150. Walid O. El Cheikh: Passion for Pitching

Walid O. El Cheikh is a coach, speaker and mentor about pitching and entrepreneurship. He has coached thousands of people since 2016. His coaching style is: learn by doing, build confidence and do exercises. Walid is Author of the book “Pitching For Life.” He is a Lebanese and Ukrainian living in Helsinki, Finland. What a pitch is A pitch is a presentation in which you ask something. Typically pitches are 2-5 minutes but nowadays they are even shorter. You have 8 seconds to raise the interest of your audience. At the other end, pitches can be up to one hour depending on your role and audience. When crafting your pitch: use simple language and be concise. Passion for pitching Walid truly has a passion for pitching. He got inspired to write a book, when he started giving many workshops. He was saying the same things all over again so he developed the book to give a reference to people before they came to his workshops. The book has  25 cases, different situations and how to write a pitch for each of them.  Today Walid uses the book as his slides. Elements of a pitch A pitch has three elements: (1) message, (2) argumentation, and (3) ask. Depending on the audience, you will know which is the main argumentation point for your pitch: technology, price, aesthetics, team, etc. For instance, investors care about profitability. Steve Jobs is an exceptional example of pitching. He pitched internally and externally, to Apple employees, to developers, to investors, to customers, to the media, etc. Related: Pitching Your Ideas With a Serious Game Favorite quotation “When you want something, all the Universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” — Paulo Coelho (from “The Alchemist”) Recommended books “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman “Start With Why” by Simon Sinek “Camels, Tigers & Unicorns” by Uday Phadke & Shai Vyakarnam Routine to Shine