Suzannah Baum

Senior leaders are promoted for judgement, then judged on how they communicate it. The gap between what an executive knows and what an audience receives is where careers stall, deals soften, and boards lose confidence. Most leadership development treats this as a soft skill. It is closer to a load-bearing one.

Suzannah Baum is an executive speech coach and presentation skills specialist who helps senior leaders translate the authority they already hold into the way they speak in front of audiences.

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Why organisations work with Suzannah Baum

  • She brings a published methodology, not a personality. The Diamond Speech Structure is a named framework that teams can apply after the engagement ends, which means the investment compounds beyond a single keynote or coaching block.
  • Her client roster is operationally serious: Roche Pharmaceuticals, BMO Capital Markets, the International Civil Aviation Organization, the National Film Board of Canada. These are environments where a misjudged presentation has real commercial or regulatory consequences.
  • She is one of a very small number of speakers who hold both a CAPS national board credential and a published book on the subject they coach in. The standard is set by her peers, not by her own marketing.
  • She works in both keynote and coaching modes, which lets organisations deploy her against either a large internal audience or a specific senior individual preparing for a high-stakes moment.

Biography highlights

  • Author, From Nervous to Nailed It! (2022), Amazon listing ISBN 9781778222900
  • Past President, CAPS Montreal; former National Director, Canadian Association of Professional Speakers (2021 to 2022)
  • Recipient, CAPS E1-R1 Ambassador of the Year Award
  • B.Comm, McGill University; M.A., Carleton University
  • Former public speaking instructor, McGill University
  • DISC Certified Human Behaviour Consultant; eSpeakers Certified Virtual Presenter
  • Named client engagements include Roche Pharmaceuticals, BMO Capital Markets, Service Canada, International Civil Aviation Organization, National Film Board of Canada
  • Media contributor and featured expert: Huffington Post, Montreal Gazette, Elle Canada, Global TV News, CJAD Montreal

Biography

A senior leader walks into a board meeting with twenty years of operational judgement and twenty minutes to convey it. What happens in those twenty minutes decides whether the room moves with them. This is the territory Suzannah Baum has spent her career inside, and the reason her work shows up in pharmaceutical, banking, and aviation environments where the cost of an unclear presentation is measured in money or licence.

Her published methodology, the Diamond Speech Structure, gives senior speakers a repeatable flowchart for building presentations that hold their shape under pressure. The framework sits at the centre of her book From Nervous to Nailed It!, released in 2022, and her online programme used by speakers preparing for high-stakes audiences. The structure is teachable, which is the point. Coaching that depends on the coach is not coaching, it is a dependency.

Her institutional credentials carry weight in her own profession. She is a past President of CAPS Montreal, served as a National Director on the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers board, and was awarded the CAPS E1-R1 Ambassador of the Year. She has taught public speaking at McGill University, where she also earned her B.Comm, and holds an M.A. from Carleton. She is a DISC Certified Human Behaviour Consultant, which she uses to adapt her work to the communication style of the individual leader in the room.

Her named client engagements run through Roche Pharmaceuticals, BMO Capital Markets, Service Canada, the International Civil Aviation Organization, and the National Film Board of Canada. These are organisations where the gap between a leader’s authority and their audience’s reception is not a soft problem. It is the problem.

Key speaking topics

  • Executive presence and presentation credibility
  • Presentation structure for senior leaders
  • Sales and client-facing communication
  • Speaking under high stakes and visible pressure
  • Storytelling for business audiences
  • Building confidence in newer speakers
  • Virtual and hybrid presentation craft

Ideal for

  • Senior leaders preparing for investor days, board addresses, or industry keynotes
  • Leadership development programmes for newly promoted executives
  • Sales and client-facing teams in regulated or technical industries
  • Communications, marketing, and HR functions investing in presentation capability across leadership benches

Audience outcomes

  • A repeatable structure for building presentations under time pressure, using the Diamond Speech Structure
  • Specific techniques for managing visible nerves in front of senior audiences
  • Sharper editorial discipline in how a leader frames the central message of a talk
  • Practical tools for adapting delivery to different audience types, drawn from the DISC behavioural model
  • A clearer sense of what separates a presentation that gets through from one that lands

Talks

Captivate with Confidence, and Leave Your Audience Wanting More

A working session on the tools that make a presentation feel professional, focused, and worth the audience’s time.

Key takeaways:

  • The questions a speaker must answer before they begin building any presentation
  • The structural moves that hold an audience’s attention from opening to close
  • The behavioural cues that signal credibility before the first slide appears

You nailed it!

A step-by-step formula for designing presentations around the audience, not around the speaker.

Key takeaways:

  • The Diamond Speech Structure applied to a real presentation brief
  • How to translate technical or operational content into language a senior audience absorbs
  • The editorial test for whether a presentation is finished or still padded

Get out of the corner!

A talk on managing speaking nerves and the discipline of staying with a single, focused message.

Key takeaways:

  • The physical and cognitive sources of speaking anxiety, and what actually reduces them
  • The cost of trying to say too much, and how to cut a message back to what matters
  • Practical recovery techniques for the moments a presentation goes off-script

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Testimonials

Thank you very much for this wonderful training. The team were all very excited and finished these 3 sessions with concrete learnings that they are eager to apply. It really met, and even exceeded, my expectations. (June 2018)
Constance Névoret
Regional Chief Operating Officer, Amaris
The ideas that you shared are practical and immediately able to be applied. The feedback from the team on the seminar has been really positive, and particularly noting that you took us that level further – not the basics, but the higher level tweaks and improvements through thoughtful and audience-centered planning. Our group included both experienced and more novice presenters, and you tailored it accordingly, which was very appreciated.
Laura Mitchell, Ph.D.
Director, Student Success Centre, Concordia University
Suzannah graciously came to present to our group PartÂge, whose members work for and/or with seniors. As a group, we were preparing an event at which we would be presenting various topics to people from the community. Suzannah taught us how to structure our presentation, and how to leave our audience with the right message. Suzannah is like a breath of fresh air; she is passionate about what she does, educates well, communicates to the audience in a way that is friendly and professional. It was great gaining her knowledge, which she shares so easily.
Marie-Claure Giguère
President, PartÂge
I considered several presentation vendors, before deciding upon Suzannah. While the others tended to have rather inflexible ‘boilerplate’ training programs, Suzannah was willing to work with me to put together a customized program to fit the needs of my team. We spent significant time brainstorming and identifying the most relevant, meaningful content, and Suzannah also did a fair bit of work in advance, reaching out to members of my team to ensure that she understood their needs and training objectives, prior to the training day. The day was comprehensive, and at the same time, relevant, interactive, and fun. I was very pleased with the result, and the feedback I received from my team was overwhelmingly positive. I am confident that this investment will make an immediate difference in their success.
Jeff Miller
National Business Manager, Roche Custom Biotech
Suzannah’s training program brought tremendous value as we prepared for our annual user conference this year. Not only did our team enjoy the presentation skills training and coaching workshop, but they continue to use what they learned – for thought leadership webcasts, tradeshow speaking engagements and customer presentations. We follow Suzannah’s Diamond speech structure flowchart, which allows us to create strong, engaging presentations faster – and with more focus. Thank you for giving our team such a great foundation to build on for all our future presentations.
Rahim Kaba
Director of Product Marketing, e-Sign Live by Silanis
I asked Suzannah to be our opening Keynote speaker for District 61 Toastmasters International Annual Conference. She delivered a high energy and very engaging keynote. She swiftly integrated Toastmasters’ culture and behaviors in her presentation. The diverse and multi-generation audience relished in relating with work life situations Suzannah shared with us.
Laurence Pechadre
District Director, Toastmasters (District 61)
The training has been very effective for the team, it definitely made a difference and helped us improve our conversion rates. I am now thinking about organizing something similar later this year for another team. (December 2018)
Amaris
My sales team & I recently participated in Suzannah’s signature Public Speaking & Presentation sales modules. Right from the onset, the team was engaged and valuable insight and discussions ensued. Suzannah’s training brought tremendous value as she easily gained the trust & respect from the team. Her vast experience in delivering a concise & clear message will pay dividends for our organization for years to come.
Jeff Tabacma
Sales Director, Cesium