One Liners

        Doug Richard, a former dragon on the BBC’s Dragon’s Den now runs a really good enterprise called School for Startups.  I don’t really need to explain what it does, the name does, as they say, what it says on the tin. www.schoolforstartups.co.uk

        If you are an SME or thinking of being a startup I highly recommend you check him out.  He has a huge amount of valuable advice which he passes on freely.

        He’s a very astute man, he’s made a lot of money from a standing start selling computer parts, and he’s a really good and charming communicator, so his training sessions and talks are worth listening to.  I watched him run a session for small businesses at the Royal Society, on how to get a pitch ready for investors, what figures you need, how to value your business etc.

        He asked me afterwards for a critique of the session, from a presentation skills point of view.     I thought it was really excellent, but there was one element missing.   He invited a few of the businesses up on stage to pitch to the audience and then invited comments on their pitches and made his own comments.  He asked them questions to get them to improve their pitch.  

        But learning to pitch is not as simple as taking a few notes on how its done them suddenly being able to do it.   It takes guidance, and there was no room for that in a very packed day to a large audience.   But it was a great introduction to the traps many pitchers fall into.   And it’s not just the inexperienced who fall into those traps, almost everyone falls into one of them.

        One of the biggest is to not have boiled down your idea to its very essence – the elevator pitch if you like.   The one thing that struck me instantly when listening to Doug’s pitchers was that when he asked each one of them to sum up their business in a single sentence, they couldn’t do it.  Or they managed a sentence that was either uninspiring or didn’t focus on the most attractive part of their business from an investors point of view.

        There was one business presented by the business owner, who was a very accomplished academic in a technical field.  His pitch was so confusing and technical it left everyone in the room wondering what it was and what he was selling.   After a lot of questioning from Doug I managed to work out that he had managed to create a revolutionary waste management system for heavy industry that made the waste saleable.   But he’d buried the fact that the businesses would also get a grant for proper disposal, and that they’d manage to avoid the fines many businesses end up paying.

        So what would his one-liner be?   When chatting to various participants over a glass of wine after the session,  I asked them to come up with one for the project.  They struggled, a few people came up with quite technical answers.   I asked Doug, he scratched his head.   Then he looked at me and said “OK Genius what would you say?!”.
 
        I told him if I was pitching to him, I would look him straight in the eye and say “I can make you three lots of money from one lot of rubbish, do I have your attention?”.  He roared with laughter and said “Absolutely!”

        Keep it simple folks, always works.