What your business does in fewer than 5 sentences

I had a chance to sit through the practice session for a handful of the companies that are presenting at this year’s VC in the Rockies conference (not too late to register, by the way – it’s a great showcase of Colorado venture deals, not to mention world class skiing).

Many of them had one common trait: they sucked at actually describing what it is their business does. Some just seemed to forget to mention it, while others appeared to try, but either get bogged down in the complexity of it or just fell short of the mark.

This was surprising but amazingly consistent.

Maybe they had all practiced their pitch too much or perhaps they were just too close to their company to be objective about how people hear their business description, but whatever the reason I found myself scratching my head and wondering how it could be that we were on slide 8 without any real idea of exactly what the presenting company did.

In the first minute of your presentation you absolutely, positively need to tell your listener what you do. This should be a description that your grandmother understands and should take you only a few sentences. Try practicing on the guy at the coffee shop or your neighbor.

For my complete view on venture presentations, see “How to put together a good venture presentation” from last January.

Comments

[David]

It's funny, but there seems to be an inverse relationship between the amount of time spent putting together the killer PowerPoint presentation and the ability to succinctly describe just what the company/person does.

Lucy Kellaway at FT.com recenly wrote a piece along a similar vein, in which she has developed a test to determine if a postion/employee should be retained or eliminated based on ones ability to provide a meaningful description. If you can't pull it up on FT.com, I've got the gist of it in the post Working the Non-Job on my site - http://hambric.net/

[Daniel Nerezov]

Great points. Kawasaki did a podcast about these things a few days back. I've listened to it and it's very good. Perhaps it could well supplement your excellent on post on doing venture presentations.

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/files/pitching.mp3

[The Unknown Professor]

I remember when I was on the market for my first academic job. My advisor said that my description of my dissertation had to pass two tests - the "grandma" test and the "undergraduate" test. These involved being able to explain my dissertation to either my grandmother or a smart undergraduate in five sentences. It was some of the best advice I've ever gotten, and applies in a lot of areas.

Sometimes we get lost in jargon. Using jargon (and "terms of art") is a useful shortcut when talking to someone who's in the same community as you are, but a reliance on it sometimes hides a lack of comprehension. And most people you talk to don't understand the jargon.

Telling a simple, jargon-free story is always a bigger challenge, since you have to have a better command of your topic.

[Andrew Fife]

I believe that the first minute of your investor presentation is essentially your elevator pitch.

SVASE is holding a lunchtime event on Friday (2/10/06) on writing a great elevator pitch with Claremont Creek Ventures.

http://www.svase.org/site/Events/Data/ev_2005120619245188/view

I'm happy to email the slides that I wrote for this event to anyone who can't make it. (afife "at" cryptine "dot" com)

Alternatively, I've written 4 postings on elevator pitches and the most relevant one on content is here:

http://andrewbfife.blogspot.com/2006/01/great-elevator-pitches-what-to-include.html

the intro is here:

http://andrewbfife.blogspot.com/2006/01/great-elevator-pitches-intro.html

3 key lessons here:

http://andrewbfife.blogspot.com/2006/01/great-elevator-pitches-3-key-lessons.html

And thoughts on delivery here:

http://andrewbfife.blogspot.com/2006/01/great-elevator-pitches-3-key-lessons.html

[Dave Jilk]

Seth,

You seem to assume that the problem must be one of communication. In fact, it is not unusual for companies to actually not do anything in particular! They may have a technology, or a market area, or a grand vision, but they don't really know what they're going to do with it as a business...

This is sometimes actually encouraged by VCs, who insist that the company have a grand vision to hit the ball out of the park, and the entrepreneurs acquiesce to this rather than pin the company down to a particular area.

So it could also be that the company doesn't want you to KNOW what they do! Because whatever it is, it isn't big enough for VCs!