Actually good pitching could fall under ideation, customers, competition, fundraising or a number of other headings. And the Pixar Pitch is the best breakdown of pitching there is.
A Pixar Pitch is a format for distilling the essence of a storyline, and is derived from the famous movie animation studio. Six sentences are begun, and all you have to do is complete them.
Once upon a time…Every day…One day…Because of that…Because of that…Until finally…
Consider Finding Nemo- it’s hard to describe the film more succinctly than this: Once upon a time a fish called Nemo and his father lived in some shallows in the ocean. Every day Nemo wanted to explore but his father didn’t trust him to go into the deep. One Day Nemo left into the deep, but went too far and got lost. Because of this he travelled the ocean and ended up in a fish tank. Because of this his father went to find him. Until finally they returned to the shallows and learnt to trust one another.
Can you describe your own business plan like this? The beauty of the above description is that it distils the essence of the story out from the methodology of the storytelling. Is Nemo a story about fish? Animal rights? Getting lost? Those are quite niche topics for such a successful movie, even with good animations and voices.
Nemo begins with a father and son and an overly protective dynamic. It ends with a better dynamic. At its essence Nemo is about family dynamics, specifically the need for trust within love in a parent’s relationship with his child. That is a story of universal appeal- hence the film’s huge success globally.
We can map the Pixar Pitch across to your business plan. Describing the market gives the “once upon a time”- it informs the audience (investor) what the current situation. The value chain dynamics and the problem with this market are the “every day”.
In all of that you see an opportunity to make a change one day- Nemo swims into the deep. How will that affect the market? As you explain your new product’s impact on the market, you tee up the second “because of that”; namely, how will the competition react? That is the step forgotten in so many business pitches, the response of the competition to your disruption of their status quo.
Finally, after a series of reactions and counter-reactions, a new status quo will be achieved in which you and the competition share the market, and consumers have a new choice.
This last part, the “until finally”, emphasises the fundamental change that has (or has not) taken place, and alludes to your defensibility. No trust learnt by the clownfish family, and Nemo would be lost again tomorrow. No fundamental change in the market thanks to your product, and you’ll be gone again tomorrow. That’s why the Pixar Pitch is a tool for competitive strategy, before all its other (brilliant) uses.
In the pitch deck template offered in the Templates section of this website, you will notice a little box in the top corner with a Pixar Pitch next to a Business Plan. Each page of the pitch deck highlights one line from the Pixar Pitch, both to provide you with the material for the pitch but also to remind you that a pitch is essentially a story, which must be told with a narrative like any other.