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I tell clients the most important thing they can put on their homepage is their elevator pitch. As most of my clients are academics with little or no business background, they usually don’t know what this means.

You’ve stepped onto an elevator and you realize there’s a potential [customer | investor | donor] next to you. He turns to you and says, “so what do you do?” You have maybe six floors to ride up the elevator before the conversation ends. So you have maybe 20 seconds to tell your story, pique his interest, or otherwise sell yourself.

With your website, like the casual interactions we have while networking, you get mere seconds to engage a new visitor before she bounces. Those seconds will be spent scanning wildly - glancing around your page to try and make some sense of things and decide whether it’s worth her time to stay any longer. (Aside: is this not like meeting people in a bar? hmm… future post idea.)

The elevator pitch is short and sweet. It’s informative, engaging, and relevant. It’s driven by value and hints of action.

And it’s really hard to make.

Many organizations have a mission statement. They might have a vision statement. There’s no shortage of descriptive copy about your company’s who, what, why, etc. But almost every one of these statements is ridiculously long. Hundreds of words. At least a couple of paragraphs. Sometimes pages of text.

Throw them all away and write one sentence. Maybe two, if it’s earth shattering. Try it.

It’s hard to distill so much into a single sentence, especially when you have a wide range of products or services. So start by creating an elevator pitch for your own job. What do you do?

My elevator pitch to clients when they ask what I do: “I keep projects on time, on track, and on budget.” (I’m a web project manager at Notre Dame.)

Maybe I should start an elevator blog.

I caught the Hesburgh Library elevator this afternoon, and just as the doors opened Father Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C. joined us. For ten floors, I got to listen to him chat to others in the elevator about various subjects, including an undergraduate who is majoring in PLS - Program of Liberal Studies.

Father Ted’s comment:

“That’s the best program we have. You can’t study the writings of fifty of the most intelligent people in history and not learn something good.”

The deadline isn’t moving, but you’re not getting the work done. The mass stays the same, but the volume is decreasing. Density (and therefore pressure) increases.
The only way to alleviate the pressure is to change one of the two variables: the amount of work or the deadline.

When the project scope changes, the mass changes. Every day that creeps toward a firm deadline decreases the volume.

If you’re really smart, you’ll charge based on pressure: amount of work vs. the amount of time.
This brings us to my favorite standby—fast, good, cheap: pick any two. Ultimately, these factors equate to quality, time, and price. Find out what’s most important at the beginning (and your quality is less variable than you realize) and adjust accordingly.