Mike Harris's Blog

I spent 11 hours last week on pitches. Either pitching business ideas myself, preparing myself or others to pitch, or listening to people pitch ideas me.

I reckon I've spent at least that amount of time on pitches every working week for the last 20 years and it's often been more time than that.

If you are successful at business: life is truly a pitch. You are constantly seeking to get others' support for your ideas or listening to others tell you how they can help you. In my view success in business is more than 50% determined by the quality of your pitches and your judgment on what pitches to back

6 hours pitching time last week was Garlik related; in the remaining 5 hours I helped one entrepreneur prepare a pitch for funding, and I listened to no fewer than 14 business ideas being pitched to me.

12 of these ideas came at an event called Pitchfest. I put together a team of professionals – a top VC, a lady who owns a PR company, a major angel investor and one of the UK's leading young entrepreneurs, and got people to pitch to an invited audience of 100 people and the panel (chaired by me) .

We listened to 12 people pitch ideas at us for up to 4 minutes each. The 12 were chosen from a group of 50 small business owners and entrepreneurs who had spent just one day with me in May in a Perfect Pitch Workshop.

I hadn't seen them since . I'd done the work with them and sent them off to practice for 6 months with the Pitchfest as the goal. Someone else had chosen the top 12 for me.

There was no specific requests in the pitches , they were just trying to interest us in what they were up to and get some feedback on both their pitch and their business. We gave them feedback and scored them Strictly Come Dancing style. The winner got a prize , the top 5 a slightly lesser prize.

There's great freedom in giving a pitch like this at every opportunity to everyone you meet. You can get a lot of different sorts of results, for example:

1. Rejection/disinterest – which doesn't tell you anything so you just discard it
   
2. Understanding and acknowledgment – useful in building rapport and a personal network, briefing suppliers, recruiting staff
   
3. Valuable feedback –someone with expertise says: to make that work you will need to ..OR that will never work unless...
   
4. A customer
   
5. A partner who can get you loads of customers –this is most small business owners dream!
   
6. An investor
   
7. An evangelist, a well connected person who goes round telling everyone what a fabulous person/idea they have heard
   

I was nervous about the pitches on Tuesday. These were people who, on the whole when I met them in May, were not good at pitching their businesses or ideas. I'd only spent one day with them and I was putting them in front of a panel who were used to hearing and delivering world class pitches. I need not have worried. The panel was impressed. The VC said at least half of them were better than most pitches he gets from companies seeking investment, and remember companies that get to pitch to VCs have already had to get through a rigorous appraisal which 99 out of 100 fail .

All but one of the pitches on Tuesday was at least "good", one or two flirted with "excellent". That's  a great result as in my normal business life it would be the other way round ie 1 pitch in 12 might be good. "Excellent" is so rare as to be a  cause for celebration!

I also felt a little frustrated in that I could see with each pitch exactly what needed be done to take it up a notch , but I haven't got the time and most of them  haven't got the money!

I think every pitch got valuable feedback. 3 interested at least one of the panel members from an investment point of view. 3 others got the PR lady excited about how she could get them on TV and make them famous.

Several pitches got new customers from the audience and two got me as an evangelist – I haven't shut up about them since Tuesday.

Best of all everybody , including the panel had enormous fun. We shall do this again!