My dad, may he rest in peace, used to have an orchard grafting business. He started out doing pit fruit (plums, peaches) in central California, and as he was expanding the business into the vineyards of western California’s wine country, we would often combine our beach trips with market research, meaning that he would hand a notebook to my brother or me, and we would write down the names of vineyards that we passed, or the names of trucking companies, since they would know who all the players in the area were.

This was one way to do market research in the pre-internet era. Also, now that I have a business of my own, I realize this was probably also a way to write off the beach trip as a business expense.

A side note for those of you not familiar with grafting: Grafting is where you change a tree from one variety to another. With grafting, you could even make a tree that’s growing peaches on one branch and plums on another. In a commercial operation, this would be a terrible idea for a gazillion reasons, but for backyard fun it works just fine.

I worked in that business for many years, starting with the simpler jobs fit for a 10-year-old kid, and eventually working up to the more dangerous (and better-paying) jobs fit for an adult, like chainsawing the orchard. In fact, I spent my 40th birthday chainsawing. You know how they say the work is never done on a farm? It’s absolutely true, even on your 40th birthday.

There are other, more thought-through and strategic, ways to do market research, ways more “official” and “business-like” than having your kids write things down in a notebook while you keep your eyes on the road. Alper and I recently discussed this, and other things, on the podcast with Rick Pizzoli, CEO of Sales Force Europe. In this short, Rick goes into one aspect of researching a new market:

(BTW, for the presentation geeks in the audience, keep reading, I’m going to bring market research around to presentation skills, I swear.)

Now for what all this market-research talk has to do with presentations: If you are going into a new market, your investors are going to want you to explain what you are doing. You are going to need at least three slides in order to do so: 1. Customer description, 2. Problem, 3. Solution. Sometimes the customer description slide will come third, not first, depending on the flow of the rest of your presentation.

Hopefully, if you have done your job, you wont be able to cram everything onto those three slides, so you are also going to need some handouts (supplementary pdfs, stapled takeaways, etc) so you have some visuals to assist you during the deep dive into the more granular data that some of the investors are going to want to do.