Finally, there’s a solution other than picturing the audience in their underwear for people who struggle with public speaking.  Highland Park resident Darren Schwartz, founder and CEO of SureSpeak LLC, has spent the last eight years developing an online training platform to help business people communicate effectively.

“We were definitely able to get people ramped up quickly,” said a client, Brian Macias, former vice president of banker training at Quicken Loans Inc., in Detroit. “The ability to rehearse on webcam and watch it played back was very telling,” Macias said, adding that the process helped build mental muscle memory.

Over six years Schwartz trained 5,000 Quicken call center sales representatives and saw a 25 percent increase in the company's revenue which he attributed to his training. For his work he booked a tidy $1.5 million.

SureSpeak, a Chicago company with four full-time employees, provides an online, interactive platform for the training and teaching of speaking techniques. The software combines online streaming video lessons with “challenges” which prompt users to practice on webcam the techniques they just learned.  The users then watch a video of themselves right after recording their speech, albeit subsequent to struggling through the inevitable “That’s what I look and sound like?” realization phase. 

The software can also e-mail the video to a coach for grading, thereby “removing the human barrier” through “asynchronous coaching” as Schwartz, 40, put it during an interview at the SureSpeak offices on LaSalle Street.

The most apparent application is for people involved in sales, the market that Schwartz identified and exploited in the first five years he provided the software solution. To broaden his business, in 2006 Schwartz went back to the drawing board and re-developed the software.

With the advent of Internet entities such as YouTube and Skype opening up the world of streaming video to the average Internet user, Schwartz knew he could find clients much more easily than when he first shopped the idea around in 2000.  Most people back then would greet the concept with “I don’t get it,” Schwartz said. 

When Schwartz unveiled the new product, bootstrapping it from his home office, he managed to sell $145,000 in licenses in four months in 2007.

Now business is booming. 

SureSpeak is establishing contracts with several new clients. Corporate clients are signing up as well as speech coaches, any Joe Public who wants to give a good best man speech, and institutional clients, such as the Beaumont Hospital in Detroit. 

For publicity, SureSpeak has eschewed more expensive models of advertising in favor of an organic method of blogging about its platform.  According to Lou Friedman, the firm's president, SureSpeak's Wordpress blog, which is updated several times a week, gets the word out to potential clients who are, by nature of reading a blog, already familiar and comfortable with the concept of streaming media and interactive products of this type.

Schwartz has a personal interest in seeing the SureSpeak platform used to help clients who struggle with speech.  In his teens, he developed a speech impediment that he overcame through speech therapy.  That experience taught him a valuable lesson about recognizing “how trapped you feel … having to skip around words.”

In an extension of the platform’s ability to help the shy, and those who depend on clear communication for their jobs, SureSpeak is also being used by healthcare professionals at the Birmingham, Mich.-based Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders. 

“We all think in pictures,” Schwartz said, as he described new courseware that has been developed using the SureSpeak platform to help socialize people suffering from autism.

Dr. Sheryl Rosin, a speech-language pathologist and director of the Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders in Birmingham, Mich., said she is using the platform as a pilot program with eight-to ten-year olds with high functioning autism and Asperger’s syndrome. 

“The kids are having a great response … they naturally like using computers,” Rosin said in an interview, “They would almost rather interact with the computer versus people.”

The next step for SureSpeak is growth.  Schwartz is confident SureSpeak will continue to expand as it maintains its cutting edge technology and reaches out to new customers, corporate, institutional and individual, who can benefit from a digital mirror on the wall.