No matter what variety of business you are starting, you wish some money. Even if you bootstrap, you continue to need to lift enough to survive and probably a small amount for operations. Given that the majority startups take several years to achieve profitability, budget for the 4 to 5 years during which you have to external sources of capital.
Business plan competitions are a great option to raise the vital funds. Here are some practical suggestions that helped me raise a few hundred dollars in a giveaway a few weeks ago. To be honest, it wasn’t nice. But the lessons I learned were value greater than money.
Have a clear marketing strategy
This is harder than it sounds because it’s good to have the option to display that you just have a plan, but also connect with judges who might not be familiar with your industry. I thought my plan was clear enough, but it definitely left some unanswered questions for the panel reviewing it. Here are some comments (anonymous) from one of the jurors:
“It was a bit of a weird reading schedule. It is a professional and quite comprehensive plan, according to what I have just learned from reading, and it seems to be aimed at a lifestyle business/passive income generator. Putting it in those terms, I think it sounds great. The world doesn’t need another weather website or app, but it looks like you’ve built something that can generate traffic at a relatively low cost and get some advertising revenue from it. While I don’t think that’s what this plan competition is usually about, judging it on its own terms, I think it’s a good plan. My life advice is to just transfer/invest the money from this business while working. The big risk I see, which you can probably mitigate, is that you’ll run into issues with the sites you’re pulling data from, or get pushed out in the free search space. Overall: a solid plan, although in some respects unambitious.”
Michigan Entrepreneurs: Sign up for our day of presentations and panels
The principal parts of a solid (and ambitious) plan
The above review was helpful. It concluded that the plan was specific enough to work, but not earth-shattering or compelling enough to be value pursuing full-time.
My plan included the usual stuff you would find in solid marketing strategy. There was a summary, a part dedicated to opportunities, implementation, information about the company and the financial statement. The execution section included marketing/sales, operations, and necessary milestones.
Technically, the plan was positive. All the reviews reflected this. The biggest problem was the insufficient presentation of future prospects. I was so absorbed in explaining the technical details of why it will work in the short term that I completely forgot to stipulate or explain long-term plans.
It’s not that I don’t have them, I just left it out of the plan because it didn’t seem necessary to me yet. Make sure you clearly communicate what you should build for the long run. Even if this vision changes in three or 4 years, having it now shows that you just have the ambition to build something that may last.
Illustrate people’s pain points
There are several the reason why I imagine the weather website I created will probably be successful. The only problem is that I’ve done a terrible job of explaining why people might want this. The focus of the plan (and my live presentation) was how much Google and other search engine algorithms would really like the site.
Whether the other competitors I faced were promoting B2B or B2C businesses, all of them focused heavily on describing how their firms would alleviate pain for individuals. This took the type of a description of unmet needs and other serious problems that individuals faced.
Explaining the problem and how your organization will solve it might be the most significant a part of your corporation plan. But it’s much more necessary to elucidate how your organization alleviates people’s pain.
If I could go back and do it again, I would focus on how my site uses text ads as an alternative of the display network and how much more people would really like it. Google AdSense tends to flood users with full-page ads as an alternative of website content (something I’ve heard a lot of complaints about).
The perfect deck is history, science and art
Have a good pitch deck
I created the presentation routinely using the same software I used to create the plan. As for me, it looked okay. Until I saw everyone else.
Basically, the software took the most significant parts of your corporation plan and condensed them into about two pages.
What everyone else did higher than me was create PowerPoint presentations by hand. Even though all of us showed roughly the same information, mine showed all at once and everyone else showed their sections one by one.
Doing so not only made the presentation easier, but allowed the jurors to focus on one thing at a time fairly than being overwhelmed by the whole lot at once.
Take this into account when planning your offer.
How to appear to be a shark tank winner
Practice your speech… a lot
I think many founders (myself included) have a really clear picture of why and how their business will ultimately grow into something big. However, as I learned, condensing this into a smooth tone that lasts only a few minutes might be difficult.
The competition I entered had a 10-minute deadline, so it wasn’t just quick elevator throws. We had to elucidate a lot about our business, but let’s watch out to not delve too deeply into one area and neglect others.
I got too deep into a lot of things related to SEO and ended up missing some really necessary details. As much as I hate to confess it, one of the judges even needed to ask me how the site would make money.
You have to practice your tone until you know it like the back of your hand. When I walked as much as do my thing, I had a piece of paper that I planned to read. This was because I kept interjecting into technical topics during practice.
Doing this worked just in addition to a regular phone call. The excellent news was that I went first, so I didn’t have to be too nervous about hearing all the good, well-rehearsed tones beforehand.
Practice yours.
Final thoughts
If you should start a business, you wish money. There are no two ways about it. Entering and winning a startup competition is a great option to start raising your first few thousand dollars to place towards your recent company. Your probabilities of success will probably be high if you have a clear and detailed marketing strategy, highlight the right problem points, have a good set of presentations, and practice your presentation until you are blue in the face.