Angels Den Blog

If this blog entry were to be jam-packed with terms such as ‘golden parachute’, ‘out of the box’ and ‘low-hanging fruit’, you would probably write it off as a load of old waffle—and no one would blame you. So if you’re an entrepreneur, why should things be any different when you’re stood in front of a panel of business angels whose funding could change the future of your business?

If an entrepreneur explains a new venture using pretentious jargon, business angels will immediately assume that he or she is showing off or lacking in substance. Clever wordplay is no substitute for real acumen and business angels are masters at sniffing out the make-believe from among the moneymakers. Business presentations must be based around solid facts and figures, explained in clear language. Whenever large amounts of money and trust are involved, there can be no ambiguities and everyone must understand each other; otherwise, the risks are too high. Business angels know that communication is one of the most important skills that an entrepreneur must possess—so it’s critical not to blow it at the first hurdle.

Regular viewers of the BBC show Dragons Den will be aware of how irritated these business angels get when some earnest inventor loses his or her nerve, gets tongue-tied and starts dropping in phrases half-remembered from the days of A level Business Studies. The dragons’ reaction is usually along the lines of “Get to the point!” or “Have you or have you not got projected profits for the coming tax year?”.

So is business jargon something new? In fact, it’s believed by some to originate from the ‘technical rhetoric’ of ancient Athens, some time around the fourth century BC. It’s a powerful image: toga-clad Greeks discussing the concept of ‘thinking outside of the box’ in between munching grapes and playing the lute! But we can assume that the business angels of that time had just as little patience for jargon as their modern counterparts.

(Incidentally, ‘thinking outside of the box’ was voted the most annoying piece of business jargon in a recent British poll conducted by YouGov. Forty-nine per cent of respondents picked this as their pet hate, although 20 per cent actually believed that knowledge of jargon—or ‘buffling’, as some call it—would help them to progress in their careers. Forty-six per cent said that the disease had spread beyond the office, with ‘touch base’, ‘blue-sky thinking’, ‘360-degree thinking’ and ‘singing from the same hymn sheet’ now being bandied about at home, in the pub and on the golf course.)

Perhaps this blog has slightly confused business jargon with business clichés for comic effect—but the two have become inseparable. Nowhere is this truer than in all of the talk around the current ‘credit crunch’ (or ‘recession’, as we are now being told to call it). The media are happy to mix up specialist terminology (‘collateralised debt obligation’) with meaningless frivolities (‘smashed piggy bank’), without caring whether anyone understands any of it at all. The point that entrepreneurs should remember, then, is this: when it comes to attracting the investments of business angels, there’s no substitute for plain speaking.