SAM ZAWADZKI

While I might not be an expert, I'm certainly no beginner. Over the years I have done quite a lot of pitching. I've won a number of competitions including: 'The Pitch' a UK wide pitching competition, "The EDGE" competition winning £50,000 funding, and raising £150,000 seed funding from angel investors. After a substantial amount of practising, I thought you might enjoy learning some of my pitching insights. To start with... pitching is the skill to clearly communicate informa

The Nest is an annual start up conference held by Toucan and Time Inc. This year I was invited to speak alongside my mentor Fiona Dent, MD of Time UK. Over the last 8 months Fiona has provided continual inspiration and guidance. Fiona stressed the importance of understanding who your target client is. Only with a detailed profile on the client can you build an effective marketing and communication strategy to reach and convert them. Together we worked on consumer profiling an

Wow this book earns a straight 10 on the Z scale of awesome. Caveats would be: it's very American & focused on larger / later stage start ups. Horowitz stands out by talking about the un-sexy parts of business, like firing people and messing up. It's refreshing to learn from someone's mistakes, rather than having to listen to them blow their own propaganda trumpet. There is far too much interesting material in here for me to go through in a blog, you really should just read i

This book makes for a fun read. At the core of the entire business is the importance of narrative. Darren explains that Gatorade became a success due to it's heritage, there is a truly fantastic story behind the drinks name. College athletes were dying from heat stroke, and the University of Florida football coach challenged university physicians to come up with a solution for the home team, the Florida Gators. Gatorade wasn't designed to be a commercial super story, it's her

Some key lessons I've learned that may, or may not be useful to you. a) 'great ideas' are worthless and usually wrong. Take your assumptions and figure out how to validate them. Don't be afraid of being wrong, it can be hard to find right (what ever that is). Implementation is key, ideas are nothing without it! b) focus take one little thing and make it work. Build on that victory and then do the next thing. Set clear goals and objectives. Understand your motivations and writ

There is something very Scottish about not wanting to accept help, a stubborn pride that comes from growing up in the wee sunless country. I’ve always thought that coaching was something for people who just can’t handle their own stuff. Peepshows continual mockery of coaching enforced my ostrich beliefs (when one decides to keep their head in the sand ignoring facts). It was a pleasure to discover how wrong my preconceptions were. Over the last three months I’ve been receivin

For the back story on what and where the expression mechanical turk comes from, see 18th Century Chess Robot and Amazon Marketplace. In this context I will refer to Mechanical Turk as a cost analysis between getting work done by a computer or getting work done by a human. To provide some background. In our property technology software an estate agent can set viewing slots on a property, which a consumer can then book onto online. At present the agent must set day & time avai