The very first thing Jacob and I did, at the beginning of 2018 (besides me getting deathly ill), was put together a presentation for the Lubbock Chapter of 1 Million Cups.
I’m going to be completely honest here: when we were asked to apply to present, my initial reaction was to roll my eyes and shrug my shoulders and think, “I guess so. It’s something to do.”
I wasn’t excited about it, but, hey, it was an opportunity to maybe network with a few businesses and make some connections.
Then we booked for their first meet-up of the year. January 3rd, 2018. Great…. Two days after New Year’s Day, what a waste of time. Nobody is going to be there.
Flash backward. December 29th, 2017, Jacob and I are driving down to Odessa to shoot for the Permian Tennis ad, and it was a good opportunity to finalize our presentation. Cutting it close? Yeah, but, honestly, we just wanted to get it over with.
Jacob and I had, a few weeks earlier, built the skeleton for the presentation, and, Jacob, bless his heart, had fleshed it out in a nice document. After some discussion, we arrived at the conclusion that I would present/speak, and he would run the slides, since he didn’t want to speak. At that point, I virtually trashed everything that he had worked hard on writing. (To Jacob: I apologize for turning your work into a waste of time.) But, this was because, if I was going to get up and speak, I had to follow my own train of thought and logic processes because I didn’t want to be tied to a document and for the presentation to be stale because I was reading (yeah, I’ve done that before).
So, I took the 3 key points that we landed on and tried to tie them into a story format that my ADHD brain could easily follow.
Wait a minute, you said you didn’t really care about the presentation, what does it matter? One of the things I’ve developed with our work ethic is that, no matter how little something means to us, we will give it everything we’ve got (within reason, of course) because that mindset sets us up for success every time.
I hope you’re still following, even though, I haven’t arrived at the point yet, but, hang on, I’ll get there and it will be worth it!
The tough thing about this presentation was that we weren’t there to present about our business, per se. We needed a presentation that would offer useful information up to a group of small business leaders and entrepreneurs. Now, we can talk about our business and industry all day long, but, to talk about general business concepts? Count me out… Except, we signed up for it and now I have to… Yet, I digress.
Onward to the point!
A few weeks prior, Jacob and I had talked with a friend and mentor, Kyle Bullock, about some business coaching that he was working on putting together. Since he had coached us in previous years, he wanted to follow up and see if we had progressed, lost ground, or just hadn’t moved at all. To his surprise, we had moved forward, quite a ways in our business model and he shed some light on some of the key, foundational points that put us where we are. Those instantly became our presentation points.
Flash forward to the presentation, I had honed my story, and I was actually excited because I sounded like I actually knew what I was talking about.
The deal was, we had 6-ish minutes to present followed by a 20-minute Q&A session. However, the other presenter that morning was in the ER, so, we were given free reign to extend our presentation and really dive in with the Q&A.
Long story short, there was a good size group that morning and the presentation was excellent. And now for the shocking revelation. I WAS WRONG. I was wrong to think that the presentation was going to be a waste of time. It was incredibly valuable for us and, if I do say so myself, we rocked it!
Over the next couple of weeks, I want to dive into the points of our presentation.
I also want to point out that, while I didn’t get to any of those points in this post, I hope that you have gleaned that there is value in everything you do, even if it’s something that you think it will be a waste of time.
In the meantime, I will give you the three points of our presentation to give you a clue as to what’s coming:
- Know what you are
- Know what you’re not
- Learn the power of “no”/ stand up for yourself
I firmly believe that every one of these points is something every small business owner/entrepreneur struggles with. I can’t guarantee we will solve your problems, but, at least, we can unpack these concepts and give you somewhere to start as you move forward in your journey.
In the next post, I will jump into the first point of our presentation. At the end, I will do my best to include the Q&A part of our presentation because there were a lot of good questions.
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