SPEAKING
Some conversations deserve a bigger room.
I’ve always believed in the power of a good conversation.
Sometimes it happens between two people. Sometimes a few hundred happen to be listening.
Explore speaking ↓
There is something I love about speaking to a room.
Not performing for it. Not delivering forty-five polished minutes while everyone politely waits for lunch.
Actually engaging with it.
A room has its own energy. You can sense when an idea has landed, when a story has connected with somebody’s experience, or when a question has caused people to think about something differently.
Those are the moments I’m interested in.
I’ve spoken in business settings, conferences, churches and smaller gatherings, and the subjects may change, but my approach rarely does. I use stories, experience, questions and practical ideas to create conversations that continue after I’ve left the room.
I don’t need everyone to agree with me.
I’d much rather they leave thinking.
Ideas become different when they’re shared
Conversations I keep returning to.
Leadership & Building
How do we build meaningful things without allowing them to consume us?
Leadership is about more than strategy, performance and execution. It’s also about judgment, identity, people, responsibility and knowing when the thing you’re building needs something different from you.
I speak about what decades around businesses and leadership have taught me — including the lessons I learned when things didn’t go according to plan.
Identity & Resilience
Who are we when the title, plan or season changes?
Success tells us surprisingly little about ourselves. Disruption often tells us rather more.
I speak honestly about failure, rejection, transition, rebuilding and what happens when the life we expected collides with the life we’re actually living.
Not resilience as simply learning to endure more.
Resilience as learning how to live again.
Faith & Life
What does faith look like when it has to survive Monday morning?
My faith isn’t something I leave outside the room. It’s foundational to how I understand identity, leadership, restoration, purpose and the life I’m still learning to live.
In Christian settings, I speak openly about following God through success, failure, waiting, restoration and new beginnings — not from a position of having mastered any of them, but from having walked through enough seasons to know that God remains faithful in all of them.
Business & Perspective
Sometimes the question behind the business question matters more.
Numbers, strategy, governance, growth, succession and leadership all matter. I’ve spent much of my career working among them.
But businesses are ultimately built and led by people.
I speak about the intersection between the two — helping owners and leaders step outside the immediate noise, see their organizations differently and consider not only what they’re building, but why.
Stories before slides.
I’ve sat through enough presentations to know that another deck containing forty-seven bullet points is unlikely to change anyone’s life.
So that’s not how I like to speak.
I prefer stories to lectures, questions to prescriptions and conversations to performances. There may be slides when they genuinely help. There may not.
The aim is always the same: to meet the room where it is, say something worth hearing, and leave people with an idea, question or next step worth carrying with them.
Selected conversations.
→ Business by Numbers
Understanding the story the numbers are trying to tell.
→ More Than an Accountant
What a career in numbers taught me about people, leadership and life.
→ Walking the Line
Leadership, judgment and navigating the spaces where the answer isn’t obvious.
→ Resilience from Rejection
What happens when the thing that didn’t work becomes part of what happens next.
Talks can be adapted for business, leadership and faith-based audiences, or developed around a particular conversation your room needs to have.
What I’m Thinking
Now.
The subjects I speak about are changing because I am too.
I’m increasingly interested in the quieter questions behind leadership and life: what enough looks like; how we build without losing ourselves; what happens when identity outlives a title; how we become more present to the people around us; and how faith shapes the next chapter when the previous one has finished.
Some of those ideas are being explored here on The Front Porch before they ever become talks.
Perhaps I Could
Join You?
I speak for leadership teams, businesses, conferences, churches, men’s gatherings and other rooms where an honest conversation might be useful.
If you’re planning something and think there may be a fit, tell me a little about the people who will be in the room and the conversation you’d like them to leave having.
We can work out the rest together.
For event organizers: about Kyan:
Kyan is a British-born business adviser, board professional, writer and speaker now based in Texas. His career has taken him through finance, business leadership, governance and advisory work across the UK, Channel Islands and United States. Today, his speaking increasingly explores the intersection of leadership, identity, resilience, business and faith.