Summarize Seriously. Doesn’t quite have the ring of the romantic movie Love Actually, does it? But that shouldn’t tempt you to trivialize the issue that surfaced yesterday in a roomful of investors willing to plunk down anywhere from $5-100 million on some entrepreneurial business that interested them.
“Remember the 10-minute time limit for each presenting company,” the moderator of the event explained to the group of 22 hopeful CEOs prepared to win his or her share of the available funds. "We’ve hosted this event for several years. And the feedback from these investors seated around you is that they make up their minds in the first 3-4 minutes whether they’re interested or not. So the ten minutes we’ve allotted to tell your story is quite adequate.”
He paused to let the point sink in. There as a corporate advisor to my client, I nodded my “I told you so” to the team. Roger that. They were locked and loaded, ready for launch.
Evidently, many others were not.
Executive after executive of these small businesses stepped to the microphone and stumbled and stuttered their way through 4-6 minutes of their allotted ten before being able to clearly state what it is their company does. Many tried to start with how they got into the business. Some started by introducing their management team (important, of course, for a group of investors—but not for 3 minutes!). Some rambled on about how they came up with their logo, packaging design, recipe, or facilities. Several talked about differentiation. A few talked about how they’d tested their product—clinical data and analysis.
Only a handful—make that a newborn’s fist—summarized upfront ALL the key elements about their business that a group of investors would want to know.
Yet, I bet if you asked any one of these busy executives back on the job how important the ability to summarize is, they’d launch into a sermon about some pet peeve such as these:
So to develop the ability to summarize massive amounts of information well, seek out some good models. For starters, I suggest The Wall Street Journal’s “What’s News?” column.
(Readers, if you have other suggestions for great summarizers out there, please feel free to share them here.)
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