Category Archives: Business Pitch

True Stories: One Good and One Bad Answer to Investor Q&A

Angel investment, Business Pitch, ,

We talk about the slides, and what they cover, but some of the more important moments in business pitches I’ve seen are not about slides, or plans, but rather about the people themselves, and how they respond. pitching

For example, I posted last week on gust.com about two radically different ways to handle questions about financials. In both cases investors had interrupted a business pitch with complaints about financial slides. One response worked perfectly, and the other was disastrous.

A really good answer

A smart woman had a financial summary slide showing when one of the investors complained:

Those numbers are different from what you show in your plan.

She answered immediately, no pauses, no reflection, as quick as a heart beat:

Of course not. That version of the plan was submitted to your deadline, three weeks ago. We’re not static ever. Things change. This chart is from our latest projections.

That was a total win. Everybody in the room understood.

A really bad answer

It was another financial summary slide. Otherwise the pitch was pretty good, and the founders impressive, but the numbers were annoyingly unrealistic, particularly the huge profitability, something like 50 percent or more profits to sales.  Several of us objected. The answer was:

We don’t like those numbers either. They were done for us by an outside financial consultant. We’re looking for somebody to come in and revise them.

Ouch. Throwing some anonymous third person under a bus doesn’t impress your investors. You can’t disown your own slides.

On the other hand, just for a note of paradox, bad financial projections are easier to fix than a bad product/market mix. That disastrously bad answer was not absolutely fatal.

(Image: istockphoto.com)

Pitching Your Business: How Not to Answer A Tough Question

Business Mistakes, Business Pitch

Imagine a meeting room in a hotel. You’re an entrepreneur talking to five potential investors. You present their new business with a slide presentation. This is your pitch.

The pitch goes perfectly well until it gets to the financial projections. They’re bad.  They are embarrassingly over optimistic. They cast doubt over the entire presentation.

So, when the investors question the financials, how do you respond?

The wrong answer: blame the financials on the outsider who did them. Take no ownership and no responsibility. Do you realize how bad this makes you look?

The right answer:  Acknowledge the problem and ask for as much information as the investors are willing to give you about what’s wrong with them. Promise a thorough revision as quickly as possible. If you can – use good judgment, this might not be appropriate – suggest that unrealistic financials are a lot easier to fix than poor product-market fit or a less-than-stellar management team.

Isn’t it obvious why one is better than the other?

(Image: istockphoto.com)

Top 10 Business Plan Mistakes #9: Pitching Without Planning

Back to Fundamentals, Business Pitch, Business Planning, , , , ,

(Note: this is the second of a 10-part series listing my revised top 10 business planning mistakes. The list goes from 10, the least important, to 1, the most important.)

I’m guessing that the idea of doing a pitch – meaning a slide deck driving a presentation, about 20 minutes’ worth maximum – instead of a business plan is popular mainly because of a huge misunderstanding. People mistakenly think of a business plan as a big honking document, difficult to do, unwieldy, and off putting. So they want to do anything they can to avoid it. Then in walks somebody who ought to know better saying no, you don’t need to do the plan, just do a pitch.

A pitch without a plan to base it on is like a movie without a screenplay. It makes no sense. The pitch is summarizing the plan.

Whether or not you show a plan document to anybody, whether that somebody sees the pitch and not the plan, the plan is your most recent take on what’s supposed to happen, and both the pitch and the document are outputs of the plan. A pitch slide deck summarizes a plan. It doesn’t stand alone.

In the angel investment group I’m a member of, we read summaries first, then watch the pitches that survived the first cut. But nobody gets serious interest without having a business plan, and a pitch without a plan shows up like a sore thumb. As soon as people start asking questions, the pitch alone doesn’t answer them.

The plan itself isn’t a document, or a slide deck, or a memo; it’s what’s going to happen, and why. It’s a combination of strategy and specific steps to implement strategy. It makes the connections between the different functions and relationships in the business. And usually it lives on a computer.

Those documents, the pitch presentations, and the summary memos, even the elevator speech? Those are all just output of the plan.

When Selling is the Hardest Part of Consulting Biz

Business Pitch, Personal Productivity, True Stories,

Looking back on my consultant years, I know that one reason I focused so hard on repeat business was I wasn’t good at sales. Doing the work, yes; finding new clients, no.

alignmentI was reminded of that yesterday reading Perception is not reality. Author Mike McLaughlin, co-author of Guerilla Marketing for Consultants, tells a good story that a lot of us (me for sure) will recognize.

It felt like the presentation went badly:

The audience of twenty client managers glared at me with icy indifference. I tried to appear at ease, but the voice in my head had already convinced me that my presentation was a disaster of Titanic proportions.

I certainly empathized as I read it. He continues:

On the long drive home, I mentally dissected every part of the presentation, retracing my missteps. I came up with a list of things I’d do differently next time. I would do anything, I vowed, to avoid another stinker like that one.

And then, the next day:

A call came the next day from my client. Fortunately, she couldn’t see my nervous fidgeting as I listened to her: “Our managers have evaluated your presentation. We’ve decided that we want you to come back and give that same presentation to each of our operating divisions, beginning next week.” What? My dread dissolved instantly–into utter confusion. “Of course, I’d be glad to do the presentation again,” I managed to choke out.

At that moment, I realized how little I actually knew about reading people.

His point is well taken:

You can easily misread people by observing behavior. I’ve seen some, for example, who project a false sense of confidence when they’re frightened; others express inner anxiety as eerie calmness. As with the audience during my presentation, outward behavior often belies inner feelings. As a consultant, ignore this reality at your peril.

Still, though, I don’t buy that altogether. I say it’s not as much a failure to read people as a natural result of the selling situation for what I call “the rest of us” who don’t naturally sell well. I never got the idea of sales as an exciting challenge, or a fun competition, or fooling people or somehow getting them to do what they didn’t want to do. To me it was always off-putting, like a job interview, or oral exam.

I think the mentality is related to why so many normal people look in the mirror and see themselves as fatter or thinner or in some way or another less attractive than they actually are. It’s natural. But it’s not fun.

And Mike McLaughlin goes on, in his post, to offer some pretty good advice on how to go on with the selling and go on with the business. Whether it’s a natural self consciousness, which I’m suggesting, or a failure to read people, as he says, he offers some good tips on how to get over it.

For example, ask questions. “Do you think this is taking on too much?” “Are you worried about what might go wrong?” “Does this seem to be the right scope?” “Do you feel like the deliverables are realistic enough, or comprehensive enough?” “What do you think is a workable schedule for all of this?” Ask specifics. Ask questions that invite real answers. Don’t just trust your instincts; find out for sure.

(Image: Mashe/Shutterstock)

Business Plan Contest: You Be the Judge

Business Pitch, Business Plan Contest, Venture Contests, , ,

Five very interesting young businesses, five excellent presentations, six judges with questions, and all of it available as online video, where you can watch the whole thing and vote for the winners.

What I like best about the Forbes annual $100K Boost Your Business contest is that it is open to everybody. I love being a judge of that event. And I also love that you can be a judge too.

This is also a good opportunity to see good examples of the classic 10-minute slide pitch to investors.

I’ve already voted. Now it’s your turn. Here’s the link (or you can click on the image):

Boost Your Business Finalist Voting 2009

forbesvote2009

Business Pitch for Fun and Profit

Business Pitch, , , ,

(I just posted this on my Up And Running blog over at Entrepreneur.com. For the record, I rarely post the same thing in both places, but today, because I’m announcing this new pitch site, I’m making an exception.)

Consider yourself one of the first to know about the new Bplans.com pitch site at pitch.bplans.com. That means you can be one of the first to pitch and one of the first to get posted.

No, it’s not about putting your business in front of investors, although maybe it could be partly related to that. Instead, it’s about the art of the pitch. Free publicity perhaps too, and tips or comments. What it is about is the art of the pitch. Doing it right, doing it well, and getting yourself and your business up and showing up. (And let’s pause here to note that The Art of the Pitch is a chapter in Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start book. Click here for his reading of that chapter.)

Take your browser to pitch.bplans.com and you’ll see the “Add pitch” button you can use to upload your pitch. What follows is a page of basic information (name, address, logo, etc.) and then a second page where you can add a YouTube video URL if you want, or short texts to deal with 10 key topics. 

This is all free to the users. What do you get out of it? A dedicated URL you can use to refer people to your business summary, plus the possibility of comments; this is free publicity, and publicity is assumed to be good. What do we get out of it? Bplans.com is about starting, growing, and planning a business, so we get more interesting stuff on our site.

And me? I like business pitches. That goes from the 60-second so-called elevator pitch to the 10-20 minute business pitch with slides. To me, business pitches, when well done, are fascinating. I see a lot of them. I see them in my role as a member of the Willamette Angel Conference, and I get to see them as a judge at venture competitions including Forbes and several business school contests. And I’ll be watching them on this site too.

Like they say in the commercials: do it today. Do it now. Click here.