The business plan presentation is an animal unto itself. Unlike marketing presentations (which depend upon emotional resonance, flair, branding and messaging) and sales presentations (which depend on logic, pricing, features and benefits), the business plan presentation requires a great deal of objectivity, sensibility and transparency. Basically, it should be de-marketed and un-sales-ed.
Ok. So why is that?
A business plan is almost always, in the end, a request for investment. The investment may be investors’ money or company resources, but when you present a business plan, you’re asking for something more than a mere purchase. You’re asking for implicit trust and faith.
Credibility is a key component of the business plan presentation, so it’s critical that the person delivering it be the most credible person on the team. It’s rarely effective to resort to such lines as, “I shared this with a group of doctors the other day, and they were amazed!”. Credibility must be present in order to be confirmed. Most investors and company managers know that when it comes to allocating cash or resources, accountability is always high. They will not go along with the plan if they don’t trust the presenter.
Therefore, it follows that while these kinds of presentations can be fun and entertaining, those qualities should be incidental or peripheral rather than central to the presentation. In marketing, people will genuinely become loyal to a product or service solely because they identify with it. But no one is writing big checks just because of their solidarity with your sense of humor.
Efforts at objectivity and transparency are often rewarded when presenting a business plan. One key way of leveraging objectivity in the presentation is to present your business plan in the context of all the other paths you tried to take before picking the one you’re presenting. This will blow up in your face if you’re lazy and did no investigations, research, attempts or trial runs, but if you did and things failed, those failures serve as an endorsement for the plan you’re presently presenting. It’s comforting, as an investor, to know that all possibilities were considered and even tested before the one being looked at emerged as the best possible outcome.
Along the same lines, transparency inspires trust by making the audience feel like they’re getting the full scoop. When people don’t know what they don’t know, they tend to be guarded and cautious. So go ahead and tell them all the unknowns and the weak parts in the plan. Share with them what you’re doing to strengthen the weaknesses, but don’t try to hide them. The more you operate on an ethic of full disclosure, the more you’ll gain their trust.
The business plan presentation relies on facts and figures, objectivity, transparency, sensibility and all that. But all those things in a deck do not make a great business plan. Ultimately, plans in general rise and fall on the personal accountability of the person who is implementing them. Therefore, it’s critical that while you demonstrate the soundness of your plan, you also demonstrate and convey your personal track record of executing, seeing things through, going down with the ship, etc. A truly influential investor or company manager knows that every plan has it’s strengths and it’s weaknesses, and the only dependable factor is the person who is responsible for the end result.
Question: How do you demonstrate personal accountability for the plans you advocate for?
