1: “The [television] network pitch room is a cold, ruthless, unforgiving setting with a very difficult audience,” Brant Pinvidic writes in his book The 3-Minute Rule: Say Less to Get More from Any Pitch or Presentation.
“Meetings start with smiles that last about ten seconds,” he writes. “If you’ve ever watched Shark Tank, that no-nonsense attitude and curt style was patterned after a TV network pitch.”
The year was 2010. Brant led a Hollywood television production company that created and produced The Biggest Loser, the mega-hit NBC prime-time television series.
“It was the first weight loss TV show, and with its overwhelming success, we were scrambling to come up with more shows about weight loss,” he recalls. “We needed to crack the next evolution of this format before somebody else did.”
And Brant had an idea. A big idea. Their next big hit.
For three long weeks, Brant and his colleagues met daily in a crowded Los Angeles conference room. More than twenty days into it, they still hadn’t begun crafting their pitch deck.
The problem?
The idea “was wildly complicated, probably way too expensive, had never been done before, and would take five times longer to produce than any other television show we had ever made,” he remembers.
Everything made perfect sense to the six people in the conference room.
“But as soon as we’d bring anyone else into the room, it all turned into a jumbled mess,” he remembers.
“Slumped in my chair in that conference room, the walls closing in, I was as frustrated as I’ve ever been in my life.”
Brant suggested they begin again. Clean slate.
He handed a blue Sharpies to each of his colleagues. He told them to write down every statement that describes the show on a Post-it note. Then, stick them on the wall.
“At the end of the exercise we had at least a hundred on the wall,” he writes, “so many that it looked like a vast yellow flag with graffiti on it.”
Brant then instructed the team to organize the Post-it notes logically so anyone reading them could follow.
“But we were continually arguing because each Post-it note idea would spur the room of voluble TV producers into yelling out the details—often all at once,” he recalls. “They ended up circling endlessly, chasing their own tails.”
2: Then, inspiration struck.
Brant turned out all the loud voices. He focused on the words on the wall.
“One by one, I began to eliminate the words that weren’t necessary to the core concept of the show,” he remembers. “Eventually I found myself with just seven Post-it notes in the far corner of the wall.”
It felt like “cracking a code, or seeing the solution to a puzzle appear. For the first time, I saw how to explain this idea appear before me with perfect clarity.”
Brant yelled down the hall at his assistant, “Jimmy! Get me John Saade at ABC.”
Jimmy yelled back, “I’ve got John.”
Brant walked back into the conference room and pressed the speaker phone button.
“Brant, you’re on with John,” Jimmy said.
“Hey, Brant, what’s up?”
“Hey, John, I have something spectacular. I’ve been working on it for months and I just cracked it. I have to pitch it to you today, right now. Can I come over?”
Silence. On the phone. And in the conference room.
Brant had never pitched an idea like this. It was unlikely John had ever been asked to take a meeting like that.
“I’m a little slammed right now, can we do it next week?” he asked.
“John, I promise it won’t take more than five minutes and you’ll get it, and I’m telling you, it’s worth it.”
More silence.
“Let me know when you’re here. I’ll give my office a heads-up.”
“I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”
Click.
Brant looked around the room at his colleagues.
Someone spoke up: “What are you going to do? What are you going to say? We’re not even close to ready.”
“We are way past ready,” Brant replied. “We have overcooked this. We’ve been trying way too hard.”
He pointed to the seven Post-it notes he had organized. “I just need to get him to see what we see.”
Another executive spoke up: “You’re going over there with nothing? No paper, no PowerPoint, no budget, no outline, no logo, no episode breakdown. What are you going to even say?”
“Trust me,” Brant replied.
He got in the car and headed to ABC. After waiting over an hour in the lobby, he was escorted into John Saade’s office.
John looked up. Skeptically. “Five minutes,” he said.
Brant uttered nine sentences:
“We take overweight people too big for The Biggest Loser.
We follow them for one entire year while they lose weight.
We edit that entire year of weight loss into one single episode.
They start out fat and by the end of one hour they are thin.
We film them all at the same time, but each person gets their own episode.
It will be the biggest transformation ever seen on television, every single week.
If you buy this show today, you can’t have it on the air for eighteen months.
You may not even have this job by the time it premieres.
But you can [tell] your boss: “I don’t know what to do with this, but it’s big, and you are seeing it first.”
3: Brant’s pitch was over in a little over a minute.
“Crucially, I didn’t try to explain every aspect of the show to John,” he writes. “He knew as much or more about television production than I did. I cut right to the heart of what was important.”
The two men stared at each other for a moment.
John asked: “How can you afford to follow the contestants for an entire year?”
“We rotate crews and use remote cameras in their houses,” Brant replied.
The gears in John’s head were spinning. “So if you have an entire year of weight loss in one episode, we’re talking about hundreds of pounds?”
“We’re talking three hundred pounds or more. In one episode of television.”
“Can you actually pull it off?”
“Yes, we have the entire production system, calendar, and budget already laid out.”
“Very interesting.”
“Let me know what you want to do,” Brant said. With that, he walked out of the room. With more than a minute to spare.
One hour later, the phone rang. “John Saade from ABC, line one,” Jimmy yelled.
Everyone in the office gathered around Brant’s speaker phone.
“Hey, John, what’s up?”
“Can you do this show for less than $1 million an episode?”
“Depends on how many episodes you order,” he replied.
“How many do you need to hit that number?”
“I need ten,” Brant said, making it up.
“OK, you’ll have an offer this afternoon. Don’t pitch it anywhere else.”
“OK, you got it,” he replied, trying to keep his cracking voice under control.
“Great job, great pitch. You bring stuff like this to me anytime.”
“OK, bye,” he squeaked.
“The room erupted,” Brant writes. “Think Mount Vesuvius. Think Krakatoa.
“This was the biggest moment of my career,” Brant recalls. “It made our company.”
Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition premiered eighteen months later on ABC. It became one of the highest-rated summer reality series in network history. It ran for five seasons and more than fifty episodes.
Looking back, Brant reflects: “We saved countless lives and gave morbidly obese people hope and the ability to do things they couldn’t before, like picking up their children, walking a daughter down the aisle, and other life-changing moments that only became possible after they lost three hundred pounds.”
Not only that, but it also resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and generated versions in more than fifty countries.
“To this day it’s still my proudest television accomplishment,” he notes.
All of this success came from a pitch that lasted less than three minutes.
This week and next, we will be doing a deep dive into Brant’s “3-Minute Rule.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: How long is the typical sales presentation at my organization? What lessons can I learn from Brant’s 3-Minute Rule?
Action: Discuss with my team or with a colleague.
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