Mar 18 2008
Do Australians suck at pitching?
Apparently, by most accounts…yeah. Brad Howarth offers his reasons for thinking that we (they?) do in Australian Anthill - Why do Australians suck at pitching?. Its a good read, so head on over, but his main reaons are:
- We are not trained to present.
- We are shy.
- We do not do enough research on the audience.
- We forget what we are doing.
- We do not understand brevity.
- We have no idea what we are doing anyway.
Having been on the receiving end of several web entrepreneur pitches over the last 5 or so years, I can relate to all of his points. One particular example came to mind: This entrepreneur pretty much ticked every box above. He came in and insisted that we sit while he read prepared notes (no slides, no eye contact, no rapport), starting with a recounting of our company and where we were positioned in the market. At least he got most of his facts right ;-) I let him get a good two minutes into his shpiel before asking him to please get to the point. Poor guy.
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I think this is 100% correct, but probably because of a lack of practice rather than anything else. We don’t have the VC or other capital investment market that the US has. Our markets are also too small for anyone to make money producing research reports on. Look at the Australian recruitment industry for example, it is such a small world it isn’t funny!