Oh, the Elevator Speech!
At some point in our entrepreneurial journey, we are told we must develop, refine and utilize our specific Elevator Speech if we are to get people to understand what our business does. If you haven’t heard of this term before, Balance.com defines the Elevator Speech as “a quick synopsis of your background and experience.” I can’t think of a business owner training I attended in the last few years that didn’t reference the Elevator Speech.
Bottom line: it is an important tool to use to get our business and brand into people’s consciousness.
No matter how well-crafted your Elevator Speech is, you risk it sounding hollow and canned if you don’t understand why you do what you do. When you are able to fully embrace and own the “why”, then when you are then asked “what do you do”, your answer will sound much more convincing and true than if you respond with some bland lines. As a customer, wouldn’t you rather hear someone tell you about their business with excitement in their voice rather than just a boring explanation?
MY WHY
I am an Accredited Financial Counselor and have been since 2012. I am the least likely person I know to have chosen a career in personal finance. When I was growing up in a single-parent home, I struggled in school but especially with math. So when I went to college, I picked Political Science and not anything math-related as my major. My college education did not prepare me to get involved in financial education and counseling.
Several years later, I was now married and living in Hawaii while my husband was on active duty with the US Coast Guard. I was a graduate student at the University of Hawaii and hoping to use my graduate degree to become a public sector mediator. As a way of getting more experience in the field, I signed up for a course in community mediation. For the practical experience part of the course, I was assigned as a volunteer mediator in Honolulu small claims court. My job was to help plaintiffs and defendants come to a mutually agreed upon, written resolution so that they could avoid having the judge decide who would win and who would lose. It was not an easy job.
What surprised me was how many military service members I met as defendants.
Before working in the court, I had assumed that all military members received financial education in boot camp. After mediating several cases, I quickly learned that this wasn’t the case. Also, I was doing this work in 2005 at the peak of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. The saddest conversations I had were with service members trying to get their court cases resolved before their imminent overseas deployment because they didn’t want to leave any loose ends for their loved ones to deal with in case they themselves didn’t return.
My work as a volunteer court mediator changed my life completely.
I decided that I needed to do something about the financial illiteracy I saw in many of the people who appeared in court. I didn’t know what exactly I was going to do, but being a mediator was all of a sudden off the table. I couldn’t forget the suffering I saw in the faces and voices of people who had made bad choices partly because they didn’t have the proper information to begin with.
I made a determination that I would change the trajectory around discussing money openly and do all I could to make sure that all who needed financial education received it. I still carry this determination today, and it informs all the decisions I make about my work and my career progression. For example, I am not willing to sell financial or insurance products as some financial advisers do, as it does not align with my values and goals for my business.
You can clearly see with my description, why I am so motivated to work in financial counseling. I was so passionate about taking on financial illiteracy that years ago, I ran for a contested seat on my local school board in my small Massachusetts town on financial literacy education for high school students platform, and I won the seat after a vote recount!
You don’t have to run for elected office though to demonstrate your passion for your work. You just have to remember and remind yourself what your passion and motivation was, what your “why” is, and then bring it back to the forefront of everything you do in your business. This should give you the perfect starting point on crafting your elevator speech.
You are the best champion of your business, and your elevator speech should reflect that.
People need what you have to offer, but they won’t know it until you tell them about it including why it’s valuable and important to them. Choose to be your biggest cheerleader because as the line in the poem Our Deepest Fear by Marriane Williamson says, “We are all meant to shine!”
Dawn Torres-Gale is an Accredited Financial Counselor® and the Single Owner-Member of Our Money Goals, LLC. Our Money Goals mission is to help individuals and couples build their household assets through the identification of specific financial goals and the creation of detailed action plans in support of those goals.
In 2008 Ms. Torres-Gale was chosen by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) Foundation to be part of a select group of military spouses who received FINRA sponsored training from the Association of Financial Counseling, Planning and Education to become an Accredited Financial Counselor®. Ms. Torres-Gale received her certification as an Accredited Financial Counselor® in February 2012. Since becoming an AFC®, Ms. Torres-Gale has worked as a Personal Financial Counselor with the Massachusetts National Guard and the Naval Operational Support Center in Portland, Oregon. In 2018 she spent three months providing financial education and counseling services to soldiers stationed at US Army Garrison Wiesbaden in Germany.
Ms. Torres-Gale has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from San Francisco State University and a Master of Public Administration degree from the University of Hawaii, Manoa. Ms. Torres-Gale has served as a district court mediator in Honolulu, Hawaii from 2003-2005 and as an elected member of the Wachusett Regional School Committee representing the Town of Holden, Massachusetts from 2009-2012. She is the spouse of LCDR Christopher A. Gale, USCG (Ret.), and the mother of three daughters, ages 28, 18, and 15 yrs. old.
