iHub UT

taught us some banger lessons during our blueprint series.

A failure as an entrepreneur is still valuable, and this is why we don’t hate on founders that have past failures.

In many ways, they have advantages that a fresh founder doesn’t have!

If you’re starting a business, there is no better place to launch it than iHub! Come get a tour today!

This is Corbin’s story of building a purse brand he sold for $120M.

Get more lessons like these every week at iHub in Provo!

When you start out in business, it’s hard to feel like a legit business. You don’t have processes, you’re not accomplishing your goals, you’re not progressing week after or week.

Sometimes you have weeks with massive growth, and sometimes you have go months staying at the same level.

It’s more common than you think and the reason is so simple: it’s because you don’t have a system.

Businesses that win have an operating system. Today we had teaching us about the Entrepreneur Operating System.

It’s a system that too few founders know about that helps your company create weekly accountability and make progress, every single quarter towards your company’s goals.

If you like this kind of thing, come get a tour of iHub and see how we help founders grow reliably and repeatably!

Your elevator pitch is the first impression of your business.

It might sound cliche, or silly, but the 15-30 seconds you spend explaining what you do is how everyone will view your business.

Investors, potential employees, a potential cofounder, will all see your business through that frame.

The money you want to raise, the people you want to hire are all dependent on you being able to hook someone’s attention.

Here are the four things you have to include:

1. The Target Customer
2. The Monetizable Pain
3. The Great Solution
4. The Primary Differentiation

If you can convey these in 30 seconds or less, you’ll be on a much better path to get dream customers, dream team members, and the investment you need.

Special thanks to Spencer Rogers for the training!

car wash is an institution in Utah, and if you’ve driven around recently you’ve seen that they’re growing like crazy!

Travis Kimball is the founder behind the brand, an iHub mentor and a donor to iHub’s mission.

Today he’s telling us the story of how he built a 300 location car wash business, how he validated it, how he overcame hurdles and how he put his background in marketing to work.

He tells the story of how he made a decision early in that he didn’t want to use his marketing skills to promote things that would harm people, or go against his values.

A true masterclass in marketing!

Todd Westra reviews dozens of founder pitches every month through the Build Fund.

These three things show up constantly. And they’ll tank your valuation before you ever get to the table.

1. You’re not paying yourself in your pro forma.

Founders think it makes them look scrappy. Investors think it means you don’t understand what your business actually costs to run. Your numbers aren’t real if the founder isn’t in them.

2. Your sales budget is basically zero.

Right now, YOU are the sales team. Cool. But your projections need to show what happens when you stop being the sales team. If there’s no line item for sales and marketing, investors know exactly what happens next: growth flatlines the second you step back.

3. You’re hiding your real cost of product.

You’re doing fulfillment, customer support, ops work — and none of it shows up in your COGS. Which means your margins are fiction. Investors will find it. And when they do, the number they put on your company gets a lot smaller.

These aren’t edge cases. These are the most common mistakes Todd sees in early-stage pitches.

Fix them before you walk into the room.

A good investors bets on the jockey as much as they bet on the horse. The business plan is important, but if you want potential investors to get excited about YOU.

The single biggest thing you can do to instill confidence in an investor is show a past track record of success.

That might be a past business, a high level job, the university you went to, deep expertise with your ICP.

You don’t have much time to impress investors, and that’s exactly what we were teaching last week.

If you’re an investor, or you’ve raised money, what would you tell young founders trying to raise their next round?

We’re building the largest startup incubator in the state of Utah, let’s get Utah to #1!