Pitching in China (Part one) The Pitch Comp
I’ve just come back from a pitch competition in China. It was pretty big. It offered huge opportunity and it was utterly unlike any pitch comp I’ve been to before.
The Jinan high level talents and entrepreneurship competition was held in Jinan in China last week. Teams from Europe, USA, and Australia were invited to compete, over 400 startups registered and 96 were selected from regional competitions to travel to Jinan for the finals.
We touched down at Jinan international airport on a Friday and were greeted by 37 degree 100% humidity weather. Friendly volunteers in bright yellow t-shirts greeted us at the exit gate and happily checked us off and popped us into cars for our trip to the hotel.
Once at the hotel, we were again greeted by volunteers who were mostly made up of language students from Jinan and Shandong universities. These guys worked super hard to make out time enjoyable and were always around to help. We were checked in and given vouchers for meals during our stay as well as a conference gift pack and agendas and were able to go into our rooms and freshen up .
Lunch and dinner let us meet some of the other conference attendees and have a quiet night before the pitch comp started the next morning.
The day of the competition arrived bright and early with breakfast at 7 a.m. With 96 competitors to get through, organisers decided to split the groups into 6 different teams with two groups each for big data & new generation IT, intelligent manufacturing & high end equipment, and biomedicine & medical rehabilitation. I was in the first big data group which had 15 competitors.
We were given our time slots for our pitch and as I drew number 13, I wasn’t required until late in the afternoon. Interestingly, competitors were not allowed to see each other’s presentations or the question and answer sessions. All pitches were held closed door which meant we had a morning free to spend in what was called “matchmaking between contestants and counties”.
The organisers had set aside some rooms and teams from large corporates and regional representatives were available for companies to hold discussions and a mini pitch about their project, seeking feedback on opportunities and investment. This was a great idea as it allowed me to bounce my project of a number of different groups and helped me in the pitch and also find some opportunities to kick off discussions regarding investment.
Before we left for China, the Australian organisers had impressed upon us the need to install WeChat on our phones and I couldn’t have been happier that they did. WeChat is ubiquitous in China for communicating, paying, organising in fact almost anything. Business cards as often as not have a QR code to connect via WeChat and my people don’t carry cards any more and just connect via phone. In fact, after a presentation with one large Investor, it was simpler to exchange WeChat IDs and then drag and drop by my presentation straight into a chat window for conversation later on. That’s something I’d like to see more of in Australia. As an aside, the volunteers tell me no one carries cash anymore because paying via WeChat is so easy.
After a fairly hectic morning session including, discussion with local media who were covering the entire event, we returned for lunch and to prepare for our afternoon pitch.
The pitch session itself wasn’t like any other that I’ve done before. Teams were shown into a waiting room two or three at a time whilst we waited whilst we waited for our turn. After a wait of about 15 minutes, a volunteer came in and call my name and I walked into the pitching room.
Before I describe the scene, let me tell you a little bit about how I approach a pitch. I try to keep about 80% of my pitch scripted and matched by my slide deck. I like to walk along the stage connecting directly with the judge’s and the audience to make sure that I’ve got their attention and check them to see they understand what I’m talking about.
I use that extra 20% of my pitch time to modify what I’m discussing in order to make sure I connect with as many people as possible. Audience feedback is important because that sets the tempo for the presentation. I then have a point in my preso to let me know when I have a minute of normal tempo talking left so I know that I can speed up or slow down to wrap up the presentation in time.
It was a small stage with a projection screen and a lectern. Directly in front of me were 8 judge’s, some of whom had translator earbuds connected so I knew I was going to have a challenge keeping up a word dense pitch. The judges looked exhausted, as they’d been listening and marking pitches since 8:30 that morning. OK Plan B.
Secondly, because the microphone was connected to a lectern I couldn’t walk along the stage and connect with each other judge directly. Some were in front of me and some were a distance away. The audience were translators and a couple of volunteers. OK, Plan C.
I looked down at the computer which was hosting my presentation it looked like it was about 7 or 8 years old. Some people had discussed at lunch that their presentations weren’t working like they planned because they’d included video. I’d already dealt with this by inserting GIF’s of my screen shots into the presentation in order to make sure that I wouldn’t be caught out. However this PC was running a very early version of PowerPoint and by this stage it was too late to change anything. No more plans — just wing it!
The old lessons are the best lessons and this case it couldn’t have been truer, you need to prepare for anything. In fact you should be prepared to run without slides at all because you never know what you’re going to find when you step up on stage. One of my GIF’s worked but oddly the second one did not so I had to talk through a blank page of my app — there goes my 20% contingency.
What did work was my timing which I practice 30 to 50 times before I run a presentation so I knew at least I be safe there. Organisers hold up a card with a 1 minute marker, I finished my presentation and opened it up to questions from the judges. The questions showed they’d followed my pitch and there were still more questions to ask when the time ran out which I took as a good sign.
So the lesson is “prepare for anything” in a pitch comp, then prepare some more. I had answers to judges questions ready but never expected the presentation to be closed to an audience. I also had no idea about the space or the equipment until 20 seconds before I spoke. You need to be ready to adapt.
Having said all of that, you can’t fault the competition for making it as fair for everyone as they could. In the next blog I’ll talk about scale in China. With such a huge population, everything seems to be upsized. Competition ceremonies were extravagant and our visits to the tech parks were an eye opener in terms of the scale that China plans in. Watch out rest of the world!
I’m the founder of Shiftiez a service that humanises rosters by letting staff co-plan shifts with employers, adapting to life’s changes and getting on with business. Interested to chat? Contact me here.
