Grounded Growth™
How to Explain What You Do in Six Seconds
I built this pitch for someone I love, after watching him lose a job he couldn’t put into words.
If someone asked you right now, “what do you do?” could you answer in 6 seconds? Not 10 minutes. Not a paragraph. 6 seconds.
Most founders can’t. Here’s the 3-part fix, and the real reason I built it.
I help [PERSON] solve [PROBLEM] through [PROMISE].
Say it out loud. If it takes longer than 6 seconds, it’s not done yet. Here’s where that formula came from.
Why did I start building this system at all?
Not long after our daughter Jolie was born, my husband Shane lost his job. He’d worked at the same manufacturing company for 10 years. He’d just taken time off to care for our newborn.
The letter they gave him pointed to his time off as the reason for letting him go, instead of properly offering him the leave the law requires for that.
We talked to a lawyer. We were told our choices were to take a small severance or spend years and everything we had fighting a case with no guarantee. We took the severance. We licked our wounds.
I had been planning to go back for my own master’s degree. Instead, we redirected that plan and put Shane through his: a master’s in technology commercialization.
Here’s the part that stuck with me. Even after he finished it, degree in hand, Shane still couldn’t say what he did. Ask him “what do you do?” and you’d get 10 minutes of process, specs, and the name of whoever he worked for. Never his own value, in his own words.
Watching someone I love be unable to say what he did, even with an advanced degree, is what made me start building a system that could fix that. Not for a business. For him, first.
How did testing a pitch like a science experiment fix it?
This was 2014, during the Lean Startup era. I’d spent years volunteering deep in Austin’s tech circles, deep in the early Lean Startup movement, and I kept seeing the same method work: you don’t guess your way to clarity. You test it, one variable at a time, the way you’d test a product.
So I asked: what if a pitch works the same way? What if I treated Shane’s message like an experiment instead of a speech?
So I stopped fixing his whole speech and changed one variable at a time. First just the person: not “companies,” but the specific founder who needed him. Then the problem. Then the promise. When one part landed, I locked it and moved to the next.
The Six Second Pitch™
Person, Problem, Promise. Change one at a time until it lands.
Person
Who is this for? Not “everyone who needs manufacturing help.” One specific person, one specific job.
Problem
What’s the one thing keeping them stuck? Not every problem he could solve. The one that hurt enough to act on.
Promise
What’s the outcome? Not the process. The result they’d feel.
That became the Six Second Pitch. Person, Problem, Promise. It fixed Shane’s pitch. Then I started using it on myself, and on every founder I coached after that.
Why does the promise have to come first?
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When AI helped me build this system, it kept trying to swap the word Promise for something else. Profit. Process. A tidier business word. Every time, I put Promise back. No matter the process or the profit, you make the promise first.
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Then I was reading the book of Judges, and I saw why. Every single judge God used was flawed. Gideon was hiding, afraid, when God called him. Jephthah was an outcast, the son of a prostitute. Samson was a mess, and the strength was never even his to begin with. Not one of them was polished. God chose them because they weren’t perfect.
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The Lord made the promise first. Not because the person was perfect. Because there was a problem in the world he wanted solved, and he gave that ordinary person the calling and the skill to do it.
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That is what Promise is. It is the bedrock. It holds even when the person is flawed, because it never depended on the person being perfect in the first place. It is tied to the person and the problem, so if either one changes, the Promise changes with it. That is why it comes first, before the other three Ps, Product, Process, and Protection, that build the business later.
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A friend of mine put it best when I told her this: if God can use people with that many flaws, the rest of us really don’t have an excuse. We can build something too.
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So when Shane could not say what he did, we did not start with his resume. We started with the promise. You do not have to be polished either. You just have to know the promise you are making, and the calling and skill behind it. It comes first.
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“I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, to work in every craft.” (Exodus 31:3-5, ESV)
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Was I already teaching this before it had a name?
Yes. Around that same Lean Startup era, I taught a session at Capital Factory in downtown Austin. Standing room only. A standing ovation.
Years before AI. Years before this had a name. Founders in that room couldn’t say what they did either, and by the end, they could.
I didn’t call it the Six Second Pitch yet. But it was the same fix. This isn’t a recent pivot. It goes back to a room full of people who needed the same 3 words Shane needed.
Where does this live today?
I still use the exact same 3 parts, now built into a free tool anyone can run in a few minutes: sixsecondpitch.com.
I didn’t want to build something that does your pitch FOR you. I wanted one that works LIKE you do, the same way I worked through it with Shane back in 2014: one variable at a time, until it’s actually yours and actually true.
That is still the whole point. Not a shortcut around clarity. A faster way to the same clarity, tested until it fits in 6 seconds.
Where does this fit if you’ve been following the series?
Everything else I teach sits on top of this. How I use AI (ROOTS vs LIES) and how I pick where to show up (How to Choose the Right Platform for Your Content) both assume one thing is already true: you can say who you help, what you fix, and what you promise.
Without those three, there’s nothing for anything else to stand on.
Shane got his 6 seconds back in 2014. The tool at that link is the same 3 parts, waiting for yours.
Say what you do in 6 seconds. Or find out why you can’t yet.
Run your own message through the free score, then drop your email for the deep report: your real buyer language, your competitor gaps, and your message rewritten in six seconds.
Think of it as a free content marketing team you install once. Five skills that each do one job, and they work together so your message actually sounds like you.
- The Kickoff: learns your brand one time, so you never have to explain it again.
- The Navigator: your project manager. It figures out what you need and hands it to the right skill.
- The Six Second Pitch: your message coach. It scores your pitch and tells you how clear it really is.
- Audience Recon: your researcher. It finds the real words your buyers use before a single word gets written.
- Route Review: your quality checker. It catches what went wrong and fixes it so it does not happen twice.
Frequently asked questions
How do you explain what you do in six seconds?
Use 3 parts: who you help (Person), the real problem they have (Problem), and the outcome you deliver (Promise). Say it as “I help [Person] solve [Problem] through [Promise].” If it takes longer than 6 seconds to say, it isn’t clear yet.
Where did the Six Second Pitch come from?
Dee Patience built it in 2014 to help her husband explain his work, after he lost a job partly because he couldn’t put his own value into words even with an advanced degree. She tested his pitch like a science experiment, one variable at a time, until it landed in 6 seconds.
Is this the same as the full 6P system?
Person, Problem, and Promise are the first half of the 6P system. The second half (Product, Process, Protection) is a separate piece.
Was the Six Second Pitch tested before it was a public framework?
Yes. Dee taught the same fix at a standing-room-only session at Capital Factory in Austin during the Lean Startup era, years before AI and years before the framework had a name.
