How To Pitch & The Business Model Canvas
Prepared for Auntie Jackie & Co. at AYF
When I talked to Auntie Jackie yesterday, she told me that she wanted me to talk about the business model canvas and how to pitch a business.
In short -
Pitching is selling. Learn how to sell and you’ll learn how to pitch.
The Business Model Canvas is a way to express your business on one sheet of paper so the investor or business partner or stakeholder can gain confidence in your operation.
Entrepreneurs start as employees.
For the most part, I’ve found that the people who want to learn how to pitch want to learn how to pitch because they don’t have a strong enough business built yet. Mark Zuckerberg strolled into Sequoia Capital with a bathrobe on because he’d generated demand. He didn’t have to pitch; the business did the pitching for him.
I’ll take a recent example. I was working with Rhoma Spencer, a Caribbean Comedian from Toronto. She’d just finished headlining a show at Gotham Comedy Club in Manhattan for The Black Women in Comedy Laff Fest and was invited to submit to more comedy festivals. I felt that the best video we could submit would be a video on social media with likes shares and tags. So we created a few videos and one caught fire.
I’m a firm believer that the product is the marketing. Have a good product? Great. Let’s release it. If it’s great it’ll perform well. If it doesn’t perform well then either you’re not ready or the market isn’t ready or you’re too late, etc.
Anyhoo, this talk about the business model canvas and how to pitch got me thinking.
Who are you? Do you want to create a startup or launch your career or make money? Which of those do you want to do first? Which one should you do first?
The Myth of the Overnight Success
It occurred to me that everyone would like to be an overnight success. Alas, there’s a saying that goes,
If you win the lottery, you better become a millionaire.
People like to talk about how Bill Gates quit school to start Microsoft. What they won’t tell you is that by the time he quit school he’d already solved seemingly unsolvable computer science problems during his undergraduate. They also won’t tell you his dad was a lawyer his mom sat on the board of a bank and his grandfather was a national bank president.
People like to point to ‘overnight successes’ like Drake. What they won’t tell you is that his dad played drums for Jerry Lee Lewis and took him out to Memphis every summer. In fact, his friend’s dad got him the Degrassi acting gig.
People like to talk about ‘overnight successes’ like Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum. What they won’t tell you is that his dad was a computer scientist and that he attended Abelard, one of the most elite private schools in Canada. In fact, Peter Thiel, head of the PayPal Mafia with Elon Musk, was the one who funded Vitalik’s departure out of Waterloo University into the world of blockchain.
What am I trying to say? Most rap beefs are just tools to sell records. Believe none of what you see and half of what you hear.
So whether you want to start a startup, launch a career, or make money, remember one thing: nobody has the incentive to tell you the truth.
Get Used To People Lying To You
If you were going to get into some sort of business, you’d better get used to people lying to you. Google ‘Luna Terra Ecosystem’ or ‘Voyager Platform’ or ‘Celsius Network’ or ‘Three Arrows Capital’ or ‘Archegos Capital’ and you’ll see billions of dollars wiped away in a blink of an eye. In business, there is a big incentive to lie.
I should know: I’m a recruiter. People lie to me all day long; it’s my job to separate the liars from those telling the truth…because my clients will pay top dollar for top talent.
So before we get into talking about business, know that business involves human beings, and human beings are human beings. You don’t have the right to change them and they don’t have the right to change you1.
If you would Lead, Follow
The cold hard truth is that most entrepreneurs start off as employees. They work their way to the top AND THEN start a business based on the unique insights they’ve gleaned. Jeff Bezos was in capital markets before he started Amazon. Jim Keller built chips for Intel Apple AMD and Tesla before starting his own chip company.
Now, of course, there are exceptions to this rule. But I think that the exceptions prove the rule. Most entrepreneurs start out as employees.
I think that a lot of people get into trouble because they believe what they read on the internet. I’ll go a step further: I think that a lot of people are illiterate. I think that literacy is the number one challenge we face today; it’s a silent killer. But then again my parents were teachers and my grandfather a principal and my wifey a teacher so I’m biased.
Before you decide to launch a startup or launch a career, it would be wise to separate the things you can control from the things you cannot control.
While you’re at it -
Oh yeah - pitching and the business model canvas.
ummmm…ok. Yeah. Gotcha. No problem.
How to Pitch
My friend once told me that pitching is very simple:
Here’s what I’ve done.
Here’s what you can do.
Leave the room.
If you want to learn how to pitch, you need to learn how to sell. In order to learn how to sell, you must understand and read the best books of selling.
Pitch Anything - Oren Klaff (The Biology of Sales)
The Challenger Sales Model - Dixson & Adamson (The Fundamental Role of Sales in the 21st century)
SPIN Selling - Neil Rackham (The Process of Selling)
The Elevator Pitch
In pitch anything, Oren Klaff referenced Geoffrey Moore’s elevator pitch formula:
For [target customers] who are dissatisfied with [the current offerings in the market],
my idea/product is a [new idea/product] that provides [key features].
Unlike [the competing product], my idea/product is [describe key features].
Business Model Canvas
The Business Model Canvas is a great way to show people what your business is all about on one sheet of paper. It’s a great thing to have on hand when people ask you for details about how you operate and make money.
To create your own business model canvas, visit https://next.canvanizer.com/
Here’s a Business Model Canvas for a Voice Acting Studio with various types of target markets.
In Review
Pitching is selling. Learn how to sell and you’ll learn how to pitch.
The Business Model Canvas is a way to express your business on one sheet of paper so the investor or business partner or stakeholder can gain confidence in your operation.
Entrepreneurs start as employees.
Your freedoms extend to the tip of my nose. - Professor Doug Carter, Cedarbrae Collegiate