﻿Now let's talk about fundraising. It is a fun and mysterious topic and a topic of, you know, a lot of there's a lot of curiosity around this topic. And your kids are not excluded from that. I'm sure they are really curious how to get money for their business. Most likely, you are going to be the major funder in their business, but it doesn't stop you from teaching them about fundraising.

So first of all, the easiest people to pitch are grandparents, neighbors. And if your child is young enough, you can even set up a day where your child literally pitches a couple of grandparents, maybe somebody else. If you can really go all out and create a little audience for them, that will make it a really fun experience. So on the practical side, there's Go Fund Me. It will give your child donations.

You can raise the donations on social media, on Facebook, friends with everybody like that, that, you know, friends and family are usually the easiest people to raise money with. And the reason I recommend Go Fund Me, there's other options like Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites. But Go Fund Me does not have expiring crowdfunding campaigns, so you can Crowdfund perpetually. Now, also on a more serious note, Angellist.com is a site that has professional angel investors. Now, when I say professional, they are professional.

So they invest large amounts of money in very legitimate companies that typically have traction. So while a kid business might not be a fit for this, it's fun to browse. And it's a learning experience to browse and maybe try to reach out to one or two of them and to read their BIOS and to see which kind of companies do get investments. So at least you have a huge goal to aim for. But for now, what I want you to focus on is to raise money, either from your crowdfunding campaign or from your grandparents.

One thing that's really necessary is some people call elevator pitch. Some people call a 62nd pitch and a one page business plan that's really easy to write. So let me give you a template for your elevator pitch. Let me show you how it goes. And this is like literally filling the blanks.

This is a hybrid from IDEO Rescue. He also has like an ad Lib sort of a thing for pitching your business and initially got the idea from him. He's the founder of one of the major incubators, so credit goes to him. So I expanded on his idea, and here's how you would essentially do your elevator pitch. You would fill in the blanks.

For example, my business is and you tell what your business is, the name of it. Then you say, is it a site? Is it an app? Is it a service so that people have a clear understanding. Then you say it helps somebody to do something.

For example, it helps people brush their teeth better, or it helps animals stay healthier or it helps machine functions more cleanly. It doesn't matter. You can fill in the blanks anywhere. But generally the reason this works is generally businesses do something for somebody. Okay, there's a target market and it's easier.

It's just easy to fit many things into this. And of course then the next sentence is, we make money by you can be selling widgets, providing a service. Then you say your main competitors are. So you fill in the blanks there. And we're different from the competitors because filling the blanks there, we are at this stage.

That means of the business. For example, are you at the business idea stage or are you live with your website or maybe do you have a million customers already? So you're just giving the listener a little bit of a background. And at the end of the pitch you tell them, I'm looking for. Maybe you're looking for an investment.

You're looking for a co founder. What are you looking for? Why are you pitching that's the elevator pitch. Now let's look at the one page business plan. Notice that it's extremely easy to go from this because this has many of your core business components to just adding a few things to it.

Your target market, the size of your market, your marketing strategies, how you're going to plan to promote this business. And maybe if you elaborate on how you will make money and how you will make this business profitable, essentially that's all the room you have in a one page business plan. And if you think earlier to the three central business plan that we made, actually the three centres business plan is really easy to extrapolate into a one page business plan because it has all the fundamentals. So if you take the $0.03 business plan and if you take the elevator pitch, you will actually pretty much have all the information for your one page business plan. So your child will be armed with an elevator pitch and a one page business plan.

You don't want to have too long of a business plan because nobody will read that. And you can communicate all the important aspects of your business in a one page plan. And if someone asks for a longer, more detailed plan, if you end up having such advanced conversation with a potential real investor, then you quickly go and you write out your longer business plan and focus on the issues in it that person wants you to focus on. But this should really take you very far and it's for kid businesses. It's unlikely that you will need a full business plan because you can express most of your core ideas in an elevator pitch and a one page business plan.

