prepare to fail ” “
If you fail to prepare,
O n April 9th, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Cornwall & SDG Counties Tourism Summit hosted in Cornwall, Ontario, where I had the opportunity to share our FanSaves partnership with Explore Cornwall and the SDG Counties with attendees. I had a twenty-minute speaking slot with an additional ten minutes allocated for audience questions. I had a couple weeks’ notice that I would be speaking, so I had plenty of time to prepare my slide deck and the message I had planned to convey. In the two days leading up to the event, I spent probably a couple of hours making some minor edits to the deck and formulating some main points that I wanted to drive home to the audience. On the morning of the event, I woke up a little early and spent about another 20 minutes flipping through the slides and another 5 minutes or so once I got to the event. Before my name was called to the stage, I was cool, calm, and collected and ended up delivering a great presentation that I really felt captured my personality, humor, and credibility on the subject. I received great feedback from attendees and organizers throughout the rest of the event and afterwards and left feeling like I had accomplished the goal I set out to. But this result wasn’t always the case for me, and thinking back on my early days of public speaking and pitching was the inspiration for this column. Back in 2017, my Co-Founder Shannon and I had just recently launched our new tech startup, and one of the ways we had learned that we could promote our
business and potentially win cash prizes to fund our development was through pitching. If you’re not familiar with pitching or pitch competitions, they are events often hosted by a startup organization or community with the goal of giving founders and entrepreneurs an opportunity to pitch their business or ideas against other businesses, with the winners or most viable ideas receiving prizes that vary from event to event. In 2019, we heard about this pitch competition in Ottawa being hosted by
Startup Ottawa in affiliation with Startup Canada. We applied, and to our delight, were one of twenty businesses selected to pitch. At this competition, we had five minutes to pitch our business, and because it was our first one, we decided to do it together. Being a sports tech company, we had these giant blowup soccer, basketball, and baseball balloon-type props we had purchased at Walmart that we incorporated into our pitch and wore matching branded hoodies. We spent days practicing and refining our pitch, our lines, and our delivery. On the
way to the event, we practiced our lines the whole way there as well as beforehand when we got to the venue. We were informed that we would be the nineteenth company to pitch, which meant we had a little over an hour and a half, whereby I continued to practice my lines in my head while listening to all the other pitches before it was our turn. When it was our turn to pitch, we got up on stage only to find that one of the microphones wasn’t working, which caused a couple-minute delay before we
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INNOVATION • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE 105
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