Consider yourself one of the first to know about the new Bplans.com pitch site at pitch.bplans.com. That means you can be one of the first to pitch and one of the first to get posted.
No, it’s not about putting your business in front of investors, although maybe it could be partly related to that. Instead, it’s about the art of the pitch. Free publicity perhaps, too, and tips or comments. What it is about is the art of the pitch. Doing it right, doing it well and getting yourself and your business up and showing up. (And let’s pause here to note that The Art of the Pitch is a chapter in Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start book. Click here for his reading of that chapter.)
Take your browser to pitch.bplans.com and you’ll see the “Add pitch” button you can use to upload your pitch. What follows is a page of basic information (name, address, logo, etc.) and then a second page where you can add a YouTube video URL if you want, or short texts to deal with 10 key topics.
This is all free to the users. What do you get out of it? A dedicated URL you can use to refer people to your business summary, plus the possibility of comments; this is free publicity, and publicity is assumed to be good. What do we get out of it? Bplans.com is about starting, growing and planning a business, so we get more interesting stuff on our site.
And me? I like business pitches. That goes from the 60-second so-called elevator pitch to the 10- to 20-minute business pitch with slides. To me, business pitches, when well done, are fascinating. I see a lot of them. I see them in my role as a member of the Willamette Angel Conference, and I get to see them as a judge at venture competitions, including Forbes’ and several business school contests. And I’ll be watching them on this site, too.
Like they say in the commercials: Do it today. Do it now. Click here.
I’ve seen so many pitches recently; literally several dozen. There was the University of Oregon venture competition, then the Rice University venture competition, one at Smart-ups in Eugene, and then we had the Big Idea Bash in Portand. I’ve seen some great pitches, actually, far more of them good than bad; but I can’t resist adding my suggestions as a quick (3-minute) video here.
If you can’t see the video here, then please click here for the YouTube source.
Palo Alto Software Ltd is delighted to announce that we will be running a number of business planning workshops in London, U.K., commencing on 27 January 2009. These business planning workshops will be run in conjunction with Company Partners, a Wokingham-England based business matching service, and will be held at the British Library in Central London. These workshops will be the perfect complement to our best selling Business Plan Pro product and will cover everything from pitching your business to understanding key elements of your business plan such as sales forecasting.
There are a small number of early bird tickets still available for this inaugural business planning workshop.
Business pitches are growing in popularity here in the UK as well as in the US. However, as this article, The Business Pitch by Alan Gleeson illustrates, business pitches are no substitute for the real thing – a thorough business plan!
This short article describes the concept of pitching in detail, and argues why pitches are not substitutes for business plans, before recommending some tips to ensure that your pitch hits all the right spots. Finally for some further information on what an elevator pitch is, visit Tim Berry’s article series on the Elevator Pitch at BPlans.com.
I just saw another blogger, who knows better, bad-mouthing the business plan as part of the startup; because investors want to know you and see your pitch first, instead of just reading a business plan.
Are the following points not so obvious that I have a right to get angry?
Given the choice, nobody would choose reading a business plan over meeting the people and letting them pitch.
Investors get the choice.
But Jeez! How dumb is it to suggest that you need a pitch presentation instead of a business plan?
Seriously: Don’t confuse having a plan with having a full, formal business plan document. You want a plan. And until you need to produce it as a document, skip the parts that are only for show. Do the core stuff, and leave it on your computer.
Don’t confuse not needing a full formal business plan with not wanting to have a plan. Plan your business strategy and have some idea of who does what when, how much time and money it costs, how long it takes and how much revenue it generates. Do you really want to do a 20-minute pitch to investors without having a plan? What if they respond with a question? Are you going to say, “I don’t know, but I’ll get back to you on that?”
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