Practice Makes the Pitch Perfect

So there's a big difference in my world about figuring out what the elevator pitch is and then the act of mastering it. You can have a fantastic elevator pitch on paper and not be able to deliver it. Pitches happen at the deli counter, cocktail parties, in elevators, boardrooms. I've pitched to a 120 people all on different video sequences, and pitches happen in all different ways. Mastering the pitch really is about practicing.

And we advise people so often that once you have the pitch down, once you know what your position and promise are, that you get in front of a mirror, go in the bathroom, get in front of the mirror, and do that pitch like 13 times. And everybody laughs and goes, you don't really do that. And everyone on our team is like, yes, she does.

Brand clarity is critically important for start up organizations because it lays the foundation for how the company is perceived, remembered, and trusted. At Flywheel Social Enterprise Hub, we work with emerging entrepreneurs to dig deep and understand and know their brand and to refine their story in concise, meaningful pitches. Pitches can get complicated because they need to do so much in a limited time. A good pitch can educate, communicate information, and inspire action. A good pitch enhances the presenter's credibility and professional image.

As a start up, you may be pitching to an angel investor or a prospective partner or new clients and customers. Each opportunity needs a little personalization. I'm Joan Kaup, host of On the Fly!, the podcast where we talk with emerging founders of businesses that have the double bottom line. That is a positive social impact and a positive return on investment. Today, I am turning the microphone over to one of our treasured board members, Byron Stallworth, who is CEO and founder of his company called Inclusion Building Solutions.

Byron is in conversation with Brooke Foley, CEO of Jayne Agency, to talk about brand clarity and powerful pitches. With them is Donna Zaring, executive director of Flywheel Social Enterprise Hub. As we listen in on their conversation, keep in mind four P's, your purpose, position, promise, and ultimately, your pitch. Welcome, Byron, Brooke, and Donna to On the Fly!

Well, hello. Hello. Hello. How's everybody doing today? Brooke, Donna.

Hello.

Hello. Glad to be here.

I'm gonna start off with Donna. Tell her the role that you have at Flywheel and what the organization does because that feeds right into Brooke's expertise.

Thanks, Byron. Yeah. I'm always happy to talk about Flywheel any chance I get. So I'm the executive director of Flywheel Social Enterprise Hub, and Flywheel, is a nonprofit organization that supports social entrepreneurs. And these are individuals who are building startups that are making the world a better place in some way.

They're improving their communities, improving the environment. That is at the the heart of the business, and we work with these individuals to provide business coaching and mentorship and expertise from around the community to help them develop their businesses.

How long has Flywheel been doing this kind of work?

Flywheel has been doing this work for fourteen years, if you can believe that.

That's amazing.

It is amazing. We have a tremendous network of dedicated volunteer coaches who've been involved with the organization for a really long time. There's just so much passion in this community around this organization, and it just wouldn't happen without, the tremendous volunteers such as yourself. And we're so thrilled to have you on our board.

That's how I interface a friend of mine who runs a significant business in town, said, you know, you should be a coach for something that I involve myself with coach and mentor startups. They're just trying to figure it out. And then I did that for a couple of cohorts. And then the next thing you know, I'm asked to sit on the board. So it is a phenomenal experience.

You can help mold and share your experiences with a young founder. Right? Hopefully they take that knowledge and go off and do great things. I was with you at City Hall talking to city council members. You shared some information about how many employees of these small businesses can you talk about that a little bit?

I'm happy to. You know, we talk about the a double bottom line of profit and purpose that social enterprises create. And it's it's it's just so so true when we say that 80% of the businesses that come through Flywheel's accelerators are still operating today, and they're growing. And we did some calculations and figured out that in just in the last three years alone, enterprises that Flywheel has supported with our programming have created 350 jobs in our community right here in Greater Cincinnati. That's really meaningful, not only from a wealth creation standpoint and the economy, but we're also talking about people that are doing work that's improving the community.

So it really is just a a double bottom line of of profit and purpose and social impact. It's it's awesome.

And I haven't been to their demo days. The gender makeup is mixed and diverse as well. And that's a consultant in that space and help small businesses. Some of these small businesses that are minority women, veteran owned are not so small and they're doing work all over the country. That's how my bridge at this point to have a conversation with Brooke.

Brooke is actually a client of mine. Brooke, you have a great history, particularly in marketing and brand strategy with some Fortune 500 and 1,000 companies doing that work direct. You started your own company. Can't tell us about Jayne agency.

So like many entrepreneurs, I started out just developing a really solid technical background. So thank you for the introduction and and the segue into this. When I came out of school, I was trained as a graphic designer, and I moved into the creative and advertising space. I became a creative director far, far too early for my own time. And I was lucky to have the benefit of being inside of Chicago DDB.

At that time, there was about ten ten or 11 really phenomenal executive creative directors. I didn't and and expertise inside of the space of digital strategy, which was very early on. Nobody even called it that at the time. I was nonthreatening to each of the creative directors, and they each needed me on their account. So I got all this fantastic information and guidance and development poured into me.

At the time, I was not necessarily aware or even able to appreciate the depth of that. But that would be the first thing I would say to any entrepreneur is really start to connect with and understand and know where your influences, your mentorship, your pedigree is coming from. And even if you don't think it's there, it is happening. It's the ability to embrace or understand how to leverage that that becomes a really important part of your brand strategy and your own DNA. So that was sort of where I got my career start.

Over time, I really moved through the creative industry, and my primary role was pitching. As a as a creative director, your pitch ratio is very much a large part of whether or not you have a job in the next six to eight months– at least in the eighties and nineties, you know, when you watch Mad Men and things like that, I really lived inside that space. So my pitch ratio was always really high, and it came from the fact that my schooling had taught me that design was both small d and big d. So design solved a problem. And if I could understand what the business leaders problem was, whether it was a Fortune 10 or an incoming startup, I could figure out how to get to that solution.

And more often than not, it was really understanding that customers need that they were trying to get to. And a lot of times when you talk about startups, somebody has solved something out of need, or they've come up with something that's not necessarily identified. And if they just pursue solving that based on what they thought versus seeing how that solution hits their audience, they get they miss out on the opportunity. Because we come into spaces and even into my own business, I came into that space thinking I was solving a problem for digital strategy. And over time, I learned through customer research, user centered design methodologies, was that my customers valued my clarity, not necessarily my creative.

They could get creative anywhere, but they what they couldn't get was the clarity on how their brand needed to function for their employees, for their cash flow, for their stability, their ability to scale, for their operations, their HR purposes. And so as we started to become more and more aware that that's what they wanted from us, our own clarity, I sat there saying, nobody's gonna buy that. That's not really what people want. So I created a business, and I created a methodology that brought clarity to people. And I was seeing inside the research that that's what people valued.

They valued the clarity more than they valued the creative the the tactics, the delivery of the deliverables. Right? And I, myself, being inside this business, had a hard time coming to terms with what people really valued versus what I thought I excelled in. And I see that so often with the startups and the entrepreneurs that we work with is that there's this intersection of what you feel really good and strong and confident at versus what the world actually wants to use that for. When you are able to embrace and harness that, and that's my second big sort of like nugget is if you can embrace what it is that people really wanna use your value for, and you can pursue and follow that, you can create a position and promise that people can embrace and will use at high volume.

And that's where you start to see startups go from startup to scale and reliability and endurance. Our job as an entrepreneur is to stay focused on how we solve a problem and making sure that the people who buy our time and our services want it solved the way that we sell it versus trying to conform to competing with a large huge agency or other brands strategy companies that are selling time within their team versus the value of the methodology. And there's a distinct difference between buying across those two. Some people want a series of deliverables taken care of. Some people wanna learn how they should be thinking about how deliverables get taken care of, and we serve the latter.

However, when we stand in a room, initially, we sound like the same until we each state our positioning. And that is where we're expert at.

Helping them clarify that that elevator pitch is so desperately needed. You know, Donna, you have some insight on what a cohort is at Flywheel.

Yeah. And the elevator pitch is one of the hardest things to do. It's you know, we work with founders of these social enterprises and groups of about five at a time, and they work with us over a series of nine weeks of coaching, individual coaching, and then workshops, but they also do pitch practice. And we find it's really interesting. Sometimes there are founders that have a really strong business model, and they just need help learning how to communicate it better.

But other times, we find that through the process of trying to figure out that elevator pitch and how to communicate about their business, founders will start to realize that they may need to reprioritize different offerings in their start ups. So similar to what you were saying before, which is, you know, what's the one thing? What's the value that people really want? And through that process of coaching the entrepreneurs through how to talk about their businesses, and we have a seven minute version, but we also coach them and have different variations of that. One of them being like you're in an elevator for one minute.

What are you gonna say? And if that process is too if that is too hard to articulate, then you have to look at your business and your value proposition and really reconsider what it is you're delivering, whether it's social impact is the product or it's it's a thing that you're selling or a technology. It doesn't matter. It should, the end of the day, be something you can articulate pretty quickly. So, yeah, big fan of the elevator pitch.

I always joke that I used to work in consulting and and brand and strategy work as well at a company called Seed Strategy and similar type of work. And I always used to say most of the sales that I made were on the back of a napkin Mhmm. At a at a coffee meeting or a lunch because it should be that simple at first to be able to reach that mutual understanding.

What do you think, Brooke? Some bullet points on how to master an elevator pitch. What's that look like?

So there's a big difference in my world about figuring out what the elevator pitch is, and then the act of mastering it. So you can have a fantastic elevator pitch on paper and not be able to physically or verbally or in writing deliver it. There there and those are all different. So pitches happen. They happen at the deli counter.

They happen in cocktail parties. They happen in elevators. They happen in boardrooms for planned experiences that are twenty, thirty, forty minutes long. I've pitched to a 120 people all on different video sequences and with 20 people in the room. Right?

Pitches happen in all different ways. So I'm gonna I'm gonna hit on how you master the pitch.

Okay.

So mastering the pitch really is about practicing. And we advise people so often that once you have the pitch down, once you know what your position and promise are, that you get in front of a mirror, go in the bathroom, get in front of the mirror, and do that pitch, like, 13 times. And everybody laughs and goes, you don't really do that. And everyone on our team is like, yes, she does, and so do we. But rehearsal, like, really calling it, like, put it on your calendar.

I'm gonna rehearse my pitch. And when you rehearse, even if you just do dry runs and each one of them's awful, and the moment in time when you stand publicly, you do great. We just had something going on in our neighborhood, which is not a professional situation. It's more of a personal one, where a few different neighbors needed to stand up in a zoning committee and pitch literally why the zoning should not happen. There was a lot of concern.

There was a lot of angst, frustration, emotion. And so we just started with getting the story down, walking through it. I had both of them rehearse in front of the mirror. We talked about where you could deviate and where you can't on the script, and we gave different little moments of, if you lose your place, here's how you catch your breath. If you feel nervous, deep breathing, don't worry.

Don't get worried about what you didn't say, just come back and refocus on what you did say. No different than if you were on a sport, right? If you were out on a football field and you fumbled, you wouldn't stop playing. You would keep you would keep the play going, or you would go right back into the next formation. Pitching is the same thing.

And so when we started to take some of the anxiety out and gave some some base ground rules, Just going through and rehearsing gives you the chance to become more embellished. It gives you the chance to find places where you can be dramatic and not feel awkward about it. It gives you places to rehearse in dramatic, what we call pregnant pauses, or to use hand motions to really emphasize things. We have the what we call the one two three, where it really helps you remember, like, these are the three points I need to make to support my promise. We watched people learn.

Once they went through it, you know, 10 or 11 times, they started to say, I think I wanna use the back part of my pitch to be the front part. You start to be able to really manage it. And when you start to become managing it, you embrace it. You are much more at home talking, pitching. You can handle things that come at you or throw you off a little bit better.

So, really, the idea of mastery comes in from giving yourself the time to rehearse and then being able to build in the places of drama, meeting theater, embellishment, verbal, nonverbal communication. And that's when you really start to see someone's pitch go from reading from a piece of paper to you're like, wow. That was on fire.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's interesting at Flywheel. We the practice is a big piece of it too. So we in addition to the coaches meetings and the workshops, we have weekly pitch practice.

And it's really you're absolutely right. The more practice as we go through those nine weeks, it just gets clearer and clearer. I think what's really interesting from a start up perspective is we bring in a phenomenal gentleman named Jonathan Predom, and he is a professor at LSU of entrepreneurship. And he has done a ton of research in this space about the decision making process that happens with the investor as they're listening to a pitch. And he comes in for one week for one of these sessions with what's really interesting is a lot of the things that people think are important when it comes to pitching are actually not as important.

It's not the things that you see on Shark Tank and on TV. He's actually done all this really interesting research on the decision making second by second that is happening with the investor. And what's interesting is, you know, in that first, I think he said something like thirty seconds you have to to grab the attention of the investor and make them wanna listen more to you, that they're investing in you. But that also that entire time after that, they're wanting to understand how to derisk their investment. So especially for women and founders of color who we have at least 50%, it is so important to understand the science behind what the listener is doing cognitively and how they are evaluating what you're saying.

I I think it's one of the best presentations I've ever seen, and I've been doing pitching for twenty years too. And it's just the the whole investor mindset and how they're thinking, is this risky? Is this risky? What am I listening for? What are the cues?

So important for entrepreneurs to understand these things as they're getting in front of investors.

An investor is thinking in terms of derisking and can I see can I see this working and growing and evolving?

And can I see myself as a mentor too? Like, they they want to know that these individuals are coachable. And let's let's be real. Less than 2% of venture capital goes to anybody except for white men. And so these are really important things for entrepreneurs to understand that regardless of whether it's conscientious or not, this is the thought process that's going through the minds of the investors that are listening.

I watch that regularly because when we curate the pitches, we also counsel the judges. We teach them what the criteria is. We bring them into the mind of the pitch participant, and then we moderate the judging after. I can point to moments where the accessibility to being coached on stage during the q and a created the commitment and the connection between the judge who was viewing themselves as an investor for that participant versus someone who might have had a great pitch and a great solution, but when the judge was asking questions, just did not take the guidance. The mentorship was not receptive, receptive, was not open.

The the literal deliberation after was that's a great product, and it is never gonna go password is right now because that that person was not open to my feedback. And it was the difference between winning and losing, which if you think about that from an investment standpoint, that's the difference between someone getting investment or not. And I so I think that is so important. You can see it real time. You can hear them.

They talk about it. They say things like, look. I love what you have, but I don't think I'd be the right mentor for you. And, really, that's code for you are not receiving my feedback or my coaching or hearing my concerns at the pitch level. There's no way I'm gonna give you a million dollars or 10,000,000 or 500,000 or even $20.

Mhmm. You can see it happen real time.

I'm curious what you think about, you know, social impact and social enterprises. And so many of the so many of the entrepreneurs that we work with struggle sometimes with what they wanna ask for because asking for an investment in a business is is a little different than asking for a donation, asking for introductions. How do you feel that a social entrepreneur might wanna think differently about their ask versus, like a company that is is making a food product or a tool, for example?

I love this question, but I don't know that you're gonna love my answer. I don't know that it's so different. If I'm asking someone to spend $3 on a widget that I'm selling online, I am asking them to take time and resource out of their world and invest it into mine with the belief that they're going to get something they value out of it. And if I'm asking someone to give me $20 grand or a million or 500,000 or to mentor me, I'm asking them to take a resource out of their world, invest it in mine for something that they believe they're going to get back. And so I don't know that it's that different.

What I do think is important for impact based pitching is that you understand, and you talked about this in the beginning, the double bottom line. So if I'm talking to an impact based investor, they wanna know where the return on investment is from a financial standpoint, but they also wanna know what the impact ROI is gonna be as well. So being able to speak to both of those is critical. Whereas if you're just selling a product or a service for the purposes of growing an enterprise of your own, you don't have that second accountability. But being able to report on the metrics, the numbers, the outcome, the anticipated value that that's gonna be back to the community or the initiative or the society that you're talking about, And being able to talk about that in a way that the investor can take back as tangibly as financial is where you really see social impact entrepreneurs and startups really making a difference.

Nice. You know, with Flywheel, we're catching these founders at the beginning. But say you own a company and you've been at it five, six, seven years, had some level of success. When do you think it's time to invest on your brand?

The marketing and advertising industry has created myths. And you hear this, you should be spending 12% in order to be able to sustain your business. You do need to invest, but strategies get invested in three ways. And there's one there's a fourth that we eliminate. It's usually the primary one that startups and impact entrepreneurs as well as five year business owners are thinking.

So if you ask somebody, how do you think you're gonna make your number for the year? The primary strategy they're using is hope, and it sounds like this. Well, we hope we get that grant. We hope to close this business. We hope that this contract is gonna happen.

To create a stable business, hope is not a good way to depend on paying payroll Yeah. At all. It's almost a a train wreck way. What is important is to think about what are my barriers? What do I really need to overcome?

And then to separate those barriers out based on brands, sales, operations, HR. Once you separate those barriers out, and don't try and sell them right away, just separate them out, Then you can look at them and say, okay. So I thought I had 17 barriers, but when it comes to brand, I really only have four, and I can do these two next year if I invest time in this one, then I can spend less money on this one. And if I solve those two, I might even eliminate a couple operations and HR issues. And so if you can break them down and separate them out, you can start to think about, am I going to invest through time, energy, or cash flow?

And that should be real at any stage of business. Now, if you have an ecommerce solution and you need to get x amount of awareness to get x amount of people on your site to get x amount of conversion, There are formulas for that, and you're not really gonna get around that. But if you are a startup entrepreneur or a a social impact based entrepreneur, resources are pretty sparse. And so if you can solve this through time and this through energy, but you can't solve this when you have to invest in it, you just remove two things you had to invest in from a cash flow standpoint, and now you can really hit hard on the one that you need. So we talk often about no cost, low cost, and some cost investing.

How do you address scope creep and how much money you should be charging your customer? And when do you say you're really asking for more and that's going to cost you X, Y, Z? Have you helped founders in this regard before, Brooke?

Yes. And and both a victim and master of it myself. So if you think about it fundamentally, a brand strategy is a set of boundaries. They are a set of decisions that you've made of what you do and what you also do not do. Mhmm.

And when you look at a scope, a scope is a set of boundaries. So my brand strategy keeps me inside of boundaries. If I get myself into a cost speed solution, when I make quality innovation sell, then I've got to mitigate that inside that relationship. And if I just capitulate, I am creating a series of problems, and those problems sound like this. While I might have won this great big client contract, I am now in litigation with them.

I am at financial risk. And the biggest problem there, which we're very shortsighted with as entrepreneurs trying to make sure we make payroll and pay the rent and everything else, is the time I just lost inside my business to create a valuable case study that is then going to feed my future cash flow. And we don't think about it like that, but that is what brand strategy protects. So if you start out by really understanding your numbers, if you understand what your barriers are, if you know where you're going to invest from a strategic standpoint, if you have a very good understanding of who your audience is, their unmet need in their world, what you offer them, and where you sit from a positioning standpoint, You're able to say, look, I can agree to do these things, but my value and my promise is that I do x y z. I do not do a b c.

And I'll give you a very painful real life experience. When I started my business, I thought I was solving digital strategy for people. We grew fast. We fortunately or unfortunately won a lot of large government contracts and privately owned contracts. It came into the company fast.

We built out technology. We built out media. We built out creative developments, and we built out infrastructure to support those things. Clients kept saying, oh, well, we need you to do this. Can you put this in a contract?

Well, we don't have that. Oh, well, we'll pay for you to build that. Well, I became very far, far, far away from my personal position and promise. And I walked in one day, and I did not recognize my own business. I had a 4 and a half million dollar absolute monster.

I didn't recognize the value of my people, the the values that they represented. I didn't recognize the decision making in the clients that we were working with. I didn't have a relationship to building out the legal and technical details of media. I didn't have the ability to really manage a technical team. And so the value I provided became lost.

And now I had clients calling and saying, you're ruining my life. This is so upsetting. Why can't you guys just get this done quickly? And I was hearing all these complaints of all these things that had nothing to do with what I wanted as a business. And it was a very, very hard reset.

My advice to any entrepreneur is know your personal brand, know your business brand before you enter into a contract. Because if you can't feel that horrible feeling in the back of your neck or the people you hire don't have that horrible feeling in the back of your neck when someone asks for something that's not in scope or not the right scope for you, which are two very different things, but they translate and they blend fast and they create confusion. And once confusion enters in, it's like the boiled frog syndrome. Well, if we delivered a website, then we can deliver an app. If we delivered a app, then we can revise someone's infrastructure.

If we can revise them someone's infrastructure, we can create a platform. Well, you know what? You don't have the legal background, hierarchy, responsibility, escalation chains to take on that accountability, but now you're under contract. Right? It's not just saying no to the scope.

It's it's employing people and partnering with people and even taking on clients that wouldn't ask you to go outside your scope or wouldn't do that. It happens all the time. And the best thing you can do in those moments is go back to the original agreement, go back to your brand platform, go back to the request that they had. And if it's outside of that, say, we would love to help you with this. However, it's not in our scope of services for anybody, and it's not in the scope of services between us.

So we can either help you go find someone that is expert in that space, or you can find a partner, and we're happy to partner and collaborate with them. But getting ourselves into spaces for the idea of just increasing revenue when it's not really our core competency becomes a real problem, and your position and promise will protect you from that.

Right. Yeah. We when I was at Centrifuge, we invited someone in from Procter and Gamble who was leading their- a lot of their integration of new tech suppliers. And hit the session that we planned with him was advice for working with big companies for startups.

And that was his number one piece of advice, which is don't don't fall into the trap of morphing into all the different things that the clients will ask you for because what ends up happening is you end up becoming not that great at anything, and then someone else comes along offering your core value proposition cheaper, faster, better, and then you're out.

Totally.

And and it was great advice. He said, I've seen it time and time again. And I would say, I mean, for me, it's like, as we think about social enterprises, that's it's you know, there's an endless amount of problems to solve.

There's an endless amount of need out there in our communities. And so one of the things I think our coaches do a great job of is reminding these founders to stay really focused on whatever the core purpose of their business is and to stay really true to that and where they can make an impact because the same type of thing will happen. You'll end up just not doing anything really that impactful.

Yeah. And I think that you just touched on something so important. Brand strategy is the responsibility of the business owner, and they need methodology. They need tools. They need support.

They need community to be able to do that and finding the right place and resources for that is huge. But once that brand strategy is completed, having a coach to help you with the personal accountability around the brand strategy is where the business owner's commitment to the employees and the clients really happens, or the investors or the donors. And it's that distinction between this is what my brand strategy is versus the coach that's going to hold you accountable to that brand strategy. And I think that's one of the most phenomenal places that flywheel comes in, because we often say to people, we are not coaches. We assure a methodology, we administer it, we facilitate it, We can guide you on it, and we have people call all the time and say, hey, this client asked us to do this, this, and this, and I'll open up the brand strategy.

And my answer is that's not in your brand, so I don't know why you would do that. It's a harsh cold moment for that business owner. It feels really bad, but a coach can help them more with the accountability, what to do with it, what to say about it, how to navigate through that. And I think that's fantastic that people can find that resource and flywheel because I believe that that is one of the most missing and most sacred components of coaching and having people know how to respect the business owner's brand strategy versus and living on the other side of the consequences, watching coaches who say these horrible words. Well, what would you like to do?

Well, I'd like to be on a beach, but that's not the situation I'm in. How would you like to handle it? Really, it's more like, well, you you invested in a brand strategy. Let's go back to that and let's see what what comes out of that. And that discipline is just so huge.

What if I wanted to engage with Jayne? What's that look like? And we'll close there.

Well, we'd love to hear from you. The best way to engage with us is to start with the conversation. So you can reach out to me through LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn at Brooke Foley. You can contact through Jayne agency.

You can check out jayneagency.com. It's j-a-y-n-e-a-g-e-n-c-y.com. You can sign up for our Substack Devil's Advocate by Jayne agency at substack.com, or you can check out Clarity University @ jayneagency.com, and you can sign up for any one of the Clarity University sessions.

Well, I personally want to thank you for coming on and dropping some nuggets, you know, your industry background and then particularly helping founders or small businesses get some clarity on what they're putting out in the marketplace. That expertise is is needed by the folks who are in our cohorts at Flywheel. Donna, thank you for your time.

Thanks for joining us.

Absolutely. Thank you for having me. What an honor.

On the Fly! is produced by Joey Scarillo with music composed by Ben Hammer. Recorded at 1819 Innovation Hub in Cincinnati, Ohio, courtesy of the University of Cincinnati.