Tim W. Hrastar - Professional Experience

Biography pdf

Tim Hrastar helps lawyers and business professionals improve their business development, client relationships, and communications with clients and colleagues through coaching, consulting, and professional education programs.

Tim’s career spans more than 40 years. He has been in his own business since 1976.  Since 1988 he has privately coached more than 1600 professionals on their presentation skills. He has facilitated numerous problem solving sessions and firm retreats—from initial planning to follow up and monitoring of results. He has spoken at hundreds of conferences and in-house gatherings, conducted hundreds of workshops on communication and business development topics, written over 200 articles on communication, presentation, and client development topics, and coached several dozen professionals on these topic areas. Tim is a general associate member of the American Bar Association, with interest in the Law Practice Management section.

In addition to his full-time consulting business he taught Communications and Presentation Skills at Miami University in Oxford OH to MBA students from 1997 to 2002. The MBA class named him one of the three outstanding faculty members of the MBA program. He holds B.A. (1968) and M.A. (1972) degrees in Communication from the University of Dayton.

He was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army Signal Corp serving as a motion picture and television director with a tour of duty in Vietnam as a Photo Unit Commander.

Tim’s interests lie in reading and writing about history, politics, and philosophy, with an emphasis on American history. He co-authored a book on Dayton photographer William Preston Mayfield, and has had articles published in American Heritage magazine, and Timeline, the magazine of the Ohio Historical Society. Tim is an active instructor at the OSHER Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Dayton, and facilitates, with a colleague,two fun classes entitled; "Examining Our Contemporary World," and "Solving World Problems through Creative and Imaginative Ways."

Although in the last several years a fair amount of Tim’s work has been in the profession of law he has continued to work with all business professionals, coming from a variety of professions and industries, on communication and client development issues. Tim W. Hrastar Associates’ programs are delivered under the service mark of Rapport Marketing®. 
 

Comments From Program Participants

• “Very organized and able to efficiently cover a lot of ground.”
• “Very knowledgeable, good concrete ideas to work with and to improve.”
• “Has great command of information.”
• “Very enthusiastic and engaged participants.”
• “Alert, fast-paced, clear, easy to understand.”
• "Very informative; good, practical information.”
• “Good information, nice mix of instruction and interaction.”
• “Very good communicator and speaker. Good interaction with the audience. He kept people interested and paying attention.”
• “Very good presenter. Every trial lawyer should attend.”
• “Excellent format…talk about it, practice it, do it, critique it…very successful results. I saw amazing improvement with each person in the group. I can now organize a speech effectively in a short time frame.”
• “I learned more in these two days than from a college course in business speaking. I feel the videotaping is very effective in helping improve yourself…to make you a more effective communicator.”
• “I learned more from this two-day program than from 11 weeks at a Dale Carnegie course.”
• “This was one of the most productive classes I have attended. The feedback was excellent.”
• “I thoroughly enjoyed your Meeting Dynamics seminar on Tuesday morning at the Columbus Bar Association. This was the most enjoyable seminar I’ve been to in many, many years. I think your being able to get everyone involved was the trick! You did a very, very fine job.”
• “Very worthwhile…everyone should attend, even if they don’t give presentations.”
• “I really enjoyed the program and now feel less anxiety about making presentations.”
• “You were great; you made this uncomfortable situation more bearable. Thanks for everything.”