Elevator Speeches That Get Attention!

I recently attended a train the trainer session for Kauffman Foundation’s FastTrac new business training programs. To start off the day, one of the first exercises was to stand and give your elevator speech to the group.

The idea behind an elevator speech is that if you get on an elevator with someone, and they ask “What do your do?” you should have a one or two sentence speech ready that you can deliver during a brief elevator ride that clearly and concisely describes your business.

There were probably 100 people in the room, all experienced business trainers and facilitators. Everyone provided their elevator speech. I remember only three.

One gentleman stood up and said he owned the largest organic cattle ranch in Texas. While this actually had nothing to do with small business development, it was a great opening line. It got everyone's attention. He then followed it up with his role as a business trainer, which unfortunately was much less memorable.

A second gentleman stood up and told everyone he ran a smoke detector testing company. His company would come to your house and push the little red button on your smoke detector to verify it was working. This was certainly an attention getter. Many people had a similar reaction - “What?” It turns out, that this particular gentleman actually ran a marketing business. He used this opening line about smoke detector testing to get you to pay attention to the true pitch about his marketing business.

A third gentleman stood up and told everyone he “Helped business owners retire as millionaires.” That's all he said. The next logical question for most of the people in the room was, “Okay now tell me how you do that.”

Getting to “Okay now tell me how you do that,” is the purpose of an elevator speech. You have a very, very limited amount of time to get someone's attention and you want to tell them what you do in such a way that they will ask for more information.

By doing so, you have turned a brief conversation to a more in-depth discussion of what you do, how you do it, and perhaps what you can do for them.

The elevator speech that I use is “I help people create profitable businesses.”

I provide this one sentence, and then say no more. This gives a person the opportunity to ask me the follow-up question – “How do you do that?”

This opens the door to explain how we work with businesses and individual entrepreneurs understand finance and the financial side of their business; how we can help them plan the business; and ultimately how we can help them turn their ideas into a viable business.

A great elevator speech is short, concise, and leads to the follow-up question "How do you do that?"

Start Up Cash

With the recession still lingering and the unemployment rate still between 9% and 10% in many places, starting a business of your own is an alternative that more and more people are considering.

A few weeks back, Wall Street Journal published an article on "Startups on a Shoestring," highlighting entrepreneurs who had started businesses with as little as $40.

I have always stressed that having enough cash is one of the keys to making a business work. Its really tough to start up a business on shoestring. More typically, its going to cost between $50,000 and $100,000 to start a business. That's why understanding finance and cash flow is so critical to managing a business

Making Things or Making Money

The events of the last few weeks have me constantly reminded of a cartoon I saw many years ago.

In the cartoon, a professor is standing in front of a group of students in what looks like a business school class. The professor starts off the class by saying “Today we are not going to learn about making money. Rather, today we’re going to learn about making things.” The next frame shows a look of shock on the students in the back of the room. One student says to the other, “But I didn’t come here to learn about making things, I came here to learn about making money.” The other student replies, “I know, we can sue the school, we can make some money that way.”

The reason I’m reminded of this cartoon is the current discussion regarding a bailout of America’s automobile industry.

That seems to be the fight today. Are we interested in making things, or are we only interested in making money?

The one hand, there seems to be lots of money to be given to those who need it to help us make money. As I write this, hundreds of billions of dollars have been given to the likes of Citicorp, Bank of America, AIG, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These institutions are said to be too big to fail, and are said to be the key to keeping the credit flowing that keeps the housing market moving and facilitates business and consumer spending.

On the other hand, there seems to be a shortage of money available for those who make things. While you can argue the merits of lending money to GM and Chrysler because of a perception that the products are not competitive, or that they are too overleveraged, or too indebted to their pension funds, you cannot argue with the profound impact that these companies, and companies like them, have had on America’s prosperity.

These companies historically have taken raw materials and transformed these materials into valuable consumer products that have altered the lifestyle of the entire continent. These companies made their mark not by the manipulation of financial assumptions, but by engineering and process know how.

They have also done this while paying a decent wage to their workers, a wage that allowed those workers to buy homes and move into the middle class.

America developed into an advanced society not through financial wizardry, but through the ingenuity of a few and the hard work of many. If we are going to continue to be an advanced society, it seems that we will also need to focus on making things rather than just on making money.