I’ve spent the last 6 days on a mad mission in the #pitchtorich competition, which, in case you missed it, was to win a chance to pitch to Richard Branson. The winner in each of 3 categories gets a cash injection plus lots of other support. Nice eh!
I didn’t make the top 50, so he may never get to see my fabulous pitch 🙂 But I’m so glad I did it and this is what I learnt…
What would you do if your business was given £50,000? I’m a single mum and I have been running a business from my home now for 4 years. I have growth and development plans but it’s always been about organic growth. Taking the time to think what I would actually do with my business if I got £50,000 to spend on it was just brilliant.
If you want to know, then watch my 90 second highly professional and polished pitch video.
If you want to win you have to get out your comfort zone. In the first 2 days I made a half hearted attempt to get votes then I had my monthly thinking walk and decided that if I want this I have to really go for it and that meant contacting a lot of people and asking for help, and then reminding them, even at the risk of being annoying!
Networking works! We are often too busy for networking. We have 500+ connections on LinkedIn, thousands of followers on twitter, but how many of them do we actually talk to? Asking people to vote involved reconnecting with lots of people I haven’t spoken to for far too long and it was good.
When you talk to people good stuff happens, so you win either way. 250 people have watched my pitch video which means 250 people know more about me now than they did last week and I got lots of great encouragement . How good is that.
It’s can be surprising who gets behind you – and who doesn’t. People that are quietly in my life shared my post on their Facebook page or tweeted it for me without being asked. I have noticed them differently now and will put some good energy their way (you know who you are so thank you xx).
How quickly a habit develops. Every morning for the last few days the first thing I have don, whilst making breakfast, is check my voting figures. Today I didn’t have to do that and I missed it! If only I could develop a morning yoga routine habit as quickly.
You get to meet great new people. As a result of taking part I met some new people on twitter and I really like what they do.
Some people don’t play nice. Of course this attracted a whole range of businesses with a whole range of behaviours, including people who got in on the act by selling votes! When the website went down on the last day it was interesting to see some of the tweets. How to win friends and influence people it was not. Luckily for me I had done a meditation course the week before so I was all Zen like 🙂
Some people think they are owed a win. I was late to the party and like many others thought the closing date was May 5th when that was in fact the date for votes closing. I didn’t attend the road show and I left myself short of time to get votes. All down to me. But some people decided that not being shortlisted was not fair. If there is one thing that I know it’s that people that survive as an entrepreneur take responsibility for their own decisions
And finally
When you run a competition make sure everything is fit for purpose. The Virgin website couldn’t handle the traffic and left people very frustrated (all over twitter) which is not a good advert for them.
I didn’t expect to win as I was a late arrival (although I would have loved to of course) but the whole experience has opened my mind up to new possibilities and I’m delighted I took part.
Will I do it again next year? Lets see.
If you would like to talk to Jane please contact her on jane@janebinnion.com