Everyone I know is preparing presentations this week–including the Biz Diva. It’s a great opportunity to get your info organized, but I never know where to start.
Chris Brogan has a really helpful post called Make Better Presentations. He reminded me that people like to hear stories. It’s a very human trait. So I’m going to take advantage of that in mine.
Here’s a snippet from Chris on a framework that I used for my presentation:
- Ask your audience a question that frames the speech.
- Tell your audience how you’ll try and answer that question.
- Start with a personal or investigatory story.
- Drill down into the details of how the story applies to your presentation.
- Offer some takeaways or next-actions for this.
- Tell another personal or informational story.
- Repeat the drill down points, the takeaways, etc.
- Thread questions in earlier than the end.
- Finish with a solid set of steps people can use to take action based on your presentation.
Do you have any advice that’s helped you with presentations? Let your fellow entrepreneurs know about it in the comments!
We can complain about the shattered economy or we can take responsibility for our part in it. I choose taking responsibility, because at least I have some power. And it can be the first step in moving on, and in making decisions that will prevent it from happening again.
“It” being debt.
I’m going to start with the easiest to see: abuse of home equity lines of credit. I’m seeing a lot of this around, and there are some tragic stories. I feel sympathy for these women, because we all make mistakes. Where my sympathy ends is when they refuse to see how they were complicit in their own downfall.
Let me introduce you to Sondra No Plan. Remember how easy money was to get? It seemed like a fine thing to do, to start a business using all that lovely home equity. It felt like access to money was unlimited. Who needs a budget? Who needs to do profitability calculations? Who needs a plan? Without a road map, this businesswoman was at the mercy of the shiny objects. Whatever got her attention, that’s where her money went.
And now Sondra’s losing her house, and her business is not viable. She can’t figure out what went wrong.
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