How I turned my business around with a great pitch

Anthony Moorhouse founded risk and travel management group Dynamiq after he felt a desire to break up a market he believed had no viable competition. The company now turns over about $4.5 million per year, and Moorhouse says cost-cutting efforts have helped boost profits over 200%.

However, things weren’t always so easy. About 18 months into the business, Moorhouse was at a critical point and had trouble winning clients.

But in one 15-minute pitch to Accident and Health International head David Epper, Moorhouse brought in a deal to support over 190,000 individual clients. He says learning how to pitch effectively is a skill every entrepreneur should master.

How’s the business going now?

We’ve really grown up out of our start up roots into a pretty fast-growth phase over the past two years. We’ve put a lot of infrastructure in place so our systems can grow. It’s important we’re not a $10 million company with a $2 million structure.

So we’ve been professionalising our team, our sales and marketing processors, and our board of directors. We’re just making sure that we enough scope to grow.

How did this particular pitch come about?

That particular situation was about 18 months after the company started. I’d spent about 18 months trying to get deals, and we had been preparing for a long time. We really were looking to force opportunities and get out there, so that’s just what we did. I called up David Epper, just out of nowhere and organised a meeting.

What did you say?

I cold-called him, and described to him that we were doing a piece of work for a client of his. I took 15 minutes, presented my case very quickly and said what I could do for his whole client base, what I was already doing for that one particular company. He agreed, told me how much money he could put into the deal, and away we went.

Sounds simple. What made your approach so effective?

The focus was this – it was very much being about credibility and uniqueness. It was important that we appeared credible as a company, but to tell you the truth we didn’t really go too in-depth into the product. We needed to show him what value we brought to him, not why we thought we were so great. It was all about the value we could offer him in particular.

He was also a straight-talking entrepreneurial kind of guy, and I needed to pick that vibe up straight away. Once I knew that, I felt comfortable, and we were able to establish some type of chemistry between us. That’s extremely important.

Is there a “secret” to good pitching?

The pitch was all about how we could help them. Reading your audience from the get-go is very important. He didn’t have a lot of time, was all about action, so I angled the presentation to be quick and snappy without ever having met him before.

A completely different client might have wanted an hour long proposal, but my sense was that he wouldn’t appreciate something long-winded. It was all about focus. I needed to show him why he should bother using my services, I needed to show him the benefit. That’s the key to the pitch, he wouldn’t have used it if it didn’t make his life easier in some way.

How can small businesses find clients, and develop their pitching skills?

Really, it isn’t luck, it’s opportunity. Preparing plus opportunity. Getting those pitches done, in part, is all about getting out there in the first place. From an SME point of view, getting over that initial fear of failure is the hardest part.

If we had hesitated, and ran away, this huge opportunity would have been lost. Yes, sometimes there is fear in pitching to people because you don’t know them and it can be frightening, but you need to get over that fear of getting knocked back.

SMEs also need to focus on the simple things from a sales pitch point of view. Consider, what solution am I going to offer them, and how is it going to make their life, or business, simpler?