BUSINESS and comedy are the perfect duo, according to a local entrepreneur and podcaster from Royal Wootton Bassett.

Sarah Archer started her weekly podcast The Speaking Club to help business people improve their public speaking through the power of humour and stories. In only six months it has reached thousands of people around the world and has listeners in more than 50 countries.

As well as the podcast, group and one-to-one sessions, Sarah is set to launch the first one-day bootcamp called Stories that Sell in Swindon this May.

“I’ve always run comedy alongside my corporate career and to be honest I think it’s always helped,” said Sarah, who started doing stand-up comedy for 17 years but started her career in HR at Galileo in Swindon before moving to Germany.

“There’s loads of Harvard business studies on humour that show there’s a correlation between your ability to make people laugh, your sense of humour, and progression,” she added.

“To a certain level you get promoted on technical ability. Then once you start moving into any leadership position your ability to communicate confidently, to tell stories, to coach people and doing stories to sell change and making that emotional connection and influencing people is such a powerful tool.”

The first two boot camps on May 17 and May 24 will be held at the Campanile Hotel, West Swindon.

“Stories are a way to get your message across clearly. The point of the storytelling boot camp is that often entrepreneurs in the corporate world are too close to their stuff, so they can’t see what the point is of the people they need to reach.

“By the end of this workshop people will leave with knowing the pinpoints and getting a blueprint for a story of what their business does. So it’s using a structure that we use in books and plays, but they’ll walk out with something they can tangibly use in their presentations and pitch.”