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.

This week started with the message, and then I created the image based on a favourite joke.

The message was around growth through acquisition, hence the Buy-A-Business Coach label. There is another tenuous link between the joke and the message, but it worked in my head.

The funniest part of the joke is the totally unexpected role of the tomatoes in the punchline. In telling the joke previously (outside of BNI), I found people often didn’t get the joke because they naturally heard ‘farmer’ instead of ‘tomato’ in the punchline. It turns out that even when written down, an audince can miss the joke that it is the tomatoes giving the reply. This fell quite flat in the room.

It is important I guess to reiterate that I don’t read – or even in most cases refer to – the joke. I focus on the message. By this stage, most chapter members were anticipating my joke slides.