Entrepreneurial

Stuck in an elevator with a well-known investor, but not sure how to make the most of your two minute ride?

Becky Reuber, a professor of strategic management at Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, has a few tips on how to craft an effective elevator pitch.

Here are Reuber’s four main points you need to get across to get investor attention:

1. What is your product/service?

Don’t launch into a technical explanation of how your product works, said Reuber. Keep it concise and to the point. For example: I make a tool that allows carpenters to hammer nails in hard to reach places.

2. Why are buyers going to buy it?

“The number one concern that people are going to be interested in is, do you have a compelling value proposition for a target market that you understand,” said Reuber.

“So you’ve been laid off. That sucks. But it doesn’t have to.” Those are the first words of encouragement offered up to visitors upon landing at the website for The Runway Project, a new venture that helps recently laid-off individuals start their own companies. Call it small-business networking, recession-style.

The project’s more than just a virtual affair, though. Since launching the group in March, founder Tony Bacigalupo and his affiliates have been busy hosting free get-togethers in New York City for would-be entrepreneurs on everything from the mechanics of starting a business to tips on building a personal brand. Another upcoming session promises a crash course on bookkeeping for startups.

The meetings are also a forum for brainstorming with other like-minded people and small-business experts. “Insanely helpful! Having a group of people to brainstorm with is priceless,” wrote one woman, who attended an April session, in a comment on the group’s website. And other comments suggest some are eager to get branches up and running in other U.S. cities, too.

You know something has buzz when it makes the leap from noun to verb. Like Google before it, Twitter — a social networking site that lets users follow and communicate with each other via 140 character messages, known as “tweets” — is raising the eyebrows from the big business gurus at Starbucks to small businesses like the local bakery.

Can 140 characters revolutionize your business?  If that possibility isn’t already on the mind of every marketing whiz across the globe, then maybe it should be.

Twitter aims to keep people connected by asking one basic question: What are you doing? Naturally, this invites an avalanche of answers of the banal “clipping-my-toenails-on-the-couch” variety.  On the flipside, businesses are starting to recognize it can be a free, highly-effective tool for communicating with customers. (Emphasis on free.)