Hi and welcome back. I'm going to talk now about business proposals and pitches and how do you write one and how do you present something to your funding sources. So the business proposal basically has to be written to get the funding for your project, so you'll need to have a pretty detailed proposal written in order to be able to demonstrate that the project makes sense from a strategic and hopefully economic standpoint. The thing about business proposals is people say what do you write them and what are they for? Well, the only reason you write one is because you want to get something approved by a person that you're presenting to. That's the only real reason you write one of these things. Convince somebody that's listening to the pitch to give you what you want, which is funding. So one of the things I always tell people about proposals is you want to write them not from your perspective but from the perspective of the person you're speaking to, okay? Because they're the ones who have a potentially vested interest in what you're doing, okay. And one of the things I also recommend that if you can find within your organization either a champion or a sponsor for your project, that makes it much more efficient and probably easier to get approval than if you go in cold. So at the end of the proposal, you want to put together a pitch deck. The pitch deck basically is used to present your project or your idea to your funding source. You want to describe what's the opportunity that you're going after, what problems are you solving, how does your service or your product solve the problem? Then you want to introduce who are going to be involved in executing the strategy that you need to get this project done in an efficient and effective way. So other things to think about when you're writing a business proposal, which we'll get into a little bit more detail later in another lecture, is that you're competing against other people within your organization for the same funds. Your capital budget funds or your operating expense funds are not unlimited. So you're competing against other people even though you're within an organization. You want to be able to show to the funding source that you can actually deliver on what you're saying you're going to do, that's in a way which says I have a team that can execute, you've done it before, perhaps, or if not, you've put together people with complimentary skill sets that actually can get the strategies executed. Then you want to make sure that if you do find a business sponsor or internal champion, you want to have that person involved. Hopefully they could even come to the pitch session. And then I always tell people, limit your pitch deck to a finite number of slides, because you have a limited amount of time and you want to get to the important points. If you have a lot of information you want to have available but don't think you have the time to present them. Put them in an appendix, and if you're asked a question about something that you don't have in the deck you can always go to the appendix and pull it up and then answer the question. So we'll get into a little bit more detail later about what I think the pitch deck should be and what the proposals are, but that's an overview.
