The baseball season is over but teams are still pitching

The baseball season is over. The Dodgers won the World Series, but the pitching continues.

Prime Health, a Denver based digital health ecosystem, fosters innovation to improve health in underserved communities.

How can formerly incarcerated people reintegrate into society if few companies will hire them? And can businesses afford to exclude the roughly one in three working Americans with criminal records from the economy? In a case study, Paul Gompers explores the challenges a social justice startup encounters in helping the formerly incarcerated, as well as lessons for other entrepreneurs.

Or how about Nafees Innovations?

"Real quick—I’m just a man from North Philadelphia who faced many challenges and wasn’t given many chances. I experienced homelessness twice and almost flunked out of college twice. I battled countless days of depression, nearly losing everything. Yet, through faith, determination, and a constant reminder to myself—‘Some kid is going to need me to make it one day so they can see what a scientist looks like’—I made it this far. Nafees Innovations is more than just workshops for kids in my city of Philadelphia. It’s a place where they can be inspired, see themselves in STEM, and believe they have a future in it too. In all transparency, it was never about me… it’s about the youth of Philadelphia."

Prime Health recently held their latest innovation challenge at Coors Field, the home of the Colorado Rockies.

Pitch fests happen almost every week somewhere in the US, They happen in primary schools, high schools, institutions of higher learning, incubators and accelerators. In addition, the spring and the fall are B school business plan competition season, so look for tweets about who won and pictures of those smiling millennial faces holding?big cardboard checks.?

These competitions serve many purposes, but fundamentally the objective is 1) to practice presentation skills, 2) to get feedback, 3) to find money, 4) to find collaborators to pilot products, and 5) to find customers.

I have participated on both sides of the plate, as both pitcher and catcher (judge) and have always found the format wanting.

Carl Schramm describes the problem:

?If you look at all our older major corporations?— U.S. Steel, General Electric, IBM, American Airlines — and then you look at our newer companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, none of these companies ever had a business plan before they got started. Empirically, it appears as if you don’t need a business plan.

Second, the business planning process is largely generated as a preview for venture capital. As I show in my book, from empirical studies, much less than 1% of all new startups ever see a venture capitalist. Much less than 1% of all new companies every year have venture backing of any kind. So, I largely view the creation of a business plan as something of a waste of time.

The third problem is that it seems to make starting a business somewhat like a cookbook. If you do this, and then you do this, and then you do this, the cake will come out okay. And that’s really not how it happens.

I think it is time to rethink these events, and, it seems, so do some investors who are moving towards data-driven investing.

That said and given the mission of Prime, all the companies were vying for the chance to pilot their products or expand their existing offerings with regional health service organizations in Colorado.

Here are some things to practice at Spring training:

1. Focus on outputs, not inputs or vanity metrics. What data driven evidence do you have that your solution is making a significant impact solving your chosen problem like teen age behavioral health in underserved populations? Focus on speed to value and improved outcomes.
2. If for some reason you are pitching virtually instead of live, have Plan B if there are technical glitches and create an appropriate background visual effect on your screen.
3. Include a competitive analysis matrix that describes how you are different from all the other platforms trying to solve the same problem. What is you unique selling proposition?
4. What is the ROI of your solution. Who cares? How much? Who pays? How much?
5. Know your audience and research the judges.
6. Be sure you understand the judges' scoring rubric.
7. What is your plan to scale and is it fundable?
8. Practice, practice, practice your pitch and presentation skills and recite it by heart: authenticity, audacity, situational awareness.

9. Be a go giver not a go getter

10. Tell your story or the story of your hero

11. Make it personal but don't take it personally

12. Every speech is a call to action. What is yours? Instead, after you deliver your CTA,?paint a picture?of what is going to happen for audience members once they complete the requested action. Throwing out a CTA creates curiosity for listeners; they want that curiosity satisfied by understanding what will happen?after?the action is over. This satisfaction — and a picture of what the future could look like — will inspire people to act.

The Mistakes Startups are Making when Pitching to Investors and How to Avoid Them

A battery is a military term for a unit of guns, mortars, or rockets grouped to facilitate better battlefield command and communication.

Its use in baseball to describe a pitcher and a catcher alludes to the fact that the battery is the principle attack force for the small army of nine players on a baseball diamond.

In the entrepreneurial world, people offer a lot of advice about how to pitch. But, for those who are asked to judge business plan competitions or internal competitions, like for proof of concept funds, business plan competitions or lighthouse funding, the guidelines are less common. If you are asked to be a judge or referee for one of these exercises i.e the catcher and not the pitcher,?here are a few things to think about.

Good luck next season.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Substack