A message to our Sydney-based startup friends. Pollenizer is sponsoring Coming to America event, now on Thursday, October 15, 2009 from 10:30 AM – 12:30 PM.

Rich venture environments exist where there is a pool of successful entrepreneurs re-investing back into the kind of businesses that they understand. The guys at Mitchellake are a unique bridge between Australia and the US and they have pulled together a terrific panel of US-based Aussies who have ‘made it’ and now want to share the love back to the Australian community.

If you are ready, this is a great opportunity to pitch your business to a switched-on panel of investors and connectors and learn how to tune your story to the people that live and work on the other side of the ocean.

If you are a startup, ML are offering student pricing for you.

See you there!

However, these executive summaries have varied from average to amazing, and average just isn’t good enough. So to help these entrepreneurs out I have shared with them an executive summary template. It’s a template we use at Pollenizer to help our clients raise funds and for our own projects. It’s clinically proven in real-world testing.

Instead of giving it out one-on-one, I thought: why not give it out to the world? Very happy to.

Download The Pollenizer Executive Summary Template for Startup Capital Raising

Updated – May 2009

Now, this is only our base template and you will need to customise it, perhaps a lot. Plus, you should do what we do and get a designer to make it look pretty. But the bones are all here and they have good structure.

Some things to remember about executive summaries;

1. The person you’re giving them to may have seen lots of them before, possibly hundreds. They know what they are looking for and you’d better give it to them. This also means you can’t BS them. Chances are, they know more than you do.
2. The investors have very little time (they’re the ones with the money to blow on hats) which is why ours are never longer than one page. It should also read like a newspaper. Give them a decent heading so they know what to read first and make sure it’s hot, so they keep reading.
3. The objective of the executive summary is to secure a meeting. It’s not to get a cheque. It’s a promotional tool. Get them excited. Whet their appetites for more and make them want to call you.
4. Be open. Tell them everything. It’s going to come out in the wash anyway. And everything is negotiable later.

There is plenty of good reading on executive summaries for raising capital.

1. Guy Kawasaki and the Art of the Executive Summary
2. More links here

There is no one best way to do a great executive summary, but hopefully this template can give you a good start. If you have your own ideas, feedback on how we can improve it, please let us know.

Get it done!

PS: I have to shout out a big thanks to DK from Zapr for introducing me to the discipline of writing one page summaries for all occasions. DK was brutal with content, getting the messages down so they were so short, simple and clear but holding onto the excitement and passion of the business and its founders.

Whilst having a sushi/beer dinner with Atari Boy last night, we were talking about how sometimes you have an idea, flesh it out, then as you start telling people, it starts whittling down and dying on the vine.

Don’t get me (us) wrong, the feedback is great, but we realised that we wanted the feedback at different times.

There is lessons here for pitchers and pitchees.

For the pitcher

Try and pre-frame, which means establishing a boundary by which you want the pitchee to take your pitch. If you don’t pre-frame you’re probably going to get the devils advocate (or as Cris and I worked it out to be, the 1,000 demons that eat away enthusiasm and creativity).

You pre-frame by telling them what you want and what you don’t want.

For example;

“OK, so I’m going to tell you this idea that kept me up last night. There is 100 challenges and 1,000 questions, but for now, I really want to just explore how big it is and how great it could be. So try not to look for ways that it couldn’t work, let’s see if we can find out how it could work.”

Ask them to leave their demons at the door.

For the Pitchee, if you can, try not to start thinking about what is wrong. Stay on what is right first. Help them out. You know how hard it is on the otherside of the table. You know that it’s not easy coming up with something new that is solid.

Sentences to avoid as a pitchee;

“Hmmm, have you had a look at __________ ?” – unless there is an exact competitor, but even then, it would be better to say “______ is doing something similar – so there must be a market there!”

“Yeah, but don’t you think that ______________?” – try and build on it for now, not knock it down.

“That’s going to be hard.” – derrr! Of course it’s going to be hard. If it were soft it would be tofu. If it’s big, exciting and a worthy challenge then who cares how hard it is, you’ll get through it.

* Notice how I pre-framed this blog post. Did it work?