6 Steps to Creating a Pitch Competition in Your School

The most useful three weeks of my high school career were the ones I spent preparing for the University of Missouri's Entrepreneurship Quest pitch competition. I placed second. The prize money mattered, but what mattered more was that I came out of those three weeks a different person — more confident, clearer in my thinking, and capable of explaining my company in a way that hadn't been possible before. That experience is what sold me on pitch competitions as one of the highest-leverage events any school can host.

If you're a teacher, principal, or community organizer thinking about running one for the first time, here are the six steps I'd walk through.

The Six Steps

Step 1: Pick a date and commit to it. The single biggest mistake schools make with pitch competitions is endless planning. Pick a date six to ten weeks out and announce it. The deadline forces decisions that would otherwise drag on forever. This is the entrepreneurial principle behind the whole thing — you don't wait until you're ready, you commit and then figure out the rest.

Step 2: Define the format clearly. A typical setup: students form teams of two to four. Each team has the prep window to develop a product or business idea. Each team gets 60 to 90 seconds to pitch, followed by 2 to 3 minutes of judge questions. Judges score on a few clear dimensions — clarity of the idea, strength of the value proposition, quality of execution thinking, how well the team handled questions. Don't over-engineer the rubric. A simple, clear rubric beats an elaborate one every time. My piece on how to host a pitch competition covers more variations on this format.

Step 3: Recruit outside judges. This is the step that most schools shortcut, and the one that matters most. Bring in real people from outside the school — local business owners, university professors, parents who run their own companies, alumni who've started ventures. Outside judges raise the stakes in a way internal judges can't. The feedback hits differently when it comes from a stranger who doesn't already know the students. Aim for three to five judges. Coach them briefly on how to ask challenging questions without humiliating teams.

Step 4: Build in prep support. Don't just announce the competition and disappear for six weeks. Build in checkpoints — a weekly office hour, a mid-prep workshop, a practice pitch session two weeks before the event. The support keeps students moving forward and prevents the avoidable problem of teams showing up unprepared. The prep is part of the learning, not just the competition itself. This is also a great context for using tools like Products: The Card Game as warm-up activities — students can practice the mechanics of pitching in low-stakes formats before the real competition.

Step 5: Make the event feel like an event. Setting matters. A pitch competition held in a regular classroom feels like a regular classroom. A pitch competition held in an auditorium with a real stage, a printed program, and parents in the audience feels like an event. The difference in student energy is enormous. You don't need a big budget to create event-feel — you just need to treat the moment as significant. Students rise to whatever bar you set with the production values.

Step 6: Debrief seriously after the event. The pitches themselves are exciting, but the real learning often happens when participants reflect on their performance afterward. Build in 15-20 minutes of debrief at the end. Have judges share one specific thing each team did well and one thing they'd push them on. Have teams compare notes with each other. The feedback loop is where students actually become better entrepreneurs. Skip this step and you've held an event. Include it and you've taught a lesson.

What I'd Tell First-Time Hosts

If this is your first pitch competition, the single most important thing I can tell you is that the event doesn't need to be polished to be powerful. My first pitch competition wasn't. I stumbled through my own slides, used jargon I didn't fully understand, and ran over time. I still walked out a different person than I'd walked in. That's the magic of the format. Once students have stood up and pitched something they cared about to a room of skeptical strangers, they carry it with them. The polish can come in year two.

I'd also tell you to plan for after the event. Many schools treat the competition as an endpoint, but the most impactful programs use it as a starting point. Winners might get connected with mentors. Strong runner-up teams might get invited to actually pursue their ideas with school support. Students who showed promise might be encouraged to apply to entrepreneurship-focused summer programs. The competition is a discovery mechanism for the talent that exists in your school. Use what you find.

This connects to broader work I've written about in how to create a local entrepreneurship group and a full curriculum for high school entrepreneurship class. A pitch competition works best when it's part of a broader entrepreneurship culture, not a one-off event. But you don't have to wait for the culture to exist before you start. Often, the competition is what sparks the culture in the first place.

Pick a date. Define the format. Recruit outside judges. Support the prep. Make it feel like an event. Debrief seriously. That's the whole framework. Everything else you'll figure out as you go.