The Power of a Four Minute Business Proposal

General George Marshall helped save the world when he delivered an impromptu three minute speech that convinced Franklin Roosevelt to increase military spending on the eve of America’s entry into WWII. It took him just three minutes to deliver a forceful and effective speech on a critical topic, and if he could do that, surely you can sell your business proposal in four.

I wrote a previous post about the Four Minute Men who helped to mobilize public opinion during the first World War, and in this post I want to bring it to your day to day work level and urge you to accept the challenge to design your next important business presentation to fit into a four minute window.

It won’t be easy but if you can pull it off, you—and your audience—will benefit hugely from greater clarity, creativity and credibility.

Brevity drives clarity, because it forces you to skim off the crud and the clutter that can hide your meaning. The discipline of fitting your idea into a tight package forces you to think very carefully about every word and sentence to be sure that it fits with your message and adds value to your audience. It also forces you to reveal the bare bones structure of your logic. That serves as a road map that your listeners can follow to figure how you’re getting from A to B in the neatest and cleanest possible way.

Constraints force creativity. It’s no accident that some of the most sublime words in English are written under the severe constraints of poetic meter and rhyme; and it’s also well known in software circles that coders with hardware constraints produce more elegant and cleaner code. As a recent Inc. article states: “With constraints, you dedicate your mental energy to acting more resourcefully. When challenged, you figure out new ways to be better.” It works because it forces you to dig deeper into your own mind for the good stuff. Our brains are lazy, so our first thoughts on anything as we begin our initial “data dump” are necessarily the easiest, which also means the shallowest and sloppiest.

Finally, Brevity makes you credible. The simple fact that you’re expressing creative ideas clearly is going to be a refreshing differentiator to your listeners, but you also get two added benefits: first, you will know your stuff cold, which means you can express it more fluently—you’re not going to be stammering and spewing out filler words. and especially—you won’t have to use your slides as a crutch. Second, it makes you credible because you sound like you know what you’re talking about,  because you’re using plain and direct language.

Of course, there are some downsides to a four minute presentation:

• You won’t be able to spend a lot of time touting your credentials or telling your corporate story.
• You won’t be able to crack too many of your favorite jokes.
• You won’t be able to pack your deck with tons of slides that you’ve lovingly crafted.

Seriously, there is one important concern you might have, and I do need to address it. While you can certainly get the big picture across in four minutes, a lot of proposals hinge on lots of small details, especially when you have a room full of diverse stakeholders. And those take time.

And I actually agree with you. I’m not saying that those four minutes will be enough for the actual decision, but they are critical to starting off your proposal on the right foot. Ideally, a presentation is the setup, and the prelude to the real conversation and deliberation that goes in to making important decisions. Besides, I firmly believe the 80/20 rule applies to presentations; you can give them 80% of the value in the first four minutes and use the rest of the time to give them the additional 20% that they want answered before they decide.

So, prepare a crisp four minute presentation, but then be prepared for the deep dive and the tough questions that you’re almost guaranteed to get.[1]

But if you’ve been clear, creative, and credible—and you haven’t wasted anyone’s time doing it, you will go into the deep dive with a huge advantage.

[1] By the way, even if you’re expected to give a 60 minute presentation, put together a 4 minute version first, and then set it aside. I guarantee that the second will flow so much more easily, and will be much tighter as a result.