Start Ups – Practice Your Pitch 100 Times!

SUMMARY: To secure investor capital for your startup, practice your pitch at least 100 times to ensure fluency and responsiveness. Avoid pitfalls like disordered slides and using unfamiliar terminology. Speaking aloud helps identify issues and refine clarity and is crucial for investor presentations. Through thorough practice and feedback, ensure your pitch is polished, clear, and compelling to secure funding for your business venture.

Start-ups. Practice your pitch for investor capital a 100 times.

What? Susan! You’re kidding me! No, I’m not actually. Practice your pitch 100 times so you can be free to be spontaneous. I was listening to a podcast and I heard about John Sculley, former President of PepsiCo and CEO of Apple, practicing his speech a 100 times so he could be free and fluid to be able to respond in the moment. You want to do the same thing. Is this a difficult task? Yes! Do you want to get funded? Yes!

Pitch Deck & Geek Speak Problem

I was speaking to one of my clients who is reaching out to investors for about $6 million and she had applied for a fifty thousand dollar grant and one of the requirements was that she have a 60 second audio message that explained exactly who she was, what her business was and why she should be funded. And she practiced it over the weekend 80 times, came out beautifully. She submitted it. Then we started to go over her pitch deck and part way through the pitch deck, I noticed two things.

Number 1: Well we noticed the slides were out of order.

Number 2: Was that she was talking about people and terms that were probably not going to be familiar to investors. I pointed that out to her – I said this is not their world, you’re going to have to educate them. It can just be a line and you want to make sure that you don’t make them sound stupid because they don’t know the same things that you do. But you just casually you know say exactly who these people are so they’re familiar with in the context of what you’re asked of what you’re asking for money for.

But the problem was that she was very familiar with her slides but she had never spoken them out loud. And I said we have to practice in the medium that we’re going to be delivering. So she needed to be able to speak this out loud because when you speak it out loud you can start to see what’s working, not working, what’s not in order, what’s making sense, what am I assuming about my investors.

All of that needs to be ironed out before, obviously, you get in front of the people who can possibly give you money. So it’s that process of getting feedback and listening to yourself talk and then having someone else listen to you talk about what can possibly go wrong and what is maybe not easily understood that you’re thinking is crystal clear.

So practice your talk 100 times so it gets completely fluid, you iron out all of those things that could be possible snafus so you get the money that you want to fund your marvelous, wonderful, incredible new business. If you would like help, by the way, in practicing your pitch in developing your leadership presence because people buy you not just your idea, I would be delighted to speak with you. I invite you to a consult with me at prsecrets.com.

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