If you have a good business idea and need to run it past your colleagues and seniors in the organization, there’s nothing better to put it down in a PowerPoint presentation. With the help of the presentation, it will become easier for you to explain what the concept is, how the company can make it work, as well as counter the threats that might exist. The basic reason why PowerPoint presentations are so widely used for these sorts of activities is that it is possible to lay out the bare bones of the topic in a graphic form that is easily understood by the audience so that they can comprehend and respond to it instantaneously. The feedback you get can then be incorporated into the detailed plan that you would need to prepare for the usual clearances before implementation.
For the business plan presentation to be effective, you need to be extremely clear about what you want to present while not making it too detailed as this is likely to confuse your audience. You should limit the number of slides to the minimum without cramming in too much detail in each slide. Ideally, the length of the presentation should be limited to 15-20 minutes to ensure that the attention of the audience does not waver, and irrelevant discussions do not creep in. Here’s how you could structure your presentation:
Introduction
In the very first slide, you should introduce very briefly the concept and your name and contact details. This will ensure that the audience knows who you are and what you are going to talk about. Think of it as the cover of a book that indicates the nature of the contents within. One of the very good ways of making your presentation look extremely professional and not something you have cobbled together in a hurry is by using powerslides.com. With the help of templates, you can make all your slides look uniform with the titles and content not floating around from one slide to another.
The Market Demand
In the next slide, you can inform the audience regarding the demand of a market that lies untapped. You can make it more convincing by quoting any statistics or results of surveys that may have been carried out by you or others. The purpose of this slide is to inform the audience of business potential. Do not make the mistake of quoting too many statistics as this will tend to confuse the audience and provoke others to start a debate comparing one statistic to another.
The Solution
After having aroused the audience’s curiosity with the analysis of the gap, you should immediately thereafter come up with what your idea of an effective, profitable and enduring solution is. You need to make sure that the suggested solution is practical and does not require a massive amount of investment to be made.
Profitability
Now that you have outlined your solution to the problem, you need to make a summary of the financial projections. The audience will want to know how the project will make money, what the pricing of the product or service is going to be and what sort of sales are expected in 3/5/10 years time horizon.
Operation Details
Now that you have managed to get your audience really interested in the new business, it’s time to share some of the operational details. This will show to them that you have taken the trouble of evaluating the project in detail. Talk about the sales – specify what sort of retail network would work best. Specify the sort of suppliers available in the market or if you are planning to develop a supply source dedicated to the company. This portion could take up a few slides as you don’t want to cram too much in one slide. Use graphics wherever possible to keep the interest level high.
The Marketing Plan
Show how you would like to cover the market in various phases, and the possible entry barriers that could be faced. Share details of how the target audiences could be communicated with print, Internet, and social media campaigns, and how street-level activation could be done with out-of-home and point-of-sale publicity.
The Next Step
Round up your presentation with a short discussion of what needs to be done so that the new business can start operating at the earliest. Talk about prototyping, test-marketing and capacity building as well as the human resource and financial investment required.
Author bio: John Tyson is a merchant banker who needs to attend a large number of presentations on new business ideas. He frequently takes time out to mentor young entrepreneurs on how to structure business plan presentations well. Among the many tips, he suggests, the use of PowerPoint templates ranks very high.