Create you Pitch Community?

We spent two years researching the most progressive practices in entrepreneurial engagement. What we discovered was a trend, a pattern, a set of best practices the finest institutions used to accelerate entrepreneurial success. This revelation, helped us develop an application designed to help organize highly engaging and interactive pitch competitions.

In the book, Traction author Gabriel Weinberg wrote, "Community building is the process of investing in the connections among your users, fostering those relationships and helping them bring more people into your circle." Successful companies and organizations we surveyed not only invested time and resources in entrepreneurs but played particular attention to the environment and the engagement process, building not just entrepreneurial programs but entrepreneurial communities.

One great entrepreneurial engagement activity and a surprisingly highly effective community building strategy is a pitch competition. Pitch competitions help entrepreneurs discover their "Why". "If the leader of the organization can't clearly articulate why the organization exists in terms beyond its products or services, then how does he expect the employees to know why to come to work?"(Simon Sinek). By every one of our metrics learning how to pitch was one of the most useful business skills entrepreneurs learned. It comprises the most important and influential aspects of a business an entrepreneur needs to effectively articulate to those who care. Most importantly, pitch competitions help entrepreneurs raise the funds necessary to continue on their journey.

 

sample pitch network

Despite the competitive nature of pitch competitions, entrepreneurs learn quickly that they are competing against themselves and every action to improve their pitch helps to improve their ability to inspire action and uncover their true value. Furthermore, great entrepreneurial organizations consistently engaged entrepreneurs prior to pitch competition events. Growing their community, affording entrepreneurs the chance to meet and engage each other. In such communities, it was not uncommon for entrepreneurs to volunteer their services to other companies. Pitching in to ensure that another company would ultimately succeed. This action is commonly called crowdsourcing and successful communities we surveyed did this all the time.

When we think of the great organizations that engage entrepreneurs we often believe that their success is due to some magical formula. However, successful organizations we surveyed did two things very well, they grew very rich entrepreneurial communities that offered entrepreneurs the support and mentorship they needed to succeed. Secondly, and most importantly they engaged them in pitch competitions that celebrated the culmination of their learning and their work and the successful articulation of their mission and vision.

With this information in mind, we crafted the perfect application that financially rewards organizations for organizing pitch competitions and funds to grow and engage entrepreneurial communities, we call it Uni-Five.

To schedule, a free demo click here.