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pitching

Pitching is one of the most nerve-wracking experiences that entrepreneurs have.  Entrepreneurs will spend days preparing for an investor meeting, refining the slide presentation, and practicing the delivery.  Early Stage Legal has a contrarian view on all of this.  Given our own venture capital experience,  we believe that more than 90-95% of the decision to move forward toward funding an entrepreneur has absolutely nothing to do with how the actual pitch goes. 

Professional investors are expert at getting the information that they need quickly and effectively.  The pitch provides a nice organizing framework but you could have a disastrous presentation and pitch but have a great business and good investors would still move forward.  That said, there is one element of pitching that is very important to investors.  They will judge you, your persona, your persuasiveness, your communication skills, and your abilty to raise money in the future by how well you pitch. 

The good news in all of this is you should put together a great presentation, go in with confidence, and show off your best side, but beyond that, there is not much more you can do to change your chances of closing a deal with a investor. 

There are various kinds of pitches, generally categorized by the amount of time you have to deliver the pitch. 

one sentence pitch

Sometimes you have only 30-seconds to give the pitch or less.  We find that it is a good idea to have a one-sentence pitch for your business.  Review Jim Collins' article about finding your company's vision and then craft a brief pitch that gets your idea across rapidly.  While we love Jim Collin's article, we also think that some entrepreneurs give a 30-second pitch that is much to abstract or idealistic.  This can make you seem naive.  When you are speaking to investor, focus on why the business will make money (preferably lots of it).  When you are talking to a customer focus on why the business will help them.

Early Stage Legal's one sentence pitch for customers is this:

"Our mission is simple: substantially reduce the costs of creating legal documents for growing companies.  Young companies often spend 10-15% of their early growth capital on legal fees. By fixing some of the inefficiencies in the current system, we can save you thousands of dollars, without any reduction in the quality of your legal services and without necessitating a change to the important relationship between companies and their attorneys."

elevator pitch

An elevator pitch is a short-form description of your business designed to convince investors or customers about the attractiveness of your business.  You should be able to deliver a good elevator pitch in 2-3 minutes.  So you have a bit more than one sentence but you still need to keep it brief. 

Investor Pitch 

An investor pitch usually takes place during a partner meeting for VCs, seed funds, and most equity funds or a committee meeting of some kind for business plan competitions, loans, and the like.  There are exceptions. If you are pitching your rich Aunt, you may just need to speak directly to her.  But for the most part there will be multiple people in the room.  Most investor pitches will require that you prepare a PowerPoint presentation that covers at least the following topics (though not necessarily in this order):

• Summary
• Business, product or service description
• Market information
  • Market size, growth
  • Trends and dynamics
  • Why your business idea works in the market
• Competitors
• Product or service details
  • Detailed comparison to competitors
  • Demonstration
  • Patents and IP
• Go-to-market (sales and marketing strategy)
• Historic and projected financials
• Funding
  • Funding history
  • Funding request
  • Use of funding
• Management team

In our opinion, investor pitches in the form of a PowerPoint presentation are rapidly displacing the need for business plans.  Creating a business plan may still be a good idea but keep it brief.  Provide investors with an introductory PowerPoint presentation, a business plan upon request, and then focus on areas where the investors have questions by providing them with detailed analyses and backup material in these areas.