Wayne’s Food Hacks: How To Pitch Good Food At The Shark Tank

EATATORIAL:

PITCHING MEANS SWITCHING.

TIME TO SWITCH GEARS!

Good Food organizations need to get as good at asking for help as giving help. It’s the only way that Good Food charities, not-for-profits, and trying-to-be-for-profits can help more people help themselves.

The challenge is that asking for help requires a different mindset and a different set of skills than most Good Fooders are used to.

The obstacle is not what you think—that you don’t feel comfortable asking for help. The real obstacle is that you haven’t managed your mindset or skillset.

Don’t blame this on your personality. Blame your lack of training.

The lack of training in the Good Food sector is a result of an unspoken public policy to only incentivize and upskill people in ways that – pardon me being blunt and rude — make money for Big Food.  As a result, with the exception of post-secondary courses on fundraising, there are no food courses on how to campaign for help in promoting Good Food. 
   


In my experience, when we ask for help, it’s almost always in the name of helping people in need.

Before we learn to pitch, we need to gear up our minds to tell donors or investors the value of their donation – to themselves as well as to the people we help.

To be honest, I don’t really want the money given in the name of help. As often as not, money given to help is money given out of pity. We want money given in hope and expectation that we can enable and support people to do and be their best.

And I want donors and investors to believe they will be beneficiaries of their own donation. They are not giving their money away. They are investing in their own vision of what people can achieve. They are investing in karma – that the goodness they share will come back to them through the “virtuous circle” of a balanced economy. Which science (see here and here) proves is true for individuals. Social science even proves (here and footnote 2, here) that wealthy people as a group are healthier when the poor are better off. Fundraisers may not want to say “this is helping you more than it helps me,” but they can say your contribution will produce value for many.

Aside from mindset, we need to learn distinctive skills to raise money.  They are summarized in already-published tip sheets just below, and in tips that two of my friends share below that.

As often as not, pitching is just like anything else people think they don’t like to do  and can’t do – whether it’s cooking, or yoga, or dancing, or writing: they never learned the skill to do something well and joyfully, and think the fault is their own personal deficiencies, and not a mere lack of skills, all of which are teachable.

So get out there and pitch in!!
 

“Above all, a query letter is a sales pitch and it is the single most important page an unpublished writer will ever write. It’s the first impression and will either open the door or close it. It’s that important, so don’t mess it up. Mine took 17 drafts and two weeks to write.”

— Nicholas Sparks

Slow Pitch

Tony Humble is president of Prosperium, a longtime entrepreneur in the “triple bottom line” business sector, and a seasoned fundraiser. When I asked the secret to a strong pitch for financial support, his comeback was lightning quick.

 “Lead with the payback – how quickly will it pay back, what is the rate of return, what’s your gameplan for dealing with hidden or unknown risks, which are always an issue with innovation.”

That’s a quick interview, I said to myself.

How do you know when to make such a strong pitch, I asked. He fired back just as quickly. “Don’t jump the gun,” he said. “That’s the main thing. Otherwise, you’re yelling through a closed door.”

Timely advice on how to spend your time – nine-tenths preparing, one-tenth delivering.

“You really have to do your homework,” he says. “You have to know where you have common ground and what the hot buttons are,” he says.  “You need a warm introduction before you pitch. You need to know the unique value proposition they’re looking for.”

You need a unique value proposition in the ballpark of what they’re looking for.

In other words, a good pitch is based on more listening than talking. Humble indeed.

A good pitch needs to check off the boxes quickly. But the preparation for the pitch is slow.

“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation… We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”

— Will Durant on Aristotle

 Find the Pitching Mound

Steve Peck is the founder and president of Toronto-based Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, which helped kickstart today’s global green infrastructure movements.

Peck promotes soft plant-based building materials in a hardhat industry known for cement and steel. The construction biz doesn’t have a softball league where he could learn to pitch ideas and ideals. He started off with hardball.

Peck’s personal version of green infrastructure includes urban agriculture. He wants food plants on the list of plants that offset heat waves, soak up stormwater, or create greenspace. By adding edible landscaping to the equation, growing food doubles the benefits of green infrastructure.

That strategy for enhancing the value of green infrastructure puts Peck in the corner of the food movement.

Unlike most food organizations that set out to improve public sector services, Peck’s construction industry focus means that he deals with private sector companies that have a keen eye for turning their work into a money maker.

“If you don’t want to live cap in hand all the time, asking for grants and donations, you have to find another way to get people to support your work,” he says.

Peck found his way by finding common ground with one particular kind of business. 

“Some companies work at being restorative and regenerative – people in energy efficiency, renewable energy, and so on – and some industries make easy money by being destructive, and some companies straddle the line. If you want to make a change, you have to strengthen the businesses that are about restoration and regeneration.”

That’s how Peck found his pitching mound.  

Peck funds his work by charging for conferences, training courses and publications that help restorative companies master the technical side of their craft. He also offers them an opportunity to market themselves at industry conferences and in industry publications, which became Job 1 for Green Roofs for Healthy Cities.

“The key to making a pitch is to know the needs of the people you’re trying to reach,” he says. “You have to know how to add value, and explain how you add value.”

He adds value with pitches that provide a competitive advantage to regenerators.

But first, he had to find his pitcher’s mound.
 

“Asking for money is better over coffee than over a computer.”
— Jeff Henderson

Request for Action