I have spent the later half of September writing on how to raise capital for your business. I wrote about the timing of a pitch, ten rules to follow when making a pitch, and how to get an opportunity to pitch your idea. I would like to now give you some resources that will aid in putting together the specific content of a good investment pitch.

Remember each pitch should be tailored to your specific situation and to the individual investor. The length of time you have to make your pitch will vary from 30 seconds to 20 minutes. If this is a formal meeting to pitch your business then 20 minutes is a good length to aim for. Nonetheless, a rule of thumb is to be prepared for anything and know your stuff well enough to adapt to the situation at hand.

First stop on the resource list is to visit the Canadian Innovation Centre and download the What Should I Include in My Pitch? - Guide. This guide gives you a great outline to work from. You don’t have to include everything from this guide into your pitch, but be prepared to respond to questions in all of these areas.

If you’ve prepared everything in detail based on this first guide, you have probably created a pitch that will take two hours to deliver. Well, no investor will give you two hours of their time to listen to your idea. Check out this article, How to be Succinct in 10 Minutes. This article gives you a great framework to deliver your pitch in ten minutes or less. This also gives you a flexible way to deliver the pitch. For example you can use this framework to deliver a one or two minute introduction and then build in more details from there. Or you can deliver the ten minute version and then move into a question and answer period.

Here are a few more helpful websites:

9 Tips for Making 90 Seconds Count in an Investment Pitch – This article focuses on making an elevator pitch so not everything applies if you have more time. However, there are many helpful insights into the reasoning behind the content of a pitch.

The Perfect Pitch – This is another article covering a variety of information about making a pitch to investors.

Ultimately, what you include in your pitch to investors is up to you. One final tip, just as not everyone will invest in your business, not every investor makes a good partner.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 29th, 2007 at 12:31 am and is filed under Innovation Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.