I remember having a chat with my friend Mayur about an Elevator Pitch sometime ago and i stumbled upon this interesting article on how to organize and formulate an effective elevator pitch

What is an elevator pitch?

An “Elevator Pitch” is a concise, carefully planned, and well-practiced description about your company that your mother should be able to understand in the time it would take to ride up an elevator.

Now how do you formulate a good elevator pitch? 

Problem-solution “hook”. Open your pitch by getting the investor’s attention with a hook. This is a statement or question that piques their interest to want to hear more. Good hooks succinctly define a real problem, and suggest the solution. For example, “I just patented a new cell-phone technology that will double battery life for half the cost. I need your help in getting it to market.”

About 150-225 words. Your pitch should be about 30-60 seconds (average elevator ride). Don’t think that you can just talk fast to cram 500 words into that time. It won’t work.

Obvious passion. Investors expect energy, conviction, and commitment from entrepreneurs. How do you expect them to get excited, if your startup sounds like a dull subject to you?

A request.  At the end of your pitch, you must ask for something. Ask for time to give a full presentation, or ask for a referral to someone who can help.

Simple and straight forward isn’t it? While some think that you don’t need to plan these things and you should go with the flow, I feel it’s always good to have this mapped out in your head so that you leave a good first impression. If you don’t have it planned, how much and how well can you cover your proposition over 60 seconds?

Source 

We hear about how our parents and the older generation stay in jobs for 20-30 years, some even retire in the job they first got when they first got into the job market. Those days are not gone but extremely rare don’t you think? People are consistently on the look out for a better job, better salary to basically progress and do better than they already are.

Now have you wondered why business people work so hard and sacrifices their savings, time and relationships for that promise of success which is not a given even with all the effort. Strange isn’t it? Why do it when you can be employed and earn that stable wage?

Here is one very interesting way to look at the whole thing

Regardless of whether you are self-employed, a traditional employee, or a business owner, you are in business for yourself. The primary distinction is who are your customers? For a typical employee, your “customer” is your boss. He or she is the one who is purchasing your services. However, if you own a business, you have many customers (or bosses).

Accordingly, many entrepreneurs feel it is inherently more risky to have a single boss than having many “bosses.” For example, if you own a thriving business where you can control costs, growth, and marketing, then a whole bunch of customers would have to effectively “fire” you before you were forced out of a “job.” A business owner’s sustenance is no longer determined by single person’s opinion or by shareholders who may not even know his or her name. This is why financial independence is so important to traditional employees: no amount of education or experience can guarantee that even the most talented and faithful workers won’t be unemployed by the end of business tomorrow.

Make sense ha?

It’s probably a good idea to re-evaluate how you look at your job and how you like to position yourself for the future, security is becoming a myth and to survive you need to adapt. Like it’s never to late, it’s never to EARLY to start.

May not make sense but hey, just what i think

I saw this on Niki‘s blog today, a short video about a lighthouse watcher who gave out some of his prized possessions to un-suspecting people who didn’t know him. Even if they had no value at first, the letters that he left them told an important story that told them the significant of their inheritances from the lighthouse watcher.

Powerful message, its easy to forget the little parts of life which has the biggest impact and to focus on the not so important parts which are the short term. 2012 is a nice start to realign the priorities and in the process to do our part in paying it forward.

Happy New Year

Watch the video 

I like to wish everyone a Happy New year 2012! Hope you had a awesome 2011 and the new  year will be filled with best of health, wealth and everything positive!

I was listening to a talk on BFM sometime last week on the history, legends, traditions and celebration of the Festival of Lights, Deepavali. It was a very insightful conversation giving a lot of info about the significance behind the festival and the way it is celebrated here in Malaysia and other parts of the world.

Growing up i celebrated the festival very differently as compared to the way it is celebrated today and for me, we have changed in the name of modernization . More of a convenient excuse for me.

Knowing why things are done in certain way definitely gives it more significant and creates a genuine need to preserve these practices before it gets lost and forgotten. I dont think there is a right or wrong way but merely preference of how you like to practise it.

Hopefully I can go back to basics and at least practise what i feel it’s the way I like to do it.

Happy Deepavali and check out the podcast below