"Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal, nothing can help the man with the wrong attitude.” Jefferson It’s often said that the primary reason startups fail is a lack of funding. Ultimately, whether startup failure is attributed to funding challenges, market conditions, too... Continue reading

Taken from ‘Here’s the Pitch- How to Pitch Your Business to Anyone, Get Funded and Win Clients’ Most pitch decks are disasters. They are confusing, boring, uninspiring, and misused. The worst thing is that it isn’t a secret. Death by PowerPoint is a syndrome as well-known as many a medical... Continue reading

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” Benjamin Franklin Three undisputed truths: 1. Delivering a winning pitch will often determine the survival and success of a business. 2. People create their best work when they have time, space, and silence. 3. Proper rehearsal is critical to delivering a... Continue reading

One of the most frequently made mistakes during a sales pitch, is when entrepreneurs focus on their companies rather than on the audience’s problem and their solution. Companies will buy and hire your solutions to their problems, not your products and services. The first minute of your pitch is critical.... Continue reading

As communication channels increase along with the speed of doing business, the ability to pitch your startup in one sentence, becomes critical. This applies equally to both sales and investor pitches. Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs are so immersed in the minutiae of their business, that they forget the importance of communicating... Continue reading

“The crowd makes the ball game.” Ty Cobb, American Major League Baseball Player Most startups will say that the biggest challenge they face is access to capital. Many good ideas developed by great entrepreneurs fail to get to market, not because of a lack of commitment, innovation or energy, but... Continue reading

Bunker Hunt once said “To be successful, you must decide exactly what you want to accomplish, then resolve to pay the price to get it.” For some, this philosophy flies in the face of entrepreneurs being able to enjoy a work life balance. After having spent 15 years as an... Continue reading

Most entrepreneurs know that one of the critical keys to product success, is ensuring they are solving their customer’s pain. Unless you are launching a truly disruptive product, where people are not aware they have a ‘problem’, targeting pain is the route to startup pleasure. For various reasons, however, many... Continue reading

This is the true story of ‘Ryan’ (not his real name). A serial entrepreneur with no qualifications and a very limited understanding of financials or launching a startup. Ryan, however, is an entrepreneur with a deep understanding of people, who consistently and easily raises hundreds of thousands of dollars from... Continue reading

client said to me last week that if I was so against startups raising capital from investors, why did I always blog and tweet about pitching investors. Fair point, made in response to my attempt to encourage him to bootstrap rather than pursue Angel Funding. The current bubbling market and... Continue reading

A common area of confusion on the part of entrepreneurs seeking to raise capital is the different objectives of an Executive Summary and an Investor Deck (usually a PowerPoint). Typically an Executive Summary will be sent to an investor before any meeting. The objective is to engage the investor and... Continue reading

It sometimes happens that there is a point during an investor pitch when something is said by the entrepreneur which instantly kills their chances of securing funding. It is the point at which there is no return and nothing can be said to repair the damage. You know it’s happened... Continue reading

An entrepreneur’s investor presentation documents and pitch will typically focus on the product or service, numbers, competition, sales strategy and team. What is often missing, however, is ‘how’ key stages and milestones will achieved. In other words ‘how’ the entrepreneur and his team will execute. An entrepreneur can have an... Continue reading

It is often said that ‘it’s not what you say but how you say it that matters’. When it comes to investor presentation documents, substance will always triumph over style. If, however, your documents are unprofessional or unclear you run a very real risk of not getting funded. An investor... Continue reading

There used to be a time, not so long ago, when an entrepreneur could secure funding on the basis of an investor presentation that focused on what would be achieved, rather than what had been achieved. Times have changed and investors are far more cautious and skeptical. This means investor... Continue reading

I was talking with an experienced Angel Investor recently who tends to mostly invest in tech startups. He had invested in a Silicon Valley startup (B), 2 years ago and was beaming at the fact that it was clear to him that the startup was finally on the verge of... Continue reading

Optimism is a quality that is present in almost every successful entrepreneur. Without optimism, entrepreneurs would not take the huge risks they do to bring their dreams to life. Without optimism, entrepreneurs would find it impossible to raise funding from Angel Investors and Venture Capitalists. After all, what investor would... Continue reading

The importance for an entrepreneur to convey passion during an investor pitch is sometimes overlooked and can undermine an otherwise strong pitch. Angel Investors and Venture Capitalists like to see passion from someone pitching them, because passion is the characteristic that enables the entrepreneur to defy the odds and succeed.... Continue reading

As we all know Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors and very busy people. Some of them have very short attention spans and pitch meetings can be very chaotic and unstructured. This can be a real problem when you are in the middle of an investor pitch, just about to get... Continue reading

Being an entrepreneur launching a startup was never an easy thing. But nowadays it is considerably harder. Entrepreneurs seeking funding are told they have to demonstrate traction whilst bootstrapping. They need to secure introductions in order to access Angels and VC’s whilst working day and night in their garages. And... Continue reading