Most of my work is with companies past this stage: real revenue, real teams, real scaling problems. But every one of those companies had to clear this bar first, and I still see founders three years in who never did. So here’s the test I give people at the idea stage, before the business plan, before the logo, long before the ad budget.
At a backyard BBQ, could a friend describe your business in two sentences? And would the people listening lean in?
If the answer is no, you don’t have clarity yet. And your idea has no business hitting social media, a sales deck, or an ad budget until it does.
Two sentences or you’re not ready
Here’s a pass: “Classic wedding cars for photoshoots, engagements, and send-offs. We bring the car to the venue and make your photos timeless.”
Two sentences. Anyone at the BBQ could repeat it tomorrow. You can picture the customer, the moment, and the money changing hands. Nobody has to ask a clarifying question before they get it.
Now compare that to what most founders say when someone asks what they do. Three minutes of context. A category explanation. The words “platform” and “solution” doing heavy lifting. By the time they land the plane, the listener has mentally left for the cooler. That founder doesn’t have a marketing problem. They have a clarity problem, and no amount of ad spend fixes a message that can’t survive a casual conversation.
Why the BBQ, specifically
The BBQ is the honest room. Nobody there is being paid to listen. Nobody’s polite attention is on the line the way it is with investors or employees. If your idea can hold interest between bites of a burger, it can hold interest anywhere. If it can’t, the market will tell you the same thing, just slower and at much greater expense.
There’s a second layer, too. The test isn’t whether you can explain the business. You built it; of course you can. The test is whether someone else can pass it along. Word of mouth is repetition by amateurs. If your message needs an expert to deliver it, it doesn’t travel. A confused mind doesn’t buy, and a confused friend doesn’t refer.
How to know you’re failing
The signs are consistent. Your own team gives different answers when asked what the company does. Explaining the business takes more than thirty seconds, and you can feel attention slipping. People respond with “interesting” instead of a follow-up question; “interesting” is how polite people say “I don’t get it.” And referrals are rare even though customers say they’re happy, because they can’t repeat the pitch, so they don’t.
Passing it
Write the two sentences. Sentence one: who it’s for and what they get. Sentence two: what makes it worth choosing. No category jargon, no adjectives doing the work that nouns and verbs should do.
Then run the actual test. Say it to someone outside your industry and watch their face, not their manners. Leaning in looks like a follow-up question: “How much does that cost?” “Does that work for corporate events?” Questions mean the idea landed and their brain is already playing with it.
If you get blank nods, don’t defend the pitch. Rewrite it. Most founders fail the BBQ test not because the business is bad but because they’re describing the machinery instead of the outcome. Cut everything the customer doesn’t care about, which is most of it, and try again.
The principle underneath this doesn’t retire when you grow, either. If people can’t repeat it, it doesn’t spread; that’s true of a startup pitch, and it’s just as true of a strategy, a core value, or a process rolled out to a 200-person company. Simple travels. Complicated stays home. That idea has a name here: Simplicity Scaling, and it’s doing work at every stage of a business, not just at the BBQ.