Pitching Your Startup Social Enterprise

In our latest blog post, Joel Balkwill (April 2014 Associate) offers insights on how to pitch your startup, based on personal experience with his social enterprise ‘Spiral’.

How can you communicate the severity of the problem, the details of your solution and your passion and capability in an 8 minute pitch?

The truth is, this is nearly impossible. Nevertheless, here are some thoughts on what you might include, as well as some tricks I have found helpful to ensure all your detailed thinking is heard.

Key Points

Keep your pitch emotive and image based. The panel are probably not expecting to see your year 1 cash flow breakdown in an 8 minute pitch.

Spend at least 30 seconds outlining why you are passionate about this social issue and what you have done to show this. Leave them with a very clear idea of what you bring to the team.

Highlight to the panel the areas they might want to ask you about in more detail after the pitch. “This is a brief look at our trustee group, please feel free to ask us more about them and how they help.”

Structure

Structure is vital when time is constrained. Ensure that you have a clear narrative so the panel don’t lose you- they might have watched 10 pitches before yours so think about how to prevent day dreaming. Here are some ideas:

1. Start with a polite and cheerful introduction outlining your vision statement. Keep this light and smiley.

2. Go straight to the problem and make it real using a human story. Make sure you bring the person and their problems to life — don’t describe a cliché. When pitching for Spiral, we chose a student — Ezekiel — who we’d worked with, and showed the improvement he made during our programme.

3. Address the wider problem — use some headline statistics but not too many.

4. Consider how you might portray the systemic problems you want to solve visually. During our investment pitch we looked at the broader causes of Youth Unemployment and compared a diagram of the current system with our own, to demonstrate the change we proposed. We also focused on the outcomes we had achieved.

5. Make sure your solution is clear and easy to understand. Avoid jargon, it won’t impress anyone. When we were preparing our Spiral pitches, we were advised to make our primary activity clear and to separate the supporting activities. This was really useful. We often feel we need to sell all of our activities to show how much we are doing but it was helpful to clarify the “sell” and to avoid confusing the panel.

6. Don’t forget that it’s important to include yourself. People invest in people. But this is not an interview so too long spent on this might make you look egotistical and crazy- get the balance right If you’re concerned about your start up’s youth or inexperience, it may also be helpful to point the investors to your trustees or advisory board.

7. Explain your solution in practice. At Spiral pitches, we introduced one of our professional experts and described what happened when he met Ezekiel. We then showed the range of professionals we work with. If you are bold enough, you could even pick a member of the panel and explain how your idea would work for them. Unfortunately, in our case, the chosen panellist was ill on the day so this didn’t really work out — but I would recommend it!

8. Impact! This is the pinnacle of the journey. Make sure you use statistics here as well as comments from your beneficiaries. Images can really help to bring these to life.

9. Return to your case study .Showing where Ezekiel was at the end of the journey emphasised what the stats meant to the individual, and underlined our impact. This is the key point- so keep your energy levels high for this part of the presentation.

10. Look to the future. You might want to show an inspirational big picture slide, quickly followed by your pragmatic sustainable model and development plan. Again keep this simple and ask them to seek more detail in the questions.

11. Make it clear what you’re asking for and believe in your idea. A confident mind-set is key to communicate your progress so far but make sure to outline how this support will increase your impact. “Your support will treble the amount of young people we will work with in the next 6 months.”

12. Don’t be afraid to end on an acknowledgement of their expertise and how much you will benefit from it. These people are not dragons, they are great people who really can help. Close by linking their values to your outcomes and remind them of the key problem you are trying to solve.

Good luck!

Spiral delivers experiential career workshops to disadvantaged young people, so they can not only make better informed decisions about their futures, but have the skills and the confidence to reach their full potential. We bring professionals into schools to talk to young people about their careers and design hands-on and engaging activities to develop life skills.
If you’re interested in delivering a workshop with us, contact joel@myspiral.co.uk for more information. We support you through design to delivery, so no experience is needed.