Neil Chalmers spent twenty years in advertising, working in the UK and North America as an account handler and board director of the major agencies J. Walter Thompson, Young & Rubicam and Leo Burnett and, for a period, as a Group Account Director at Saatchi & Saatchi London, where he was responsible for the Conservative Party, Gillette, Courvoisier and Department of Energy accounts, amongst others. After leaving Saatchi, Chalmers set up his own communications consultancy focussing on spoken communications, presentations and speeches, and has worked with such clients as Eurotunnel, J. P. Morgan, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, US Surgical, Kleinwort Benson, the London Docklands Development Corporation and XL Insurance, on a range of projects from group courses and individual coaching to crisis management, new business pitches and culture-change programmes.