How to Get There: CEO of Sheehan Associates

As a teen, being an adult and choosing a job feels like a dark looming challenge with many obstacles. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Top people in all fields had to start somewhere, right? The mission of the How to Get There series is to explore the journey and simplify the process, therefore bringing it to the growing-up-21st-century audience. 

It began on a hot July morning at the famed Gaston Hall at Georgetown University. After introductions were made by students, Michael Sheehan took to the stage. After his interactive speech for the Junior State of America, I asked for his contact information for an interview and he gave me his card. And with much excitement, the interview soon arrived.

The Position: 

Founder and President of Michael Sheehan Associates, Inc.

The Person Behind it: 

Michael Sheehan 

The Process:

I was born and raised in New York City. When I was a freshman in high school we moved to Woodside, Queens and that’s where my family lived until my parents passed away.

Growing up I had absolutely zero interest in either politics or public speech coaching.

I also had a very serious stutter that I had to confront and conquer it if I was going to have any kind of social life. So, I jumped into speech and debate clubs and began to do theatrical plays as well. 

After high school, I went to Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service as an undergraduate. Although I dreamed of becoming a lawyer, my extracurricular life was still filled by theatre. I headed up the drama club and performed, wrote and directed plays. I also worked part-time at Ford’s Theatre. As my interest grew within the Georgetown theatre community, I began to think, “Maybe I could make this my job”. 

So I put in my application to the Yale School of Drama. 

Upon graduating from Yale, I was faced with a fork in the road: I had been accepted to Georgetown Law School and was also offered a fellowship from Yale School of Drama. It was a very difficult decision, but I chose Yale. Looking back, I made the right choice. 

Among my classmates at Yale were Sigourney Weaver, Meryl Streep and Christopher Durang, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time there. After graduation, I moved to Washington D.C. and became the associate producer of the Folger Theatre Group, known today as the Shakespeare Theatre. During my tenure we not only produced in-house plays, we also produced four plays at the Kennedy Center and took a musical, Charlie and Algernon, to Broadway. The play ran for only two weeks, but it was a great learning experience. 

While working at the theatre, which happened to be right near Capitol Hill, many of my friends were staffers for congress people, as well as members of the media. The more time I spent with them the more I became interested in events. 

They began to ask me to work on a very informal basis with their bosses and I discovered that I had an aptitude for the field. It was fortuitously during the same period of time that CNN and C-Span began to cover congress people more heavily. The public affairs programming was miniscule compared to the amount we have today. 

As the need for a speaking coach expanded with the growing need for televised speeches therefore leading to my opening in my consulting business. 

Things to Keep in Mind: 

We are an independent consulting company and we are usually called upon to help major corporations or trade associations, sometimes prominent individuals such as authors or artists. To help them with either their public presentations, media interviews or shape their content and the expression of their content.

My work demands one on one contact with the individual. Major portions of our work together have to do with recording the client and playing it back for critique, identification of progress and then rehearsal. Most of my days are spent on-site with clients, reviewing both the content and the style.

We are a very small association because it is such a personal contact and the skills required are very unique. The way I grew was by referral and word of mouth. In the 35 years of this company I have not taken out an ad anywhere. The first two years were very lean and hard, it did start to accelerate. 

I wish I’d spent more attention to the most classical forms of speech writing and speech delivery. I’ve found that one spends so much time doing it, more hands-on practice would have helped. 

Unique Experiences:  

The most surprising thing is helping former presidents and cabinet members in varied difficult times when a controversy arises, or when an emergency arises. Learning how to deal with those things on the fly, and all you can really do is learn from one instance as apply it to the next. 

There was one vice presidential debate in 2000 where we coached Senator Lieberman to debate then Secretary Chaney. We spent so much of our time strategizing and thinking about how we were going to counter Mr. Chaney’s arguments that we didn’t give enough thought to the arguments we were going to advance. We planned more for playing defense then playing offence. 

There are a number of funny situations. In 1994, where President Clinton went down to Capitol Hill to speak to the House of Representatives to give a speech on his health care reform plan. And as he went to the front of the house the wrong speech was loaded into the teleprompter. He had to adlib for the first five minutes of the speech. We were luckily able to scramble and make corrections and get the right speech up there. That was the most harrowing and slighting humorous moment. 

Advice: 

The best you can do is learn from an event as apply it to the next and to the next. And that is where the advantage of experience comes in. The more experience you have the more you can problem solve out the next challenge or assignment. 

In the past one needed to make a series of speeches or hope that C-Span would cover the speech. Now one has the ability to record oneself and get the actual video out there in its entirety in a matter of minutes. What used to take months to produce and distribute. It is excerpted speed wit much change! Please take advantage of this change! 

Don’t be afraid of making an error. I was about to graduate from Yale and I had two job offers and I really didn’t know which one to take because they were in two different places and two different types of theatrical groups. I went to my mentor, Burnie Gursten, saying, “I’m really torn and I don’t know what to do.” He said, “Describe it to me, what is it about these two jobs.” 

I told him about how one was more stable and a safer bet and the other one has experimental work that I really am excited about but I’m worried about it’s long-term viability.” 

He looked at me and said, “Michael, you’re 23 years old. In no way should you be thinking about longevity and future. Think about the next two years. What do you want to learn and do in the next two years. At your age just think about the next step. What would A, Enjoy greatly or B, Teach you something that you don’t know.” 

I’ve never forgotten that advice. Sometimes you can look so far down the road that you’re lost or confused. Just look at the next step. You can worry about long term stuff when you are 35. Right now just think about the next step.