3 Pointers for a Perfect Pitch

Here are my three pointers for making a perfect pitch.

1. Invest in your presentation deck

Unless you are a successful graphic designer, don't try to create your own decks. There are two options out there for people who are not creative (enough) or (which is more often the case) who don't have the time to spend 38 hours working on PowerPoint, Slides or Keynote.

a. Buy a template. Sites like www.graphicriver.net have tons of templates for business pitches. Pick one and start editing. (Disclaimer: You will end up spending upwards of an hour to select one from dozens of awesome templates. But this is much better than wasting eight at trying figure out the right font and color for your text.) Good templates cost between $40 - $65.

b. Hire a designer. You'll find good designers on sites like www.PeoplePerHour.com or www.deviantart.com. Of course, this option is a little more expensive with the minimum that you might end up spending is $150.

2. Get your facts and numbers straight, consistently

Very often, I see startups pitching number only to see a completely different number in the business plan. The excuse - "Oh, that's an old plan. I didn't get time to update it!" Now, as a consultant/coach, it doesn't matter to me much, but it doesn't really shout out, "Trust me, I know what I'm saying!"

Make sure all your collaterals say the same thing, including jargons/terms, tag lines, descriptions, etc. In other words, all your collaterals - brochures, decks, plan documents, flyers, banners, etc. have to be at the same version.

3. Rehearse like you were Bill Murray in Groundhog Day (or Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow)

Practice makes perfect and if you want to make a perfect pitch, guess what... you have to practice. A lot. At Spark10, for the first cohort, we (the startups) practiced every day for one month. And what happened on Demo Day seemed like a miracle to the audience, with people exclaiming that the 9 pitches they heard were the best they ever heard.

There's another benefit, apart from delivering it perfectly, of practicing a lot - it helps you update your presentation, your story or narrative, your sequence, your tone, etc. based on what works best. Call it the evolution of your presentation by natural selection.

Preparing a Pitch Deck

The best pitch is when it flows naturally out of you. And the only way that can happen is when you narrate the story of your idea and/or startup and not when you talk numbers or facts.

Here are some tips to help you make a better pitch deck.

1. Remember the application is a tool that supports/betters the action - the presentation.
2. Take a notebook or better still, a long-pad (also known as a legal pad).
3. Draw a vertical line dividing the page into 2/3rd and 1/3rd sections. Do this for all the pages that you will consume.
4. Close your eyes and imagine the following:
• You are standing on the stage or in front of the room.
• You are wearing nice formal clothes (or clothes that are appropriate for the meeting).
• Your audience - the investors, are all sitting in front of you. They are eager to hear what you have to say.
• You are confident and poised. 
• And finally, you start your speech.
5. In the left section, start writing your speech, as the words come to you. Do not bother about grammar, correct words, jargons or impressive terms; just write them as you hear yourself talking in your imagination.
6. Do not stop writing until you have narrated your story and reached the end of your speech.
7. Take a fresh sheet/page.
8. Edit the speech. Move sections around to make your narrative more interesting. Swap lines. Add in words that you missed out the first time. (Don't forget to vertically divide the pages all the time)
9. Repeat until you are happy with what you have written.
10. Once you have written your speech, it's time to start thinking about your deck.
11. For every line, paragraph or section you have written, draw a mock screen in the right section. It doesn't have to be a work of art, but just some scribbles and doodles to give you a fair idea of what your screens should/would look like.
12. Once you have the sketch (and the related text), it's now time to fire up that presentation application and make the fluid pitch deck.

Some additional advice:

• Invest in a good presentation template. Use sites like graphicriver.net to find the right template.
• Invest in ensuring your casing is correct. Learn the difference between sentence case and Title Case.
• If you see a squiggly line below any word or sentence. Fix it right away.
• Be consistent with words and terms. Especially with currency values. If you use the currency designator code (INR, JPY, USD, GBP, etc.) or currency symbols ('₹', '¥', '$', '£', etc.) then use them through the deck. Do not interchange codes with symbols.
• Search the internet for must-have contents in a pitch deck. Make sure your story/narrative covers all those topics.
• Once your deck is ready, that's just 30% of work done. The 65% is the rehearsal and the 5% is the delivery.

What Makes an Entrepreneur an Entrepreneur

When anything goes beyond a tipping point and becomes a part of the vocabulary of people en mass, the word defining it or associated with it, are used with a liberal dose of poetic license. The term, "entrepreneur" is one such word.

I promised myself when I took on the Spark10 Insights project that I will not get into an endless tirades and become a definition nazi, and I so I won't go back on my word. Not yet, at least! But before we move on to my definition of the term, there's one bit of etymological deviation that we must take.

The word "entrepreneur" comes from the French language, in which it means - a businessman (or businessperson, to be gender neutral). And that's it - an entrepreneur is just another business-person.

Nowadays, of course, it doesn't just mean a business-person. It means a lot more. And rightly so! Words and their definitions evolve over time to encompass new meanings and usage based on how the people use it in common parlance. So, what's my take on the meaning of the word 'entrepreneur'? When can you call yourself that?

There's only one thing, in my view, that makes an entrepreneur different from a business-person. In essence, she's everything a business-woman is: a) a risk taker, b) wants to make money, c) wants to engage in commerce, d) creates jobs for others (directly or indirectly), e) adds to the economic growth of the society, etc.; but has one attribute that makes her different, special.

She wants to change the status-quo and that desire is the fuel that causes her to embark on the journey of doing business on her own.

The change could be anything - an improvement in the product or service, a reduction in prices, increase in the value perceived by her customers, making anyone's/someone's life better or bridging a long existing gap. It doesn't matter what it is, just that it needs to change.

So, if you are not changing the status-quo, you are just another business-person - think of another person opening a grocery store in the neighborhood. There's nothing new there. At least, until the first online stores opened up. That guy was an entrepreneur! Everyone else, who just copied his model, didn't change much of anything and hence, in my eyes, is just another business-person.

One-liner: You are an entrepreneur only if you are changing the status-quo, otherwise, you are just another business-person.