Hello, once again it’s Victoria here at NVBC’s night for learning how to pitch.  David Shore from Stirling Mercantile and Jonathan Bixby from Strangeloop Networks will be taking the stage tonight.

What differentiates people who win? They have a focus. Have a thesis and they have greed around their focus. So, what is the structure of a business focused statement?

1. Thesis: Tell Me What You Do

We sell (blank) that helps (who, target market) and what does it do for them (save or make them money)

•    do not tell us what the technology does
•    it has to be simple and make sense
•    differentiate yourself

2. Communication: Are they going to remember you?

Example with Barack Obama–he is a gifted communicator.  He is going through a quick presentation about a. not including points you are speaking on a slide and to pause and b. to observe your audience, not just talk at them, lastly c. the judges will remember you, so show some excitement. Show the fact that you are excited about your business.

3. Presentation: Judges prefer graphical presentations. Colour, simple text, and go overboard.

1. Start with and include a title.
2. Include a snapshot of what you do, then include something about you, the team and those involves. Indicate who you are, CEO, CMO and indicate that you require the CTO or advisors.  Brief description of where you’ve worked and who you’ve worked with.
3. Industry Problem: will your customer make money, save money or what? It’s a financial issue. *Customers are leaving. Problem can be societal.
4. Identify the solution: Uses Flickr as an example. If you have software, use screenshots. If you have hardware, show diagrams and tell a story. How did you get involved, or determine that there was a need? Introduce a third-party validation with a quote with a person’s name with a target company. This slide will take longer to present. Show your pride, the route you took etc.
5. Product
6. Addressable Market: these slides you need to go over quickly, use a graph or chart, name important points and graph them and talk about where they’re going, show where we are going as opposed to our competition
7. Sales and Marketing: data on marketing # helps (1 minute to 30 seconds on this slide)
8. Road Map: do a graph, design to full launch about where you are with raising money (this slide’s length depends on how complicated your business is)
9. Projections: busy slide with a lot of numbers, 5 years shown, number of customers and price are the most valuable numbers on slide. If your number is less than $10 million in the fifth year, raise that number. If you’re going after a trillion dollar market, it’s not unreasonable to have a half- billion of that market.
10. Investment Opportunity: name three stages, raising money at this stage, raising money at launch and scale and ask (%) of $$.
11. Summary: leave up for question period, flavour the rest of your discussion
12. Appendix: no end to that so make them and you can email the investors a softcopy, each slide can have a Q and A, slide. So 12 in a presentation and then 30-40 to prepare

Things to avoid saying:

• Our projections are conservative
• We have no competition
• We have first mover advantage
• We only need to capture x% of the tiny piece of huge market

Would you have more than one person present?  Yes, but practice. Seemlessness is key.  The CEO should be the one giving the presentation.

Tags: New Ventures BC, NVBC, pitch, vancouver

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 8:11 pm and is filed under Seminars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.