You Know What Your Company Does. Can You Explain It in 30 Seconds?
If not, you’re in trouble. Here’s how to perfect your pitch: A business lesson in the form of a screenplay.
Published July 2007
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COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLE[FADE IN]
EXTERIOR--A bright-blue, cloudless sky on a spring morning in Austin. An office park, populated with identical brown buildings interspersed with grassy areas and trees.
INTERIOR--A small conference room. At one end stands a whiteboard with a screen pulled down in front of it. Seated near the head of the table is DAVE YEWMAN, co-owner of Elevator Speech, a consulting firm based in Austin and Portland, Oregon, that specializes in media and presentation training--specifically in helping clients craft pithy 30-second descriptions of their companies. According to Yewman, executives who can't, in half a minute, clearly explain what they do and why anyone should care miss out--on sales, funding, partnerships, and more opportunities. His firm uses video to dramatically show clients how bad they often are at explaining their businesses.
Across the table, looking at a silver Mac laptop and fiddling with portable speakers, is Yewman's business partner, ANDY CRAIG, head clean-shaven, wearing a pressed lavender shirt. A week earlier, Craig spent a day with a video camera trained on eight executives of uControl, an Austin-based home security start-up, asking each of them a simple question: "What does your company do?" He and Yewman then spent several days watching the tapes and taking notes. They're about to deliver the results to JIM JOHNSON, uControl's CEO, who sits at the other end of the conference table. He looks a little nervous. His company, which is 18 months old and has 18 employees, is competing for contracts with the nation's largest cable and phone companies, and Johnson needs any edge he can get. Seated next to him is JASON DOMANGUE, uControl's director of marketing. His pen is poised and he is ready to take notes.
ANDY [Stands up behind his chair to lead things off] Have any of you ever read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell?
JIM It's in my closet, about to be read.
ANDY [Smiles sympathetically] I have a lot of those, too. That book is about first impressions. That's actually what we are talking about when we talk about an elevator speech: first impressions and the power of first impressions to your business.
DAVE What we are concerned with is that first 20 to 30 seconds. If you are coming out with a whole bunch of gobbledygook, no matter how well you say it, people are going to go, what the hell does that mean?
[JASON nods. JIM looks impassive.]
DAVE I'd like to begin by pumping you guys up a little bit. What we're going to do first is show you the worst elevator speech ever. It was caught on national TV.
[Everyone in the room chuckles. ANDY points his remote control at the computer.]
[CUT TO: Screen in front of the room, where 60 Minutes correspondent BOB SIMON stands, head cocked skeptically, next to a young guy with a dark suit and spiky hair. It is JEFF DACHIS, who then owned an e-business consultancy called Razorfish.]
BOB SIMON So, what do you do?
JEFF DACHIS We've asked our clients to recontextualize their business. We've recontextualized what it is to be in the services business.
SIMON There are many people such as myself who have trouble with the word recontextualize. Tell me what you do. In English.
DACHIS We provide services to companies to help them win.
SIMON But so do trucking firms…
DACHIS Absolutely, absolutely, and our talent is to do a certain thing while trucking firms do…
SIMON [interrupting] But what is it you do?
DACHIS We radically transform business to invent and reinvent them.
SIMON That's still very vague.
[CUT TO:]
ANDY [Standing at the head of the table, shaking his head] So let's just get past the fact that they made up a word. I've looked up recontextualize a million times in a million places and it's just not a real word. So that's the first problem. The second problem is that Simon gave them several kicks at the can. Now, I don't know about you, but none of my potential customers would give me all of those chances, and say, "I still don't understand." Recontextualizing, radically recontextualizing, helping companies win. What does that mean? It is not clear at all what they do.
