Maria Franzoni Ltd

Sample Topics

Risk Taking and Decision Making in Poker, Business and Life;

Leadership, Uncertainty, Intuition and Judgement;

Motivation and Persuasion;

Innovation;

Pyschology of failure

Testimonials

“Brilliant, intelligent messages delivered with passion and knowledge. The best talk from an outside speaker I have ever seen.” Jonathan Walsh, Corporate Marketing and Communication Director, Nestle

“I thought the session was excellent.”  Karl Trumper, Sales and Service Director, Barclays plc

“Risk is a really important issue for the Home Office and it was refreshing and I think very effective to have a discussion of how we increase our appetite for, and effectiveness in managing risk with such good humour. Your mixture of personal anecdotes, real life examples created an excellent learning opportunity. The feedback we received has been uniformly excellent. Learning can be fun!” Kevin White, HR Director General,Home Office

“A really fun and relevant afternoon which looks at business in a very different way. Caspar, your session was fantastic and the highlight of the day. Well done. The PayPal team is still talking about it”. Geoff Iddison, CEO, PayPal

"Caspar's presentation stimulated a great deal of very productive discussion about all our attitudes to risk taking and really helped crystallise some of the critical decisions we need to make across the business. It helped us understand each other as individuals and will be talked about and referenced for a long time to come. We would highly recommend it to any executive team in business." Darren Blackhurst, Chief Merchandising Officer, Asda

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At university, Caspar was a prolific theatre director where he worked with a wealth of talent in The Footlights and after setting his sights on becoming a professional film writer he had his first screenplay produced by Film Four whilst still in his final year. By the time he was 23 Caspar was writing for Miramax and Columbia Tri Star. Then at 25, he took the decision that would dramatically change his life: he moved to Las Vegas and became a professional poker player!

Caspar played poker professionally for most of the next 3 years of his life during which time he made a good living pitting his wits against the game's best known players.

In 2002, Caspar returned to the U.K. co-founding Twenty First Century Media and building it into the fastest growing audio visual media company in the North East of England before selling it in 2008 to Bob Geldof's media giant, Ten Alps.

It was while still at the helm of twenty first century media that he began his career as a speaker and catalyst for new thinking within business about risk-taking and decision-making using his experience as a poker player to explain how we all make decisions in our personal and professional lives.

Throughout this time, he continued to be a presence on the poker scene in the UK as the host of over 400 television shows on SKY television, strategy writer for Flush magazine and one of the two poker advisors on the James Bond Movie, Casino Royale.

In 2005 he become a trainer for a great company called The Mind Gym who schooled him in the fundamental skills of delivery and facilitation before going it alone to become one of the best known business speakers in the UK.

He has now been a professional motivational and keynote speaker for the last 6 years during which time he has delivered over 1,200 speeches for over 300 great companies in Europe, America and Asia.

His key messages around the need to embrace uncertainty and take calculated risk in order to get the edge and achieve success are timeless and non-sector specific making them perfect for any training day or conference where new ideas are being discussed or debated. He is a catalyst for change and his famously upbeat, energetic style is always inspirational.

Caspar Berry, started his career as the lead in the first series of Byker Grove on BBC1 alongside Ant and Dec. He went on to read Economics and Anthropology at Cambridge and - after setting his sights on becoming a professional film writer - had his first screenplay produced by Film Four whilst still in his final year. By the time he was 23 Caspar was writing for Miramax and Columbia Tri Star.

Then at 25, he took the decision that would dramatically change his life: he moved to Las Vegas and became a professional poker player! Caspar played poker professionally for most of the next 3 years of his life during which time he made a good living pitting his wits against the game's best known players.

In 2002, Caspar returned to the U.K. He co-founded Twenty First Century Media and built it into the fastest growing audio visual media company in the North East of England before they sold it in 2008 to Bob Geldof's media giant, Ten Alps. It was while still at the helm of twenty first century media that he began his career as a speaker and catalyst for new thinking within business about risk-taking and decision-making. Most recently, Caspar has also gone back to his television roots as the presenter and poker expert on a number of TV shows, most notably: Poker Night Live, voted Britain's best poker show; and the Emmy award nominated Sky Poker, the country's premier nightly poker show. He can also be seen on Sky Sports and is the poker strategy writer for Flush magazine. His latest film credit was as the poker adviser on the latest James Bond movie, Casino Royale.

In business, Caspar gives participants a greater understanding of their decision-making process with a view to answering the following question both as individuals and as a team: "Are the decisions that we are taking the best decisions to achieve our desired outcomes." In order to answer this question participants are given new ways of looking at uncertainty, risk, the psychology of failure - and success and forced to question how much they really want to achieve their consciously stated goals. The session is highly interactive and involves a great deal of think, pair, share and game play using the metaphor of poker throughout as a way of explaining this often quite inaccessible but crucial subject matter. Participants will not leave with a desire to gamble! But they will come away with a greater understanding of the maths and fundamentals of risk, the basics of behavioural psychology and new insight into their own personal drivers. Fundamentally, they will also leave with action points and the emotional desire to act on them!