I help leaders, technical professionals, and teams communicate complex ideas with clarity, confidence, and influence, especially when the stakes are high.
Sapphire, TechEd, and customer keynotes. A partial map of the cities where the work has happened. Hover any dot for the city name.
Together we:
“I have a rule that I will only rehearse once on the day before the demo, to make sure the spontaneity is there.”
Ian Kimbell, in CIO Magazine, 2009
For more than thirty-five years I've worked inside the world's technology companies, helping them turn what they know into what their audiences hear. Most recently at SAP, where I became one of the people the company put on its biggest stages: Sapphire, TechEd, regional kick-offs, customer summits. Audiences of ten thousand were a regular part of the calendar.
What I learned in those rooms is that the talk people remember is almost never the most polished one. It's the one whose author had a complex idea and knew how to translate it into something the room could hear, trust, and act on. The craft, the slides, the rehearsal: those are in service of that.
Now I work with a small number of technology leaders, sales teams, and experts at a time. The people whose ideas are most worth landing and most often lost in translation. I take engagements worldwide. If you're one of them, get in touch.
Ian transformed how I structure executive presentations.
His ability to simplify complex thinking and build clear narrative flow completely changed how I communicate at board level.
Game-changing for our presales team.
The frameworks Ian introduced elevated the clarity and impact of our demos. We now present with far more confidence and authority.
Direct, structured, and highly effective.
Ian doesn’t just polish slides; he reshapes how you think about communication. The difference in outcome was measurable.
You have a talent.
Ian has a rare ability to sharpen complex ideas and elevate delivery under pressure. Working with him noticeably improved the clarity and impact of our high-profile presentations.
I joined SAP in 1998 after eleven years at DuPont, and spent the next twenty-eight years there: in marketing, in the Chairman's office, and on the stages SAP put me on at Sapphire keynotes from Berlin 2000 onward. Along the way I co-authored two books on SAP (Discover SAP, with Nancy Muir, and mySAP ERP For Dummies) and quietly built a reputation for landing complex ideas at the speed of a live audience.
I'm British and German-trained (a BA Hons in European Business plus a Diplom Betriebswirt), and have lived and worked between the two countries since 1987. Now I take engagements independently and worldwide.
The best engagements start with a short call: thirty minutes, no slides, just enough to figure out whether what I do is what you need. If it is, we plan the work from there. If it isn't, I'll point you to someone who's the right fit.
Email Ian