The 5-minute pitch.

Writing it, and pitching it in a lift, or anywhere else.

Sometimes, after your 5-10 pages are written in fire, edited in coal, and solidified with amber, your idea has up and run off with another. So, tracking the pathway to speed, and social innovation - tech, marketing & importantly communications - is crucial to getting your ideas up, about and flying out to above and beyond the iCloud.

As a trial-by-fire, advertising freak of a twenty-something media addict, data sometimes predicates most of the things we stand - or have stood for - no one is going to read your BIO, that 4-page ancient thing called the CV or bother to take up 20 minutes fiddling about with a website that scrolls to 12-15 other links and pages or platforms.

I have pitched high and low, for clients, in front of both massive (client & board meetings) audiences as well as just for revalidas (school/training campaigns) - and both have given me the jitters - and i have always shown five minutes late for (can’t be helped, might be genetically caffeine-impaired for life thereby needing the eternal prescription for the coffee drip). Sometimes, there are things that could take up more space than the 2-page journalist q’s: WHAT, WHY, HOW, HUH?

So to make sure there is some sense in the mentor-mentee a tailoring is always, to some degree, needed and called for. Get your concepts lined up, ready and ingested by heart - and then speak. The formats are secondary, but the gist must always appear: with or without your mac remote in hand, or even if the projector is down, technical dysfunction is NOT an excuse. Your audience is mostly the investor, the people holding product, business & team consult in charge of the communications. So clarity is number one.

WHAT: Idea in 3 lines is standard to all types of audience.

WHY: Where did that come from (a 2-second spit off of where you originated that idea - to make sure investor does not reminisce another’s work)

HOW: Is that on FaceBook? Make this 1-second mention brief, so the fine line of execution and brevity of intellectual property is still kept in a silent NDA premise. You are also checking the audience/ investors out and don’t want the kitchen sink to drain your potential patent.

HUH: When identifying the quizzical look is somehow crucial to adjustment, or retreat in the presentation - if you’ve lost the audience, there IS a need to rinse & repeat - but crucially where you need to track back, and how long ago have they switched you off?

So with these in mind, i leave a copy of my 5-minute Deck on SlideShare for a record of presenting - which i think most benefits the tech-based Founders as well as those who are not used to taking to the white space of 360-degree presentations. Practise, practise, practise. After a few of these, you might be able to get enough material to present yourself, your awesome idea, and actually enjoy the process at TEDx or some other sharing space in your community.