This post is about one of my 45-second pitches at my BNI Chapter, BNI City Business. You can read the introduction to this collection here.

While convalescing after a surgical procedure, I had a couple of weeks to (amongst other things) ponder my 45-second presentations. I used my Substitutes and Absences slide for the meetings I missed.

Nearly ten years ago, I made a presentation at a Cloud Computing tradeshow in Singapore. When I make public presentations, I like to know as much about the audience and venue as possible so I can tailor my presentation to the setting. Unfortunately, this was not possible for the trade show: I didn’t know who might attend the session. All I knew was that it was on the tradeshow floor.

My topic was ‘what is Cloud Computing?’ To give me as much latitude for my audience, I used a deck of memes – just the memes – plus a few high-level network diagrams, and then basically ad-libbed from there. I could go as fast or as slow as I liked. I gave the presentation twice on the same day. The first fell quite flat, the second time seemed to be received quite well.

The Doctors’ Typeface above was one of my slides, sourced online. I used it to talk about a lack of clarity of definition of Cloud Computing.

When thinking about setting a theme for my next BNI pitch, I went back to that core theme of clarity. In this case, I talked about the clarity a buyer needs during due diligence as to the condition of the business they are buying. I carried this ‘Importance of’ message on for a couple more weeks.