The cold, hard truth of the business world is that you have to find someone willing to front you the capital to let you capitalize on your blockbuster idea.

There’s nothing in the world of business that’s worth more than a great idea. So why isn’t that enough to get a new enterprise off the ground?

Unless you’re one of those rare entrepreneurs with a Howard Hughes-style bankroll, the cold, hard truth of the business world is that you have to find someone willing to front you the capital to let you capitalize on your blockbuster idea. Like the Lone Ranger, venture capitalists (VCs) can come riding out of the horizon to give you that needed escort into the promised land, but there’s no such thing as a free ride. Those who have been through the process on both ends of the deal say there’s more to making VCs open up their checkbooks than a killer idea, and sometimes they will walk right out the door if it’s clear you haven’t done your homework.

Let’s say you’ve been working as a window washer for the past 10 years for InterSqueegee Inc., a big corporate window washing firm. While working downtown one morning on a streak-free 27th floor, you hit upon what you think is a great idea – singing window washers. You think it would be great for business, but your boss won’t hear of it, so you turn in your rag and bucket and start off with an idea for your own company. Now comes the tricky part – winning over the VCs.

Venky Harinarayan has been through the process a number of times, most recently to fund his latest start-up, Web page creator Kosmix. He’s also been on the other side of the fence, providing capital to other start-ups as a VC. He says the most important thing a start-up can do when courting VCs is to practice. “It tends to be a little bit of a dance, as with most things,” he says. “You [should] present to VCs who you sort of have a relationship with or you have someone in common with.”

That means using business contacts to find VCs that you can make a no-pressure pitch to. Harinarayan says the advantages to a test run are two-fold. “If you feel like your story is not resonating, you have the chance to change it,” he says. Also, you can get a good idea if your idea is going to make a good impression when it really counts.

“Usually what happens, if you get the first guy excited, you’re going to get [the rest] excited, and if it doesn’t work with the first two or three it won’t work with the rest of them,” Harinarayan says.

Three-Legged Approach
Back to the singing window washer idea; you’ve asked around and found a friend in the soap business who knows a VC he’ll put you in touch with. You can already smell the cigar smoke and feel the VC’s firm handshake. It’s a can’t-lose concept – every building needs window washers, and everyone likes a little music during the workday. You’ll be offering something no other window washer in town does, you’ll be setting a trend, you’ll be franchising within a few months, right?

That could very well be, but Elias Blawie says to make sure you’re standing on solid ground before taking a leap like this. Blawie, co-founder of Heller Ehrman LLP’s Venture Law Group, says a VC pitch is just like a stool – it needs three legs to stand on or it won’t support anything. A good pitch to VCs should include three essential elements, Blawie says: an attractive market, an attractive business proposition and the right team to execute it.

Standing Out
Having an attractive market means knowing the playing field inside and out and being able to describe why your business will stand out. Your singing window washer business might be unique, but in a market where no building is taller than three stories it won’t do you any good. Likewise, a market that already has two or three successful singing window washer companies won’t need a third unless there’s something else that makes it of interest to customers.

Your product or service “has to be cool and has to matter to the customer,” Harinarayan says. It should also be different from what’s already out there in the market. VCs should understand the potential returns from your presentation. He says those making the pitch should be able to couch the pitch in terms of a big payoff. “Everybody understands that a start-up is a bet of sorts,” Harinarayan says. “Where you start losing VCs is when they don’t know what the bet is.”

If you can’t demonstrate that singing window washers will be X times as profitable as a typical window washer, don’t be surprised if they don’t stick around for the rest of the slideshow. Venture capitalists don’t invest out of the goodness of their hearts - they want to back a winner.

Blawie says to remember that you’re not pitching the concept of your company, you’re pitching your company. “You’re focusing on a market and how you will be a sustainable market over the long run,” he says. “You’ll start with a product … but often what I’ve seen is there’s nothing beyond that product.” How your business operates is not a vague idea to be fleshed out later – it should be a detailed part of your pitch from the onset. Blawie says too many start-ups he’s seen relied solely on the novelty of their product or service and paid little or no attention to how they were going to survive as a business.

Team Players
Part of having your business in place is having the right team behind your idea. Harinarayan says the right team is so important, it can trump the other aspects of the pitch. He says he’s heard pitches from software start-ups with such talent behind the idea that it became the sole reason to invest. “Some of them, the quality of the team was so high, we said we wanted to invest no matter what they were doing,” he says.

However, the opposite is also true, Blawie says. “Sometimes VCs won’t fund an idea, they’ll look for a similar idea but with the right team,” he says. Say your window washing start-up has four window washers onboard, but no accountants, no one with human resources experience and no one with any experience dealing with suppliers. That amounts to a lot of window washing experience and little else.

Finally, Blawie says, start-ups should make sure that they can elaborate on their basic idea but also cut to the chase. “A surprising amount of people, when put on the spot, can’t reduce [their pitch] down to three sentences,” he says.

Your start-up might have successfully jumped all these hurdles. The pitch has been made, the proposition was appealing and your team is assembled to make it work. The VC is ready to fund your idea, all’s well that ends well, isn’t it? Harinarayan says getting funding from a VC is not even close to the end. “Selling to the VCs, at the end of the day, it means nothing, it’s not an end in and of itself,” he says. “You’ve got to look at a VC as someone providing fuel for your company for your next run.”