You lost me on the 417th floor

(originally posted on July 20, 2016)
Problems are complex.
Your business or mission is a challenging one.
Life is a series of consecutive hurdles.
Conversely, you might have the coolest, hippest, most disruptive technology ever created.
But no matter what, you have no choice: your “pitch” must be short, clear, and engaging.
Last week, thanks to the generosity of Alistair Croll, I was able to attend StartUpFest here in Montreal. This is a playground for the curious and the serious, the start-up and the VC master, when it comes to the up-and-coming and all other things “entrepreneurial”.
And pitches were flying left, right and center. Profit-driven ones. Socially-minded ones. Personal ones. And it was not hard to tell those who had made it or would make it based solely on the first 2 minutes of any conversation.
John Stokes from realventures is known as the Gordon Ramsay of the Canadian tech start-up scene. Give a bad pitch, he will let you know about it in no uncertain terms. On each of the 2 days, I saw John take the stage as budding entrepreneurs pitched the crowd. John was far more lenient on these two days than I have seen him (he told me he was making up for the bad weather on Thursday, not sure what his “excuse was for Friday), but you could tell by his body language after about two minutes which pitches he was still actively listening to and which ones he was clock-watching on.
Musician, author, speaker and entrepreneur David Usher has mastered the art of the power pitch. Ask him about his goals and objectives around his latest project, The Human Impact Lab, and he will hit you in the gut so hard after a mere 45 seconds that you have no choice but to engage and dig deeper, hungry to learn more.
So what makes for a good pitch, whether you are a tech startup, an established goliath or a game-changing social impact player?
It’s what author Gary W. Keller and Jay Papasan wrote about in The One Thing: Do you know what yours is for the particular project/company/initiative you are pitching?
I have the good fortune of working with a lot of social entrepreneurs and others in the non-profit space. These people are amazingly driven, unbelievably smart and inspiring as hell. Problem is, they also tend to be a little long in the pitch. They start describing the complexity of the issue they are trying to solve first, and by the time they get to what they are trying to accomplish, you can tell most people have checked out.
I admit, I used to be one of those people. But as I started to have the good fortune of working with a network of ever-more-impressive people, I could tell I needed to fine tune my own pitch.
Today, when people ask me what I do, it’s short, and simple, and more often than not, leads to follow-up questions: I connect great people and game-changing projects for positive impact. Sometimes, when the context is right, I will add “at Concordia University” to the end.
So start at the end: What is your Why? Break it down to simple terms, broad enough to not become long-winded, but short enough to hit them hard, and fast. If they are interested, and you demonstrate enough passion about your Why, people will dig deeper.
Then, and only then, have you been invited to let them take you on a long, slow ride up the elevator. But now, you’re taking them somewhere they want to explore!
Oh, and for the record: those with the bad pitches, you had lost me on the 2nd floor. But 417 made for a much better blog title. That was my pitch to get you this far. See?
So, what’s your pitch? Share it here and let others provide their thoughts on feedback!
