The 3-Minute Rule: Say Less to Get More from Any Pitch or Presentation
256
The 3-Minute Rule: Say Less to Get More from Any Pitch or Presentation
256Hardcover
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Overview
That’s the 3-Minute Rule.
Hollywood producer and pitch master Brant Pinvidic has sold more than three hundred TV shows and movies, run a TV network, and helmed one of the largest production companies in the world with smash hits like The Biggest Loser and Bar Rescue. In his nearly twenty years of experience, he’s developed a simple, straightforward system that’shelped hundreds—from Fortune 100 CEOs to PTA presidents—use top-level Hollywood storytelling techniques to simplify their messages and say less to get more.
Pinvidic proves that anyone can deliver a great pitch, for any idea, in any situation, so your audience not only remembers your message but can pass it on to their friends and colleagues. You’ll see how his methods work in a wide range of situations—from presenting investment opportunities in a biotech startup to pitching sponsorship deals for major sports stadiums, and more.
Now it’s your turn. The 3-Minute Rule will equip you with an easy, foolproof method to boil down any idea to its essential elements and structure it for maximum impact.
Simplify. Say less. Get More.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780525540724 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 10/29/2019 |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 394,494 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.60(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 2
The Bullets
Just over a decade ago, I was blindly struggling as a TV development executive at an emerging production company. My job was to take the germ of an idea and somehow get it on TV. I had to not only create and develop the premise for the show but also convince the network executives to buy it, pay to make it, and then put it on their channel.
Every day was a battle trying to get the head of this or that TV network to see the value in the show I had just created. The pitch process was intense and difficult. But it was all I knew. A big part of the job was watching good ideas die because the network “didn’t get it.”
At the time, taking a show from the idea stage through the pitch stage was about a ninety-day process. The idea usually only took two or three days to formulate, but it would take us weeks to prepare all the detailed written and graphic material, film and edit a so-called sizzle tape, and set and deliver all the pitches. Each pitch would cost us an average of $30,000 to take to market.
We averaged about one sale for every ten pitches. In television, that was a solid average.
One particular show changed my entire career. It led me to develop the 3-Minute Rule, and it’s why you’re reading this book.
Getting Extreme
My production team had spent three weeks in our cramped LA conference room, shouting in circles about how to best pitch this show. Three weeks and we hadn’t even started to craft the pitch deck or film the sales tape because we didn’t know how to pitch it. We all knew it was a great idea. We just couldn’t figure out how to explain it to anybody else.
It’s not that we all became stupid at once. We were just drowning in too many thoughts and too much information.
Part of our issue was that the show we were thinking of was wildly complicated, probably way too expensive, had never been done before, and would take five times longer to produce than any other television show we had ever made.
But it was a great idea!
The six of us in the room—with dozens of years of TV experience—saw the beauty of this idea and how it all worked. In that room all the elements and ideas flowed in harmony and added up to a hit show. When it was just us, it was perfect.
But as soon as we’d bring anyone else in the room, it all turned into a jumbled mess. Each meeting would careen off onto another tangent and crash into confusion. This was unbelievably frustrating. My team was losing focus and enthusiasm, and I was losing them. I had no idea how to make this better.
At the time we were an up-and-coming production company. Our claim to fame was that we were the producers of The Biggest Loser. This was a hit NBC prime-time television series airing around the world. It was the first weight loss TV show, and with its overwhelming success, we were scrambling to come up with more shows about weight loss. (In Hollywood, when one show’s a hit, others like it are sure to follow.)
We needed to crack the next evolution of this format before somebody else did.
I knew in this conference room we had the next big hit. I could see it crystal clear in my head. I just couldn’t explain it.
Slumped in my chair in that conference room, walls closing in, I was as frustrated as I’ve ever been in my life. I just couldn’t get it. If I weren’t Canadian, I would’ve been shouting and snipping at my assistants. Instead I just seethed. I ate way too much cold pizza and got way too little sleep.
It was at this moment I discovered the very core of what later became the 3-Minute Rule and the entire foundation of everything I speak, teach, and coach today. That moment is burned into my memory.
Could It Be That Simple?
I want to try to illustrate how messy and overloaded our original pitch for this show really was. It’s difficult because in hindsight I see it so simply and clearly that I have a hard time replicating the convoluted way it looked twelve years ago.
But here is my attempt:
The idea for the next great weight loss show involves looking at the casting tapes from The Biggest Loser, taking people who were too big to compete on the show, and, instead of making them compete to lose weight by tempting them with food and exercise challenges, letting them work through the struggles on their own.
We will help them when they need guidance, but it is ultimately up to them. Lasting weight loss takes time, so we’ll actually be filming them the entire time they lose weight. Since it will take a long time to film, we’ll have to condense a lot of time into little segments so you can see all of the progress in one hour. We won’t have them all in a house together, so all their stories are going to be separate, and they won’t know each other or work with each other. There will be no teams, no rivalries, no getting voted off the island.
It will just be their individual stories, told from their perspectives. Note that if they aren’t losing weight in a competitive situation they won’t lose weight as quickly, and since these people are so big, the change will be more gradual. Since it would be too slow to carry over a series of episodes, and the audience would get bored, each episode will be devoted to one individual’s story of personal transformation—and the following week’s episode will focus on a different person. There will be no connection from one episode to the next, nothing to have to remember from week to week.
There were another five paragraphs about how we would actually film and edit the show and rotate crews to save cost over the year. And how we would hire one trainer for the year to travel to a different contestant each week and how we would need to bring in off-camera trainers to monitor the contestants because someone would need to babysit them or they wouldn’t lose weight. I also had to describe how these contestants would be living in their own homes and not on a ranch or “reality house,” so there were things we would need to do with their jobs and lives to make sure we could film the important aspects, all year long.
Are you unimpressed and way confused? Good. It was even worse in real time.
When we ran our mock pitch meetings, this explanation would take about eighteen minutes. I felt like I said everything I wanted and had relayed all the relevant information, but nobody could possibly stay interested or focused for that long. Most times I’d get interrupted in the middle with questions about parts of the show I hadn’t had a chance to explain yet.
I was dreading the idea of getting in the room with network presidents on this show.
The network pitch room is a cold, ruthless, unforgiving setting with a very difficult audience. Meetings start with smiles that last about ten seconds. If you’ve ever watched Shark Tank, that no-nonsense attitude and curt style was patterned after a TV network pitch. If I couldn’t win over employees in my own company, how was I going to win over John Saade or Andrea Wong at ABC?
I actually ached to just give up. I’d done that with hundreds of ideas in the past. I would pitch the show around internally and if people didn’t “get it,” we’d just move on. I have no problem with people disagreeing with the viability of an idea or thinking it won’t sell. But in this case, they were judging it without actually understanding it. It was making me crazy.
Luckily for me, I didn’t give up. In a moment of pure frustration, I decided to try again with a completely clean slate.
So I returned to our large development conference room and asked the team to write down every statement that described the show on individual Post-it notes in blue Sharpie and then stick them on the wall. At the end of the exercise we had at least a hundred on the wall, so many that it looked like a vast yellow flag with graffiti on it.
Each tiny Post-it could only fit a word or two because we needed to print large enough to read them from across the room. So the words or phrases were originally meant to just be placeholders.
biggest contestants jogging one year start fat sweat remote cameras end thin compassion thin dreams life saving trainers grueling obese single episodes transformation diets exercise weight lifting carb counting cinema verité
And more . . .
Our goal was to arrange these bullet points in an order that made sense and that anyone could follow. But we were continually arguing because each Post-it note idea would spur the room of voluble TV producers into yelling out the details—often all at once. They ended up circling endlessly, chasing their own tails.
I tuned out the yelling in the room and focused on the words on the wall. They overwhelmed me. The wall was filled with everything I wanted to say, but I had to find just what needed to be said.
One by one, I began to eliminate the words that weren’t necessary to the core concept of the show. Eventually I found myself with just seven Post-it notes in the far corner of the wall.
overweight
too big
entire year
one episode
start fat
end thin
transformation
It was like cracking a code, or seeing the solution to a puzzle appear. For the first time, I saw how to explain this idea appear before me with perfect clarity.
I stood up and yelled out the door to my assistant: “Jimmy! Get me John Saade at ABC.”
Everyone in the room stared at me wondering what on earth I was doing.
Jimmy yelled back, “I’ve got John.”
I hit the speaker button.
“Brant, you’re on with John.”
“Hey, Brant, what’s up?”
“Hey, John, I have something spectacular. I’ve been working on it for months and I just cracked it.
I have to pitch it you today, right now. Can I come over?”
The room was silent because everyone was holding their breath.
This was not something I’d ever said to the head of a network. I’m guessing he may never have been asked to take a meeting like that.
“I’m a little slammed right now, can we do next week?” he asked.
“John, I promise it won’t take more than five minutes and you’ll get it, and I’m telling you, it’s worth it.”
Again silence.
“Let me know when you’re here. I’ll give my office a heads-up.”
“I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”
After a long, stunned silence, my head of development said, “What are you going to do? What are you going to say? We’re not even close to ready.”
“We are way past ready,” I replied. “We have overcooked this. We’ve been trying way too hard. I just need to get him to see what we see.” I pointed to the board of Post-its. He had no clue what the hell I was talking about. But I did.
We had made a collection of some of the people who never made it onto The Biggest Loser because they were just so overweight. We had a DVD made of them puffing and straining and failing all the preliminary tests we had devised for contestants on that show.
Our head of production came out to the hall and asked me what I was thinking. He reiterated that we were not ready and that the DVD was just a “mood and emotion tape” that didn’t explain anything about how the show would work or what the show even was. He said, “You’re going over there with nothing? No paper, no PowerPoint, no budget, no outline, no logo, no episode breakdown. What are you going to even say?”
I asked him to trust me. Five minutes after I hung up the phone with John, I was driving up the 405 freeway toward ABC.
I had to wait in the lobby for over an hour while John took other scheduled meetings.
John looked at me skeptically through his round glasses. Unlike the typically chatty network people, John was always quiet and purposeful.
“Five minutes” was the first thing he said.
I dropped the DVD on his desk and pointed to it. I uttered nine sentences:
We take overweight people too big for The Biggest Loser.
We follow them for one entire year while they lose weight.
We edit that entire year of weight loss into one single episode.
They start out fat and by the end of one hour they are thin.
We film them all at the same time, but each person gets their own episode.
It will be the biggest transformation ever seen on television, every single week.
If you buy this show today, you can’t have it on the air for eighteen months.
You may not even have this job by the time it premieres.
But you can show your boss this DVD and say, “I don’t know what to do with this, but it’s big, and you are seeing it first.”
It took a little over a minute.
Crucially, I didn’t try to explain every aspect of the show to John. He knew as much or more about television production than I did. I cut right to the heart of what was important.
We stood there in silence for a few moments.
John reached out and grabbed the DVD off his desk. He looked at me expressionlessly.
“How can you afford to follow the contestants for an entire year?”
“We rotate crews and use remote cameras in their houses,” I said.
He twirled the DVD in his fingers. I could see the gears in his head spinning.
“So if you have an entire year of weight loss in one episode, we’re talking about hundreds of pounds?”
“We’re talking three hundred pounds or more. In one episode of television.”
I could see him piecing it all together.
“Can you actually pull it off?”
“Yes, we have the entire production system, calendar, and budget already laid out.”
I think he almost smiled. “It’s very interesting.”
“Watch the DVD, let me know what you want to do,” I said as I walked out of the room with more than a minute to spare.
One hour later my phone rang. “John Saade from ABC, line one,” Jimmy yelled.
Everyone scurried out of their offices to crowd around my desk. I put John on speaker.
“Hey, John, what’s up?”
“Can you do this show for less than $1 million an episode?”
“Depends on how many episodes you order,” I said.
“How many do you need to hit that number?”
“I need ten,” I said, making it up on the spot.
“OK, you’ll have an offer this afternoon. Don’t pitch it anywhere else.”
“OK, you got it,” I said, trying to keep my bulging heart and cracking voice under control.
“Great job, great pitch. You bring stuff like this to me anytime.”
“OK bye,” I squeaked.
The room erupted. Think Mount Vesuvius. Think Krakatoa.
This was the biggest moment of my career. It made our company.
The show premiered eighteen months later in 2011 on ABC as Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edition and was one of the highest-rated summer reality series in that network’s history. The show ran for five seasons and more than fifty episodes. We saved countless lives and gave morbidly obese people hope and the ability to do things they couldn’t before, like picking up their children, walking a daughter down the aisle, and other life-changing moments that only became possible after they lost three hundred pounds.
The show generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and spawned versions in more than fifty countries. To this day it’s still my proudest television accomplishment.
All this from a pitch that lasted less than three minutes. I said only what was needed, not everything I wanted. I let the idea do all the work.
Table of Contents
Introduction xiii
Chapter 1 The 3-Minute Rule 1
Chapter 2 The Bullets 15
Chapter 3 Whac Your Story 33
Chapter 4 The Statements of Value 51
Chapter 5 There's More to Your Story 61
Chapter 6 Information and Engagement 71
Chapter 7 Your Core 3 Minutes 83
Chapter 8 The Hook 99
Chapter 9 The Edge 119
Chapter 10 Use Your Negatives 129
Chapter 11 Your 3-Minute Pitch 149
Chapter 12 Opening, Callback, and Ending 169
Chapter 13 Powerpoint-Less 185
Chapter 14 "Are You Putting On Red Lipstick?" 203
Acknowledgments 223
Index 229
