Just found a very cool tool from Harvard Business Review that helps you craft your elevator pitch, HBS Elevator Pitch Builder.  The elevator pitch is one way to crystallize your thoughts on the unique value you bring to the world and how that matches with the marketplace. I also have used Robert Middleton's idea of an audio logo, which is more conversational and expansive.

I tried out the pitch builder using my other business, A Bigger Voice, as the topic. What I like about the tool is that it breaks down the elevator pitch into several parts–who you are, what you do, why you are unique, and what your goal is. By doing this, it forces you to focus on one piece at a time, making it less daunting. Still, just doing one piece well can take some work. After about twenty minutes using the tool, I came up with the following elevator pitch. Bear in mind that this is something I've been working on for months, so it's one of many iterations:

"I'm a Bell Labs engineer turned career coach turned wisdom entrepreneur. I help innovators transform an idea, born from their life experience, into a sustainable, scalable movement, combining 21st century smarts with centuries old methods. A Bigger Voice focuses on three distinct areas that often get overlooked in the "doing good and doing well" arena: Story-telling, Community Building, and Monetizing, in that order.

My goal is to create a vibrant community of wisdom entrepreneurs that continually evolves the roadmap of how to "do good and do well" in the world. If this interests you, please check out my blog, A Bigger Voice, and become a regular reader and contributor. "

The tool provides an analysis of number of words, estimated speaking time, and number of repeated words and then compares that with the "average," whatever that means. I was pleased to see that both my words and speaking time were about half the average (108 words vs. 231, 27 secs vs. 56.) Unfortunately, I was a bit redundant. I had 13 repeated words vs. 4.

Ahhh….the curse of continuous improvement!

What are your biggest challenges in crafting an elevator pitch? What tools have you found to be useful? Provide your elevator pitch as a comment so we can learn together.

My thanks to Carol Fishman Cohen, @iRelaunch, for tweeting about this tool.

Photo by tlianza.