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Adoption, Business & Pitch Practice | Q&A with Kevin Sandlin

You may not realize it, but pitching is everywhere. From convincing a business investor to spreading the gospel, your ability to communicate your ideas and persuade others is an invaluable skill in life.

In this episode, listen to Kevin Sandlin talk about his business experiences, from creating them to expanding and managing them. He also emphasizes the importance of learning how to articulate our ideas well and with confidence. He also shares the moving story of his adoption and how he reconciled business and faith.

Tune in to learn more about how to deliver the perfect pitch and manage your own business.

3 Reasons to Listen:

Learn why pitching is everywhere in our daily life.
Discover lessons and advice on businesses and managing relationships.
Understand how to reconcile your business and faith and trust God’s plan for you.

Resources

About Kevin

Kevin Sandlin is a tech entrepreneur and CMO for various companies. He is the founder of Pitch Practice, a weekly meetup for entrepreneurs to hone their pitching skills with each other. He is also the author of Practice Your Pitch, a book about the lessons he obtained from the thousands of pitches he has encountered.

If you want to reach out to him, you can do it through Pitch Practice’s website. Alternatively, you can contact him through LinkedIn.

Episode Highlights

Kevin’s Personal Pitch

Most people reach a certain point in business through brute force but don't know how to expand to a broader audience.
These people don’t know what they already have and how to create and distribute new content to attract new audiences.
His job is to solve these problems in an expanding business.
He also helps his clients create a repeatable and systematic process in generating content.

Fractional Partners

Kevin created a process wherein a group of experienced executives can work on key roles in different companies simultaneously.
This only demands less time for the same results.
Being a fractional consultant can be confusing and needs absolute focus for each client.
What you can learn and apply to one company also applies to other companies.
The job of a startup is to find a repeatable business model.

Kevin’s Journey in Business

He had to work five different jobs to pay for bills and tuition.
He describes himself as the lowest-paid MBA in Georgia State history.
Kevin worked long hours preparing for an IPO without earning money for himself.
He realized that to make real wealth, you need ownership. Hence, he started his own business.
He thrives on change as it brings out new opportunities.

“You have to have ownership to make real wealth.” - Click Here to Tweet This

Financial Challenges

He and his partners borrowed money to grow the business.
Their client, Motorola, split and went away, which created a big problem for them.
He absorbed all the debt caused by the split, but he took his client’s equity in exchange. He ended up selling his company in 2012.
Don’t borrow money if there is nothing tied to it.

“You're going to have these ups and downs, and what you do when you're up is just as important as what you do when you're down.” - Click Here to Tweet This

Lessons on Business Partnership

Having a mentor who has experienced everything in business is invaluable.
What you do when things go wrong is just as important as what you do when it’s going well.
Clear communication is crucial in managing a relationship.

Kevin’s Personal Life

Kevin loved his hometown Conyers, Georgia, where he spent his childhood.
He started playing soccer at age 7.
Listen to the full episode to hear his wonderful adoption story.
From his adoption, he realized that only God could change our hearts.
Having a relationship with a child is identical to us being adopted by God as His children.

“When God adopts us as our children, we are His.” - Click Here to Tweet This

Reconciling Business And Faith

The tech industry isn’t that friendly to believers.
He was afraid of not saying the acceptable thing to other people to get the gigs.
God made him realize that Kevin needs to stand up for what is right, and He will provide the rest.

“Most startups fail. But if you have two entrepreneurs, and one of them can articulate their idea really well, and the other one can't, the one who can articulate it's going to win every time.” - Click Here to Tweet This

How Pitch Practice Came To Be

He was too quick to create a new company after selling his previous one.
An organization called Venture Lab from Georgia Tech listened to pitches and criticized it.
He realized that it was a constructive idea, and he brought it to Atlanta Tech Village.
From then on, he has listened to about 3500 pitches.

The Mindset and Attitude on Pitching

Everything is a pitch all the time.
The idea behind the pitch is never to close the sale; it's to advance the relationship.
The same goes with sharing the gospel. No one's going to listen to you unless you know them as they know you.
There is a certain amount of faking you can do as you won’t always be confident.
When you have identified, validated, and articulated a problem in the marketplace, that’s the heart of the pitch.
Nobody cares about your solution; they care about their problems.
If you can’t alleviate a problem, you have no value.

“Consistency is key.” - Click Here to Tweet This

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To growing and becoming all we are created to be,

Tim