The call comes in at around, 1 PM on a Wednesday afternoon, I am having lunch. The caller sounds somewhat hurried; he is not hot on introducing himself. “The Young Presidents are in town,” he says. “The young who?” I ask. “Be at the basement of Telecom House at 5 PM,” he goes on ignoring my question. My line of work doesn’t allow me to feel sweet about such calls, so at a few minutes to 5 I am taking the stairs to the Telecom house board room.

And there were members of the young presidents’ organization and a few Rwandan Tech Entrepreneurs. For the uninitiated, Young Presidents’ Organisation (YPO) is the world’s largest network of Chief Executives that was founded over 60 years ago to connect peers all across the world.

They regularly exchange Ideas and strategies to achieve personal growth and professional success. The young achievers also have a mission of building better leaders through education and Ideas exchange. These are relatively young (30s and Early 40s) business people and professionals in a range of sectors from Tech to mining to finance to logistics. Their resumes are long. They were there thanks to PSF ICT chamber’s invitation.

You would imagine men and women of their class and status would be suited up and in ties, but you’d be wrong, there were all casual. But despite my admiration for them, they somewhat seemed distracted, despite their high financial status, most of them seemed not to have made the intended distance from searching for a fortune; they were constantly on their phones and tablets, doing what I imagined to be tracking their wealth or ensuring all was well in their castles.

The Rwanda ICT entrepreneurs in the room were there to pitch their business Ideas and innovations in hope for strategic partnerships or financing in terms of equity share.

One after the other, they made five minutes presentations. At times your several weeks of preparation can be summarized into a five minutes presentation. It is in those five minutes that you have time to be nervous, get over it, make a killer presentation and walk away with a deal.

They seemed prepared, within the five minutes they had introduced their firms, what they do, what they have achieved in the recent past, and what they were looking to do in the near future and how they were planning to do it.

The audience of YPO had questions; the presenters fielded few of them technical, most of them poking holes at the business plan;

1. What is your business model?
2. How much are you asking for?
3. How did you come up with that figure?
4. What do you need it for?
5. How good and recent was your market analysis?
6. Who are your targeted clients?
7. Have you thought of who is your biggest competitor?
8. How long will it take you to break even?

From the pitching process, I took a few lessons home that can come in handy especially for a tech entrepreneur.
You always need to have you business ideas summarized just in case you have to make an elevator pitch.
You may have a good product but the marketing model and packaging is just as important.
When you ask for funding, know what exactly you need it for, when and how you will pay it back.
Have in mind who your biggest competitors are and how you will beat them. Have an outlined business model, gone are the days when entrepreneurs ran firms blindly or on faith.
Working in isolation, without being in touch with your targeted clients is distractive; you end up having good products or services but no market for them Studying other firms’ business models and trends can come in handy more often than you expect.
Clients and investors are wary about complex products and services, break down your innovation and simplify it to a way that it can easily be understood by as many people as possible.
There is more to successful start-ups than money or funding, drawing lessons from all around you take you further.

Written by: Collins Mwai