The business case
Tools to help you secure budget from your boss (and your boss’s boss).
Poor communication costs a 100 person business more than £75,000 a month.*Not on our watch.
Why Kirsty
Kirsty Hulse is an award-winning speaker and influence expert. She has trained more than 150,000 people to communicate with more confidence, at companies including LinkedIn, Amazon, Spotify, Meta, Virgin Atlantic and Tesco, and has spoken in more than 30 countries.
She founded her first company at 26, a marketing agency whose clients included Virgin Atlantic and IBM. She was named Most Inspiring Speaker at the 2022 Speaker Awards, and she is writing a book on influence with a Big Five publisher, out in May 2027.
Across the thousands of people she has worked with, 100% of attendees say they would recommend her work to a colleague.
49%
of workers score in the lower half for psychological safety at work. Those are the people not raising the risk, the objection or the better idea.
APA Work in America, 2,027 workers [1]
2x
People who do not feel safe speaking up are more than twice as likely to be job hunting inside a year: 41% against 19%.
APA Work in America [1]
74%
of workers who feel able to speak up rate their own productivity as high. Where people do not feel able to, that falls to 43%.
APA Work in America [1]
114
studies, covering 21,616 people, found self-efficacy correlated .38 with work performance. Confidence is not a mood. It is a measurable predictor of output.
Stajkovic and Luthans, Psychological Bulletin [2]
7.5 hrs
per person per week lost to poor communication, which US leaders valued at roughly $12,500 per employee per year.
Grammarly and The Harris Poll [3]
9 to 82%
the measured prevalence of impostor syndrome, depending on the screening used. Across 62 studies it tracks with impaired job performance and job satisfaction.
Bravata and others, systematic review [4]
What actually changes
The behaviours worth naming in your case, because they are the ones a sceptical budget holder can picture.
Good ideas stop dying in meetings
Most organisations do not have an ideas problem, they have a voice problem. The work is teaching people to say the thing, to the right person, in a way that gets a yes.
Presentations get shorter and better
Fewer slides, clearer arguments, less rehearsal time, and decisions made in one meeting instead of three.
Managers give feedback that works
Direct without being brutal, kind without being vague. The conversation most managers avoid until it becomes a formal process.
People act without waiting for permission
Confidence is not a feeling, it is acting while uncertainty is still present. That is a trainable behaviour, and it shows up as pace.
Make the case
Three lengths, written to be sent. Fill in the square brackets with your own specifics, because the specifics are what convince a budget holder who knows your team.
Confidence, communication and influence training for the team, delivered by Kirsty Hulse. One day, on site, up to 30 people.
Hi [name],
I'd like to put some budget behind communication and influence training for the team, and I want to make the case properly rather than just asking.
The problem I'm trying to fix is [specific: people not speaking up in reviews / presentations taking three attempts to get signed off / good ideas not reaching decision makers]. It costs us [time / rework / delayed decisions] most weeks.
The evidence here is unusually good. The American Psychological Association's 2024 Work in America survey found that people who do not feel safe speaking up are more than twice as likely to be job hunting inside a year, 41% against 19%, and far less likely to rate their own productivity as high, 43% against 74%. Separately, Grammarly and The Harris Poll put the cost of poor workplace communication at about 7.5 hours per person per week.
The person I want to bring in is Kirsty Hulse. She has trained over 150,000 people at companies including LinkedIn, Amazon, Spotify and Meta, and 100% of attendees say they would recommend her work to a colleague.
Happy to put together a fuller case if that would help. Could we find 15 minutes?
[your name]
We are requesting budget for confidence, communication and influence training. The American Psychological Association's 2024 Work in America survey of 2,027 employed adults found that workers who do not feel able to speak up are more than twice as likely to be seeking another job within the year, 41% against 19%, and markedly less likely to rate their own productivity as high, 43% against 74%. Grammarly and The Harris Poll estimate the cost of poor workplace communication at 7.47 hours per employee per week, around $12,506 per person per year. This proposal addresses those behaviours directly: speaking up, presenting clearly, giving usable feedback and influencing without authority. The proposed supplier is Kirsty Hulse, who has delivered this training to over 150,000 people at organisations including LinkedIn, Amazon, Spotify and Meta, with 100% of attendees reporting they would recommend the work to a colleague.
What people say about my work
Kirsty delivered sales training to a team of over 1,000 Amazon employees across Europe, and every single one of them loved it. Genuinely phenomenal! Completely exceeded expectations.
Kirsty is THE person to help modern organisations build confident leaders, strong teams, and workplaces people actually want to be part of.
The highlight of my week. Presence and communication are such tricky things to master, and Kirsty did an awesome job uplifting our team, with a few laughs along the way.
This has to be the best, most insightful & helpful webinar I've ever organised. Cannot recommend this session enough!
It's so rare to have a programme that makes things practical and useful and also absolutely hilarious and engaging. Very inspiring, thank you!
The feedback has been 100% positive and the teams really valued that we spent time investing in 'us'. We all left the session feeling inspired and ready to go!
Handling objections
And what I would say. Steal the answers.
Then do not call it soft skills. The behaviours here are the ones that decide whether your good work gets funded, adopted and noticed. If there is budget for a tool that saves an hour a week, the communication number is 7.5 hours a week and it is already being spent.
Agree the measure before the session, not after. Pick something you already track: time to sign off a deck, number of people who speak in a review, internal promotion rate, engagement scores on the questions about recognition and being heard. Take a reading now and read it again at 90 days. Kirsty will build the session around whichever measure you choose.
Most groups are fine one to one and fall apart in front of a room or a senior stakeholder. The gap is rarely ability. It is the willingness to be direct when it is uncomfortable, which is exactly what goes missing under pressure.
Sometimes, and Kirsty runs a train the trainer format for exactly that. But an internal facilitator carries the organisation's politics into the room with them. People say different things to someone who does not sit in their reporting line.
Sources
Checked against the primary source in August 2026. If you are putting a paper in front of a finance director, cite these rather than me.
- 1American Psychological Association, 2024 Work in America: Psychological Safety in the Changing Workplace. Conducted online by The Harris Poll among 2,027 employed US adults, 25 March to 3 April 2024. 49% scored below the median on psychological safety. Intent to look for a new job within the year was 19% among those experiencing higher psychological safety against 41% among those experiencing lower. Self-rated high productivity was 74% against 43%. View source
- 2Stajkovic, A. D. and Luthans, F. (1998). Self-Efficacy and Work-Related Performance: A Meta-Analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 124(2), 240 to 261. 114 studies, 157 samples, 21,616 participants, weighted average correlation of .38 between self-efficacy and work-related performance. View source
- 3Grammarly and The Harris Poll, The State of Business Communication, January 2022. Survey of 1,001 knowledge workers and 251 business leaders in the US. Leaders estimated 7.47 hours per employee per week lost to poor communication, around $12,506 per employee per year. The headline figure at the top of this page scales that to 100 people and converts at 0.7363 USD to GBP, the rate on 27 August 2026, which gives £76,733 a month. It is written as "more than £75,000" so it holds if sterling moves. View source
- 4Bravata, D. M. and others (2020). Prevalence, Predictors, and Treatment of Impostor Syndrome: a Systematic Review. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 35(4), 1252 to 1275. 62 studies, 14,161 participants. Reported prevalence ranged from 9% to 82% depending on the screening tool and cutoff used. View source