I’ve been a screenwriter for almost 20 years and have taught screenwriting for half that long. The elements of dramatic storytelling that all screenwriters learn from day one are equally important and relevant to entrepreneurs. When I coach entrepreneurs and executives preparing for high-stakes presentations, this is where we start. The five essential presentation components are as follows:
Passion – Why tell us this story? Why should an investor care? Your story must be appealing, personal, and original. If it’s important to us, it better be important to you.
Former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill used to ask local Democratic committees to host his fundraising events at a place of local significance. He would open his remarks with what that local place and its history meant to him. This homage to a place of local sentiment created a rapport that made people open their wallets and donate to the party.
Hero – Who will lead us? The answer to that question creates audience buy-in. We love to root for the underdog. Are you passionate enough to take a risk? Why should an investor shoulder risk if you won’t?
Ronald Reagan used heroes to make abstract or difficult concepts concrete. Reagan would point to an “American Hero” placed at the edge of the Congressional Gallery who exemplified an issue’s human face: a single mother without health care, or a wounded veteran.
Antagonist – What are the threats you or your venture face? For a doctor, the threat is disease. For passengers aboard the Titanic, it’s the onrushing and frigid seas.
In the stellar 1984 Apple Super Bowl commercial, the antagonist was IBM (the PC).
Awareness – What did you learn? What’s that Eureka moment when you knew you had something, and you knew what you had to do?
Dr. Alexander Fleming discovered a mold that had blown into one of his petri dishes. He was looking for a way to kill germs. He had tried for ten years, and overnight, the winds brought him the answer in the form of a spore that settled in the uncovered dish and grew to become a colony that eradicated the deadly staph colonies within the dish. That was his Eureka moment, even though it took another decade to figure out how to produce penicillin in mass quantities. Fleming was knighted and won the Nobel Prize in medicine.
Transformation – Make no mistake, this is an opportunity to define yourself as a leader. How will you save the world (and make your investors rich along the way)?
As ever-quotable Winston Churchill once said, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
