Budget Season Foundations  #5:  Approval of your Big Idea

Budget Season Foundations 5:  Approval of your Big Idea

Through the first four budget season foundations series, we identified your annual revenue goal, we identified 3-5 big ideas, we gained cross-functional alignment on the idea, and then modeled various iterations of the impact of your big idea.

Now it is time to close the deal and gain approval of your big idea from your executive leaders.  

From my career in the shark tank of needing to know why things were good in the business, why things missed the mark, and ultimately pitching big ideas on a recurring basis to drive growth that ultimately supported the stock price, I learned and adopted the below approach. 

Step 1:  Prepare, Prepare, Prepare

Preparation is critical to your big idea’s success.   You likely have an overabundance of information.  The key here is to synthesize and simplify all your information into a very simple story. 

Story you say?   Yes- a story.  

Executives have very large jobs, with responsibilities across many different disciplines.   From my experience you need to:

·        Quickly capture their attention

·        Clearly describe the problem your big idea will solve

·        State your solution (with the financial impacts to the business) 

And a quick insight from my experience:  when developing your story- I like to use KISS approach:  Keep It Simple Stupid

Step 2:  Develop a simple executive level deck (3-5 slides)

 You might be thinking, how in the world can I boil down all this information into 3-5 slides?   This is where you need to put the KISS approach into action.   

I use this approach that I learned and adopted during my 8 years of my monthly and quarterly shark tank sessions. 

·        Slide 1:  Executive Overview

·        Slide 2:  The Analytics

·        Slide 3:  The Outcomes and the request for approval

Above shows a 3-slide solution.   Can you have more slides?  Yes, but I would not go beyond 5 slides total.  Remember, the slides are the leave behinds that carry the story.   YOU need to tell the story and YOU need to close the deal.

Now, can you have an appendix or supplemental documents?   ABSOLUTELY.  These supplemental documents are great to have readily available if a leader wants to see additional details.  

However, when you think about what the physical presentation of your big idea pitch, remember the  KISS approach.

Step 3:  Be prepared to have your idea challenged…for all the right reasons.

Out of all my big idea pitches in my career, I would say maybe once or twice did I not have any questions from my executive leaders to a challenge idea, the financials, or the approach.   Expect to be challenged.   And this is a GOOD THING!

Remember your audience.   They have big jobs and have different visibility into the business that you likely do not have visibility into.   If they choose to approve your big idea, they need to make sure this is the right decision and the right time for this big idea.      

And most importantly:  do not take a challenge personally!   Accept the challenge and hit a home run!

This approach has served me well throughout my career, is actionable, and is completely within your circle of control.   I encourage you to use it the next time you need to pitch a big idea to your executive team.