Making sure your business plan is understood
Here’s a great tip I hadn’t seen before, straight from review of a business plan submitted for funding. Embed a link to a video from within the business plan.
This particular business plan had a link to a Vimeo video on their cover page. The video used icons to represent constituencies and functions of their service. Combined with a voice-over describing how everything worked together, it was a very effective way at helping me understand how they intended their service to work.
There are lots of ways to skin this cat, but YouTube and Vimeo stand out as two good places to start. YouTube for name recognition, and Vimeo for some of it’s added features at the paid “plus” level. With the cost of electronics so cheap these days, it doesn’t take a ton of money to buy a digital video camera to shoot a pitch video. If your pitch is more suited to a presentation, then there a tons of free utilities out there to help you put it together.
Here’s some suggestions that came to mind today while reviewing this plan:
- If you’re going to go to the trouble of creating a video and linking to it, make sure you highlight the link so it’s noticeable. This particular plan had the link in a couple sentences at the bottom of the plan’s cover page. Not a place I normally look when reviewing a plan. If it hadn’t been mentioned later in the document, I would never had seen it.
- Make sure the video is professional: looks professional, sounds professional, IS professional. At the stage where potential investors are reviewing your business plan, they are looking for a reason to to say no. They would never tell you that; that’s why I am. For example, don’t do this!
- Since most of the time you will be delivering your business plan electronically through E-Mail, consider embedding video directly in the plan. Even more useful, consider a series of short video snippets to help explain various elements of your business plan. Be careful though. Many times business plans are read off-line with no internet connection, and embedding the full video directly in the plan may bloat your file size. I would consider this a rifle shot trick, not a shotgun.
- Alternatively, create a video series about your startup on the platform of your choice and provides an overview of the videos and link from within your business plan. Since the videos are hosted online, you don’t have to worry about bandwidth or access.
- As illustrated by the picture above, video can go lots of places. Think about ways to creatively re-use your video once you’re satisfied with it (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, attached to online submissions, etc.)
Finally, I’d just like to remind you of that old saying “You only get one chance at a first impression.” This is just another way of re-itering the point I made in #2 above: if you can’t create a top notch video in support of your search for funding, then either get someone else to do them, or don’t do them at all.
How about you entrepreneurs out there? Has anyone every used video during the funding process? What was your experience – did it help or hurt? If you are currently seeking funding, what are your thoughts on using video as part of the process?
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I like this idea a lot Dave. I’d like to try it out! As you say, the video has to be professional – if it looks sloppy then this can speak volumes (in the eyes of your prospect) about the approach to your work.