1: “My wife says you help people pitch their ideas. Do you think I need some work on mine?”
Brant Pinvidic was sitting next to Jeff. It was the start of a three-hour bus ride into the British Columbia wilderness for a heli-skiing adventure.
The two men knew each other through their young sons, who were friends at school.
“Well, I guess you’d say I run a plumbing company,” Jeff said, “but not really plumbing, more of a service company around plumbing but in re-piping homes.”
“Jeff began talking about copper pipes, and then PEX (a kind of plastic) pipes, and then plumbing contractors and his call center and how his sales guys bid the house and then he contracts out to plumbing contractors, but those contractors had to be certified to re-pipe his way,” Brant recalls of the conversation in his book The 3-Minute Rule: Say Less to Get More from Any Pitch or Presentation.
It felt like it might take Jeff the entire three hours of the bus trip to explain what he did.
Jeff was quite successful at his re-piping business, but “there was a frustration in his voice that I had heard so many times before,” Brant writes.
While “he knew his business and knew exactly why it was so valuable,” he notes, “I could see the exasperation written on his face as he struggled to explain what his business was really all about.”
Jeff’s challenge is similar to that of many entrepreneurs and salespeople, Brant writes: We “know our value and the most important and unique elements of our businesses, but we struggle to explain it and don’t know in what order to put the information and how to get everyone to understand it.”
Jeff “was a classic mix of too much information and no semblance of how to organize it.”
The reality?
“His explanation was a mess,” Brant writes.
2: “You have a lot going on, and some amazing stuff,” Brant told Jeff. “Let me sleep on it and I’ll come up with some thoughts.”
That night, Brant got out a pack of Post-It notes, wrote “statements of value,” and applied his WHAC presentation model we explored last week: W—What is it? H—How does it work? A—Are you sure? C—Can you do it?
The following evening, after a day of skiing and dinner at the lodge, Brant pulled Jeff aside.
“I spent a lot of time going through what your company does and why it’s great,” he said. “I want to show you what I’ve come up with.”
Brant waved over one of the other skiers on the five-day trip. He asked Jeff to explain what his company does and why it is so good.
“Jeff started by talking about his re-piping expertise, then rattled off a series of facts and statements,” Brant writes. “He wasn’t being long-winded or overly complicated, but there was just no pattern or flow. Nothing tied it together and told a story.”
The skier was polite. But the conversation quickly drifted away to another topic.
“Watch this,” Brant told Jeff.
He called over another skier they had met that day.
“Kelly,” Brant said, “I just found out what Jeff does for a living and I found it fascinating. I wanted to see what you thought. Jeff’s company re-pipes homes. They will re-pipe your entire house, every fixture. You wanna know the twist? When they re-pipe your house, they actually leave the old pipes right where they are.”
“Oh, really? How do they do that?” Kelly leaned in.
“They have these new flexible plastic pipes that they feed through and around the walls and connect them at all the faucets. Just like that, new pipes for your whole house.”
“Oh, that’s really smart, I never thought of that.”
“Wanna know the best part?” I continued. “They thread these plastic pipes through tiny holes in your wall and the ceiling. They don’t have to rip apart anything.”
“What?” said Kelly. “You’re kidding. They don’t rip off your drywall to get behind the walls and stuff?”
“Nope. In fact, they re-pipe your entire home in just one day, patch all the little holes so there’s no mess, no damage. You wouldn’t even know they were there.
“They take what has always been a major renovation and turn it into a minor renovation. You don’t even have to leave the house while they do it.
“Jeff tells me he did an entire hotel while it was still open. They checked into a different suite every day and the guests had no idea. They even wore normal street clothes in the lobby so they wouldn’t look like construction workers.”
“That’s incredible,” said Kelly. “How do you connect the new plastic to the old fixtures?”
“Yes, Jeff, how do you do that?” Brant grinned.
Jeff began to answer the question. His explanation generated another question. And then another.
“There was some animation at our table now,” Brant writes. “Soon, another group of skiers came by to check out the conversation.”
Kelly told them, “So Jeff runs a plumbing company that can re-pipe your entire house in one day by feeding these flexible pipes through tiny holes in your walls. They leave the old pipes in place and only run the new ones.”
“That’s brilliant!” one of the other skiers exclaimed. “Are the plastic pipes as strong as the copper?”
Over the next 30 minutes, Jeff answered that question and a host of others.
“At one point there must have been fifteen people gathered around,” Brant notes.
3: When things quieted down, Jeff turned to Brant and said: “How on earth did you do that so fast?”
Brant shared that the key was simply getting the elements of the story in the proper order. What Jeff needed was a better road map.
And that was just the beginning.
“There were thirty-two other skiers staying at this lodge for the five-day trip,” Brant recalls, “and by the end of it, every one of them had heard Jeff’s pitch, and he could see how quickly they understood his information.
“There were at least a dozen other business owners and entrepreneurs there who watched us unpack and repack his information. By the time the week was done, I had helped a stationery company, a shipping logistics company, a custom home builder, a clinical therapist, a helicopter ski lodge owner, a property manager, and a Realtor.
“I loved every minute of it. Cracking the value and unique elements of a Dutch financial planner while naked in the sauna was an experience I won’t soon forget.”
This week, we will continue our exploration of Brant’s “The 3-Minute Rule“.
It starts with basic questions: What do we do differently? What’s unique? What is most valuable?
“The pattern is always the same,” Brant writes. “WHAC would categorize the information, we’d break out all the statements and filter them through the information or engagement buckets, and the story would start to emerge.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Can I deliver a 3-minute pitch about what my organization does that captures my audience’s attention?
Action: Discuss with a colleague or my team.