A Short and Sweet Elevator Ride
Even a complex, ambitious, and technical engineering story can be told simply.
Once Upon a Pitch Problem #22
Transcript of an actual 90 second elevator pitch: “Hello, I’m [Founder] and we are [Company], bringing the dream of commercial fusion energy to reality. Limitations in current energy sources are numerous, from creation to delivery to storage to costs. Many of our sources of electricity create harmful environmental by-products like carbon dioxide and according to the IEA, at least 770 million people still have no access to electricity. Fusion is how our own sun makes energy. Over the past fifty years, the idea of clean fusion energy on Earth has moved from research in academia to discreet engineering problems like ignition, creating the energy needed to start the reaction, and containment, managing and controlling the reaction. [Company] was founded to solve those problems through our proprietary technologies used in our proposed clean fusion reactors. [Here, the founder gave two sentence overviews of each technology solution.] The capital raise for our endeavors will be around seven billion to complete R&D and build the first commercial reactor, a small capital cost for the promise of unlimited, clean, affordable energy for everyone. We have already raised [X] and are looking for large capital investors interested in funding new technologies for the long term. Thank you.”
Solutions
Simple stupid. We can all agree the engineering to bring clean fusion energy into reality is hard, expensive, and on a long timeline. We can also agree that achieving this goal is worth the effort if it replaces current energy models with clean, affordable energy for everyone. I think we can also agree that for a quick pitch, this founder gave us a great story. We understand the size of the problem (energy for all humans), we understand the solution (clean fusion energy), we understand the challenges (engineering for ignition and containment), we understand the costs (a lot), and we understand the type of investors the company is seeking (large funds with technical expertise investing on long time horizons). We do not have to agree or disagree with the story; the story is the story and I now know it. If I am aware of a capital fund deploying hundreds of millions in clean energy or climate change mitigation or even social impact, I am firing off an email to make sure this company is on that fund’s radar. I can’t vouch for the technology or the founder, but I can pass this simple story to those who can vouch for the technology and the founder. I can get the story to the experts and that is the entire purpose of an elevator pitch. You will never make a sale or get investment from a 60 to 90 second pitch, but you can transfer the story to the audience and let them retell the story for you, getting it out into the world where the experts can build upon it.
“And because of this . . ..” The cause and effect of your business solution solving your customer problem is often the most delightful part of your story. You can imagine a changed world and paint the future as you see it across industries and users. More likely than not, though, for a 60 to 90 second pitch, you are going to have to ignore ninety-nine percent of that picture because you simply do not have enough seconds to jump from industry to industry, use case to use case, application to end user and keep the story straight in your audience’s mind. If you confuse your audience, they will never retell the story. For the short elevator pitch, pick that single, most impactful cause and effect and paint that picture clearly: “unlimited, clean, affordable energy for everyone.” The audience can grasp that cause and effect and understand it is big, industry changing, and important and that is the cause and effect you need for your audience to retell the story.
Helpful silence. Maybe you noticed a word missing from this pitch or maybe like me, you didn’t. It’s not a good word for pitching. It is a terrible word for storytelling because it is a word that the audience will immediately associate with many personal feelings that the storyteller has no control over. It is a fraught word, loaded with fear, horror, death, obliteration. As the person pitching, there is no way to use that word and hold the audience in your story. The second the audience hears that word the storyteller loses control; the audience is gone, baby, gone in their own feelings. Your pitch may not have as difficult a word, but it likely has problematic words for the audience. Strategically omit negative emotional, historical, and business bingo words: synergy, disruptive, first mover, groundbreaking, cutting edge, the Uber/Starbucks of [fill in the blank], unicorn, open kimono, democratizing, broken, war, revolutionary, visionary, rock star, ninja, game changer, etc. You only have 60 to 90 seconds to move your story into the audience; chose each word to create a straightforward, no distraction, pathway for the audience to hear and follow only your story.
What They Said
We experience our day-to-day lives in story mode. The brain creates a world for us to live in and populates it with allies and villains. It turns the chaos and bleakness of reality into a simple, hopeful tale, and at the centre it places its star - wonderful, precious me - who its sets on a series of goals that become the plots of our lives. Story is what brain does. It is a ‘story processor,’ writes the psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt, ‘not a logic processor.’ Story emerges from human minds as naturally as breath emerges from between human lips. You don’t have to be a genius to master it. You’re already doing it. - Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make us Human and How to Tell Them Better, page 3.
See You on the Track
Rafferty Jackson
Author The First Principles Pitch, startup storyteller, board member, advisor and investor. Once Upon a Pitch is a weekly newsletter looking at one business pitch problem and offering storytelling solutions to help solve that problem.