I recently had the privilege of being on the judging panel for several early-stage pitch competitions.
The permitted speaking time varied from sixty seconds to many minutes.
Less than half the participants managed their time well.
Two ran out of things to say before the 30-second mark in the one-minute events.
One brought a 50-slide deck to a 4-minute event and hadn’t finished their introduction when time ran out.
This is silly, embarrassing, and entirely avoidable.
If you are a presenter, record yourself doing a practice talk. Even if you don’t do anything better with the recording, you can check your time management.
If you are an organizer, you require that the speakers send you such a recording in advance. It could be part of the application process or a step after acceptance. Even if you never even view the recording, it will help them to check their management.
In either case, there are, of course, many additional good and useful things that could be done.
But I’m not greedy.
I’ll just ask for this one.
#pitchevents #pitch #pitchcompetitions #startups #speaking #publicspeaking #timemanagement
