Pitch

So you have a great idea for a start up and you want to try to get funding from an established venture capital firm. You have hired the private equity attorney who was referred to you by a trusted mentor as the go to private equity attorney on the Street, or Silicon Valley. And you think your mentor may be right, because low and behold, you have gotten the impossible hour long meeting with the private equity group.

Now you are a tangle of nerves. What are you going to do? The best advice I can give you is to spend some quality time working on your pitch. The way you pitch your idea to the venture capitalists, the more likely you will achieve success in getting them to fund your project.

Venture capitalists want to fund projects. They are looking for good deals. So know your product inside out. Ask all the what ifs before you go in for the pitch. Play devil's advocate with yourself and your partners. If you do have partners make sure everybody is on the same page and that they understand the product, market, channels of distribution, trouble shooting, etc.

The idea is to impress the venture capitalists so much that their enthusiam for your project gets the better of them. If you can't pitch the idea, you won't be able to convince and persuade the venture capitalist to take you on.

And the art of the pitch is applicable to scenarios that do not necessarily involve vc's. It could be a bank you are trying to persuade to give you a small business loan, or the SBA, or your uncle Mitch.

Or maybe you are pitching a potential client or customer. The rules are the same. Persuade, impress, and know your stuff inside and out. Make it so that their enthusiam for you and your project/product/services, gets the better of them and they have no other choice but to say YES.

Ideas

Ideas are like belly buttons. Every body has them. The question is, what do you do with your ideas? As a small business owner, hopefully you find a way to take your ideas and turn them into a lucrative franchise, or, maybe even, the next Google. Think about it: Sergey Brin and Larry Page were a couple of geeks till they took their brilliant idea (I believe it started with them writing a thesis at Standford) for organizing the world’s information, and ran all the way to the billionaires club with it. Now they own their own boeing 767 and are both listed on the Forbes List of Billionaires.

What is the price of an idea? The beauty about it is that ideas are priceless. They cost you zero dollars but could make you a gazillion. All you have to do is think them up. How hard can that be?

Ideas can come to you from all sources, places and people. Ideas can come in your dreams, from your soap lather as you shower in the morning, from the glass of wine that loosened you up over dinner, from the clouds. You don’t have to be in any special place to get really good ideas. Ideas have no sense of timing. They pop up all the time, sometimes even when you are busy doing really important things, wink wink.

Different people, including quantum physicists have different ideas of where ideas come from. Jack Foster, author of How to Get Ideas suggests that each person can actually program themselves to be more “idea prone.” He seems to think there is a science to getting ideas to flow. Whether his theory is right or wrong, it is probably true that every body has at least one brilliant idea in their lifetime. Those who become millionaires or, in Bill Gates’ case, billionaires, just seem to know when and how and what to do with it.

There is not one small business or big business that did not start with an idea. Nothing in the entire universe – even the creation of the universe itself – started without an idea. The Big Bang was an idea. Something, somewhere, thought it up. Kentucky Fried Chicken was an idea. The P.C. was an idea, so was the light bulb, jogging shoes and Victoria's Secret underwear. Every book that was ever written and published began with an idea. Microsoft was an idea. So was Starbucks. Every fashion show in Milan and Paris starts with an idea. Vogue Magazine was somebody’s idea and it wasn’t Anna Wintour’s. The International Monetary Fund was somebody’s idea. Video games were somebody’s idea. New York Sports Club, Disney and Liposuction – all ideas.

Probably no other business is more filled with ideas than Hollywood. Hollywood is literally an idea tank. People with ideas gravitate to Hollywood more than they do to Silicon Valley. Hey, Steve Jobs would be lucky if he got half the ideas that floats around Hollywood in a given day. Putting Brad Pitt and Angelina in a movie together. Who’s idea was that? The movie industry has spawned many derivative industries and companies, from production companies, to PR outfits, Studios to Cinemas, to MTV - all of which depends on other people's ideas to keep going.

If you are stomped about what kind of business you want to start, or how to take your business to the next level, maybe you need to get in touch with your idea lobe, that side of the brain that does the thinking. The trick seems to be not to censor yourself and your ideas. It seems to be that the more you can allow yourself to become like a kid, the more likely you are to come up with something brilliant.

Creativity

To be creative is to be like Edouard Manet, the French Impressionist of the late 19th Century. His was a style that was innovative, bold, transparent and visionary. He “broke new ground in representation and technique” and was both focused and flexible.

As a small business owner, these are qualities that will serve you well. Your first task is to figure out what your customers want then you’ve got to experiment, look to emerging trends as a guide, be willing to change to capitalize on the trends, and steadily build momentum towards making your vision manifest.

Being creative means using a certain calculus and “visionary leadership” to form strategy and to execute strategy using cutting edge methodologies rather than using a sort of haphazard approach, doing things willy nilly with no rhyme or reason just because it is the status quo. Creativity, therefore is not a euphemism for a lack of discipline. Nor is it an excuse for a totally laissez faire attitude. It is really a "juxtaposition of innovation and imitation." It is where “scandal meets triumph.” It is art.

So get that adrenaline pumping, be true to your values, mission and goals. Creativity, as Manet came to realize, is about purity, a willingness to boldly act on ideas and vision in such a way as to challenge pre-conceived ideas, and the old way of doing things, and to do so with a healthy degree of transparency. It is about risk, daring to “look for the grand light and grand shadow.”