To use a sports metaphor, Ken Bautista works hard at both ends of the ice. He’s a solid presenter and a tireless networker, evidenced by the raising of over $1 million in venture capital for his CIE project and the closing of a multimillion-dollar deal with the Discovery Channel.
Without the presenting and networking skills that Bautista has acquired, it’s doubtful he’d be where he is today. A recent Harvard Business Review study lays this all pretty bare. Without charisma, you can’t get funding and like anything it takes work and practice to get there.
Bautista has pitched publicly three times, at KidScreen, Venture Forum in Vancouver and Venture Prize and has won at all three. Discovery signed on to his project without a demo, getting on board based on the strength of the presentation alone.
He’s been to six or seven industry events a year for the past three years. To some people, that’s a slog but Bautista loves it. He gets a kick out of talking with his cohorts about what they’re working on and is very much a people junkie. Face-to-face networking is important but you can’t be everywhere at once. This is where online social networking comes into play. Bautista prefers Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
“From a business perspective, LinkedIn has been good. I get introduced to people and I introduce people,” says Bautista.
“Facebook is more ‘friends’ but it’s become more of that personal network. Makes it easy to keep in touch with people.”
He sees a link between being a good networker and a good presenter. When presenting, you’ll have a script. Talking points that include things you should return to when you get off track. But when you’re networking, you don’t use a script, that would just be weird and awkward. It’s in these networking situations that you can work on your off the cuff, unplanned talk about what you do. So, as Bautista puts it “You have to have this arsenal of stuff to talk about without sounding like a robot.”
The better you get at dealing with people in unscripted, unplanned discussion, the more natural your formal presentations will be.
Of course it’s rare that people find themselves with a microphone and a slide deck in front of hundreds of people. You have to get your practice in and Bautista got his from pitching his product from a very early stage. By starting early, he got feedback and gained a comfort level with the process. Every pitch he did helped him refine his message.
Bautista always goes into a presentation with a plan. “What are the one or two things they need to remember and then I craft my pitch around that.”
He wanted to get people to understand the mystery and the intrigue of his property as well as the multi-platform interactivity. During his KidScreen pitch, Bautista mocked up a crash screen and played it off like his computer had crashed during the presentation. People in the crowd were surprised, muttering to themselves. Then he got a phone call over the loudspeaker from one of the “agents” in the product he was pitching, telling him that there had been a security breach. He kept going through the pitch and came to slide that needed a password. He had planted a clue for the password under the judges’ chairs, and they were prompted to look there by another phone call over the loudspeaker.
“At this point the crowd is loving it.”
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Category: Entrepreneurship
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