This post is about one of my 45-second pitches at my BNI Chapter, BNI City Business. You can read the introduction to this collection here.
Still in lockdown, I relaunched my flegling Exit Planning practice – at least for BNI – as Business Buy/Sell Coach. Terms like Exit Planning Advisor and M&A Advisor didn’t have a lot of traction with my (BNI) audience. This was an attempt to simplify my messaging.
The message of the pitch was about there being a right way and a wrong way to prepare a business for sale, so the above meme dealing with way toilet paper should sit on the toilet roll holder seemed appropriate. This was my first attempt at using the meme format on my slide.
You will find hundreds of memes in this format online, covering pretty much any conceivable yes/no posiiton.
We had also had a chapter discussion the week before about minimum information on our slides. We were getting a good number of visitors at our online meetings. At in-person meetings, we circulate a box with all members’ business cards so that visitors can get the contact details of any member they wanted to follow up with. This, of course, doesn’t happen online. It was suggested we all add at least our name, email, and contact number to our slides. I did; many in the chapter did not.
I also dropped the TEQ branding. It was cumbersome and basically meaningless on the slides. I focused my BNI pitch on me as the brand.
This was also the start of intentionally creating weekly slides, which I pretty much did every week thereafter.
Our chapter meets every week on Friday mornings. I created the next slide on Friday after the chapter meeting, giving me a week to practise and tweak the message. This also resulted in much better discipline for me in designing and creating the slide, rather than leaving it to the last moment. I would generally upload the slide on Thursday afternoon.
The Right Way…
Neither the slide nor my presentation message spelt out the right way to buy or sell a business. As a general rule, a BNI pitch is not intended to educate the chapter members. In 45-seconds, the pitch is intended as a brand statement, and conveying what a suitable customer looks like (or the challenges they face) to generate referrals.
Preparing a business for sale and advising on buying a business are core practice areas at TEQ.