Tag Archives: entrepreneurship

How Is Your Elevator Pitch Going Down?

by on July 5, 2006 in Business

It’s such a good idea it makes me wish that I thought of it first. We all know how important that 30 minute second elevator speech is when it comes to introducing our work or our company to a potentially interested person. We know how it has to grab that other person by the shirt collar and shake into them a clear recognition that you are just the individual to solve their problems. But how do you know whether your pitch is any good or not? You could always try it out on a friend or a family member and get feedback. Or you could try it out on a potential client and see how it lands.

Or you could submit it to Your Elevator Pitch, a website that allows you to post your pitch and receive ratings and feedback from others. In some ways, its kind of a self-help group for microentrepreneurs. One upside of the site is that it gives you access to others who are fine-tuning their pitch and you can gather ideas.

Right now, the site seems a bit new. For that reason, there are a few downsides. Your Elevator Pitch makes it easier to give quick, knee jerk ratings than actual comments to help you improve your message. I tried to add a message to one of the pitches and I’m not sure it actually posted. And there’s not a very good way to search all pitches which will be problem if the site scales too far beyond the 78 pitches there today.

With that said, the site has a lot of potential and here’s hoping that it can be a successful way for those of us working on selling our work or companies to craft a dynamic message. Give it a shot and let me know what happens. You’ll probably find my pitch there in a few weeks.

Is There Room For ‘We’ In Your Elevator?

by on March 8, 2006 in Business

Arnie Herz at Legal Sanity recently wrote a post referencing some familiar advice for crafting an effective elevator speech. The latest conventional wisdom would have us believe that the best elevator pitch is not about us, but about the other individual. The principal strategy is to set our needs to the side and focus exclusively on the needs of the potential customer, member, or client. After all, the reason we’re in business to service them, isn’t it?

Well, yes and no. Arnie writes that this strategy misses a greater point:

Business relationships are as much about valuing and evincing our selves as they are about reaching and helping others. Both aspects (self and other) need to be expressed and honored to foster lasting connections for business success and satisfaction.

There seems to be this tacit understanding that relationships in business are different from those elsewhere in life. Perhaps it’s okay to screw over a vendor in your business, but it’s clearly not acceptable to do the same to a friend. Or maybe it’s fine to do everything to make a member happy but necessary to put conditions on making our spouses equally happy. It’s as if we are two individuals merely sharing the same skin, which might explain why we’re so damned unhappy at times.

Like Arnie, I believe there’s a different way…one that accepts that our core values define our relationships regardless if they are business or personal. There is no need for this artificial schism. What if, instead of making the elevator pitch primarily (or solely) about the other person or even selfishly about ourselves, we use the AND proposition and make it about us. The pitch then becomes one for a mutually respectful relationship where the needs of both sides have equal importance.

Not realistic? Think a customer or member is too self-interested, focused too much on what they gain? Maybe, but then, that’s the message they’ve been trained well to absorb. This is an invitation to propose a new type of relationship, one that addresses the client’s needs, but also honors our own goals, dreams, and possibilities. There’s no way to do any of this when the relationship becomes imbalanced and the customer’s needs are always put first. Actually, that’s not a relationship…it’s servitude.

And we have a choice.

Review Of “To Be Of Use” by Dave Smith

by on February 22, 2006 in Business, Career, Media

Rosa Say has given me just the nudge that I need to do something that’s been floating on my to-do list for a while. This is Talking Story’s 2nd Annual Love Affair with Books where folks in her Ho’ohana Community have been encouraged to submit a book review. Well, I’ve been meaning to write a little about a powerful book that was actually sent to me by a publisher’s rep who actually has a pretty neat blog herself (visit Kim and her blog, Skip On!).

In the fall of last year, I received To Be of Use: The Seven Seeds of Meaningful Work, by Dave Smith. The title certainly was compelling and intimately related to my own philosophy toward work. The book is not only an autobiography of a man dedicated to making this world a better place, but a field guide for all of us to use to connect our work to something greater than ourselves. Dave Smith was the original founder of Smith & Hawken, a company dedicated to organic gardening (sadly, Smith & Hawken was bought up by Scott Seed and changed into the kind of empty Pottery Barn-like store that Dave fought against).

It has seven chapters with each one focused on a particular value or seed. And the chapters flow easily from one to the next: faith, hope, justice, temperance, prudence, courage, and love. In each, he offers his own personal experiences as a testament to what an individual can do with their life. He writes of how he left his high-paying job as a computer programmer to work for Cesar Chavez and five dollars a week. He speaks candidly about his spiritual wandering from a fundamentalist Christian upbringing toward Quakerism.

What I found most refreshing is his take on business and entrepreneurism. His story is an inspiring account of how business can be a force for good in the world and that a successful business can be measured by such ideals as responsibility, compassion, and service to the common good. At a time in our history when many companies are better known for their greed and maliciously competitive actions, we need more men and women to follow the path of Dave Smith.

A final quote, which I believe sums up the main theme of To Be of Use:

Meaning comes most naturally when we find and fulfill our purpose. This implies that there is an overall higher purpose, one beyond simply surviving and satisfying our own selves on what someone once called our separate little islands of commodities. We find our purpose in responsibility and service to others, living our values – making things better, fairer, happier for others.

You Get What You Give

by on December 20, 2005 in Business, Career

I belong to a marketing listserve and a member posted an email he received from Chris Cardell, a marketing consultant. While Chris succumbs at times to a roaring bout of hubris in his message, he reminded me of a simple, golden principle: you get what you give. It’s a powerful idea and appropriate for this time of year. And if you think about it, giving and getting are never in direct proportion to a fixed ratio; we’ve all experienced the time where a small amount of giving yielded a far greater amount of joy, fulfillment, and solace.

Here’s one poignant snippets:

I made the prime purpose of my business to give, give, give. To add incredible value to the lives of people that I came into contact with. I gave everyone who was interested tons of great information on how to grow their business. I sent them information in the post. I emailed them. I chatted to them on the phone. Some became clients, some didn’t. It really didn’t matter because I knew I was making a difference. I stopped forever the "I can grow your business and solve your marketing problems – Why don’t you become my client" pitch. Within a few days people started contacting me asking me to work with them.

What had changed? Instead of trying to convince people that I could give them the knowledge that could solve their marketing problems – I just started giving them the knowledge anyway and let them decide for themselves. I switched my focus from what I wanted to what they wanted.

Take in that last sentence again. Play with it. Does it fit somewhere in your work right now? Someplace in your life? I think to my own experiences in business, in marketing, in designing a soulful career and realize that I have put way too much emphasis on me. The most difficult thing about having faith in the notion of continuous abundance is that you’re never sure if freely giving your ideas and knowledge will come back to help you. But then, that’s the real problem isn’t it? When we offer freebies, we tend to just give away the crumbs and hope its enough to entice new business or reup current clients. What if we also started to worry less about intellectual property and gave our best work away, as well? No strings attached.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. More than likely, someone else has had the same idea before. Think folks like Stephen Covey, Tom Peters, or Seth Godin are saying anything new or groundbreaking? Nah, not really. Yet, what makes them – and each of us – compelling to others is the quality and uniqueness of our own humanity.

When it comes to building a business of any size, clients and customers want to surround themselves with others who can make a true difference in their work and lives. In the end, its the relationship that matters. The key ingredient to any healthy relationship is a caring regard for another. So, practice freely giving and don’t be surprised if the return is far greater than anything you anticipated.

All The Cool Mediators Are Doing It

by on November 9, 2005 in Business

The reason I went on my trip to New England last week was to spend a day with a great chapter of my association and attend their annual conference. What I expected to do was talk with its leaders and members and share what we can do to further improve our organizational relationship. What I didn’t expect was to walk away with some pretty profound experiences.

In the past few months, I’ve come to learn about mediation as a practice and a profession. I’ve also gained a great deal of respect for those who mediate disputes (prior to landing at my current gig, I tried to mediate a staff conflict and discovered how difficult it is to do well). In a culture that seems to idolize the act of litigation, mediation is just a better way.

During the conference, I was able to attend a few sessions. One of the coolest was a workshop focused on helping practitioners use blogging as a marketing tool. It was led by three prominent bloggers in the field (which you really need to visit and read):

An added bonus was that Tammy Lenski, author of Strategic Conversations, was there, too. To be honest, it was the first time that I’ve managed to find myself in a room with more than two bloggers in it (including myself) so this workshop experience was particularly neat.

Folks like them and other legal bloggers like Arnie Herz at Legal Sanity give the world of law a truly good name.