Pitching Your Business with iFundWomen’s Ashley Olafsen

Ashley Olafsen is a 2x published author, TEDx speaker, and Forbes featured social entrepreneur who is passionate about building inspiring businesses. She started off running workshops and summer programs for teenage girls on self esteem and leadership, which grew into her co-founding MOVE, LLC when she was just 16 years old. 

Now, Ashley works as a Startup Coach at IFundWomen where she coaches women-owned businesses on pitch-honing, goal setting, and more. She also guides female founders to the best resources for where they currently are in their entrepreneurial journey.

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Ashley Helps Female Entrepreneurs and Business Owners:

  • Start their businesses

  • Grow their businesses

  • Get funding

  • Pitch themselves

  • Improve social media strategy

  • Evoke marketing strategy

iFundWomen is really the go-to funding marketplace for women-owned businesses and the people who want to support them with access to coaching, capital, and connections
— Ashley Olafsen

What is Pitch-Honing?

Pitch-honing includes writing, branding, marketing, ad copy, and design. It is the craft of taking the goals, passion, and relevance of your business and simplifying it for people to better understand your main objectives. It is key to focus on because nobody can support you, fund you, give you opportunities, give you press, or anything else unless they understand what you are doing. “It's so important that you are able to express articulately, powerfully, confidently, what you are doing so that people can support you,” Ashley says.

“If you don’t have a solid pitch, so many doors are closed to you, but if you have a good pitch, so many doors are able to open for you”

Ashley is an effective pitch-honing coach because she will help business-owners identify what they are passionate about and narrow it down into two sentences. She will see your paragraphs, listen to you talk, and pull out the bigger picture. It is important to chip away at your ideas to find the angle that finds the timeliness, the relevant, and something that has data. 

“Pitch-honing is a very personal thing because although I am helping you condense and craft, I’m really just listening to you to make sure that the pitch is authentic to what you actually want”

Pitch honing Do’s

If you don’t have a solid pitch, so many doors are closed to you, but if you have a good pitch, so many doors are able to open for you
— Ashley Olafsen
  • Be clear and not use vague language. People need to understand what you’re saying and be clear in one sentence.

  • If you have data, always include some. Remember It takes more skill to be specific than it does to be general. 

  • Underline one sentence business pitch.

Pitch Honing Don'ts

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  • Don’t undermine yourself and always present confidently. 

  • Don’t talk straight for multiple minutes, allow people to ask questions and interact with you while you’re presenting your pitch.

 

“Pitching myself has been incredibly useful throughout my career”

Ways Ashley Has Benefited From Pitching

  1. Getting a 1.5k speaking gig from someone on LinkedIn who just sees and reads my posts 

  2. Getting 136k for former businesses at pitch competitions

It’s important to know how to pitch your brand, so you are first in mind for opportunities related to you. 

Another important part of pitching to remember is that brand awareness is how easily one could recognize your business. On average, 5 to 7 brand impressions are necessary before someone will remember your brand, so having a confident pitch is key. 

When you have a pitch you’re proud of, do you want to share it, you SHOULD feel excited to share it

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Want to join a supportive community of 1.3k+ small but mighty businesses on the same PR journey as you? 

→ Join us every Friday at 12pm EST in the “Small Biz PR Pros” Facebook group to learn from founders who got featured, receive live expert training so you can be more seen, heard, and valued.

Just keep pitching and following up. You can do this! 

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