 Some of the wisest advice you'll ever get is when starting a project, it's best to begin at the beginning. This is as true in developing presentations as any other part of life. We have to start somewhere, so oftentimes it's best to start at the start. In this video, we'll discuss the work that goes in to developing your presentation, the important work that you do before you ever get in front of an audience, which is where, in truth, the majority of your presentational work will happen. So let's start with some of the basics that we need to do to get prepared to deliver a business presentation. The first thing we need to identify in delivering a presentation is our general purpose. A general purpose could take many forms. It could be to inform, to persuade, to entertain. Any of these are fine general purposes, but we need to know right from the get-go What is our intended purpose for this speech? Are we simply sharing information with the audience? Or are we trying to persuade them to take a particular action or viewpoint? Or are we simply here to entertain the audience to fill some time and bring some laughter? Or are we paying honor or tribute to a particular person or topic or event? We need to identify very early on what our general purpose is in this presentation that will guide the rest of our preparation process and the rest of our presentation. Once we have the general purpose identified, then we can move on to the specific purpose, which then adds to the general purpose of to inform, to persuade, or so forth. An identification of the audience and an identification of the specific topic area. So, for example, a specific purpose may be to inform my audience about the political career of Ronald Reagan. So there I've identified the general purpose to inform. I've identified the audience just vaguely by saying my audience and recognition that there is an audience, but it could be to inform high school students, to inform my Sunday school class, to inform a group of citizens. Whoever it is, we're going to identify that audience so we know who we're speaking to. And then we're going to identify what our specific purpose is, the political career of Ronald Reagan. So a specific purpose puts all of those things together and continues to narrow our focus from just the broader general purpose into a more specific purpose. Getting prepared also means acknowledging the context and constraints of that presentation. So context, meaning is this presentation for a business setting? Is this presentation for a Sunday school class? Is this a presentation to an elementary school class? That context will determine, by extension then, our use of language, our use of visual aids, and our level at which we approach this topic. So we need to very early on know, okay, who am I speaking to and what is the context for this presentation? And then also the physical setting and things like that for context. But also the constraints. Have we given a time limit for this presentation? Do we need to have this wrapped up within 10 minutes or within an hour or, you know, things like that? Is there a particular time of day that this is happening? And what are the constraints surrounding that that we need to use to shape this presentation as well? These items, our general purpose, specific purpose, and context and constraints, provide the basic foundation for the rest of our decisions in preparing this presentation. On some occasions, it may be important for us to also select a topic. Now, granted, there are times when the audience or the person asking you to speak is going to identify that topic for you, especially if it's a topic on which you happen to have some sort of subject matter expertise. But if it's open to whatever you want to speak about or even open within a broader topic, at some point we need to select a topic and continue to narrow that down as well. When we're thinking about selecting a topic, there are a few things we want to keep in mind. First, novel topics are always a good place to start. What's something that's going to be new to the audience? Giving a speech on how to tie your shoes or how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for an adult audience in particular is probably not something that's going to gain and hold their attention because it's something they already know about. We ought to at least have a different angle on whatever topic that is, whether it's a well-known topic or be a topic that they're not familiar with and that's going to gain and hold their interest by virtue of being something different. We also want to consider relevance. What's important to you is not necessarily what's important to or interests an audience. So relevance exists between those two areas. You ought to speak on something that you think is important and that you think the audience will think is important, something that captures your interest because that will give you more of a spark as a speaker. But we can't ignore what is going to be of interest to the audience. If we don't speak on a topic that's going to be of interest to them, then we're going to fail to gain and hold their interest throughout the speech. So we need to consider relevance based on not only what's important to us, but also what is important to and of interest to the audience and find our topic in the overlap of those two important areas. We need to consider the scope of our presentation. By scope, we're essentially referring to the depth and breadth of our presentation. Every presentation is going to have a certain amount of depth of content, how deeply we can get into this subject matter, and then the breadth, how much of this we can fit in. So if our breadth is too broad for the given time constraints, then we're not going to have enough time for depth. We're going to be a mile wide and an inch deep on this topic area and not give the audience anything of any consequence or anything that might be useful to them. But likewise, if we only consider depth, if we go too deep with that considering breadth, then we may be narrowing that topic too much, narrowing it too much for audience interest or for understanding. So we need to find that balance in scope of, okay, what is the appropriate depth and breadth for not only the topic that I've chosen, but the time constraints that we've already identified and the context in which we're speaking. So all of that needs to be in the mix when considering the scope and identifying the appropriate level of depth and breadth. Now, we are at the very beginning of developing a presentation. These are all things that we should consider before we really start preparing the formal presentation, putting together our main ideas even and things like that. So we're just at step one of a multi-step process here, but these are some important considerations that need to be on our mind as we are beginning the process of developing any business presentation. If you have questions about the process of starting a business presentation or what you should be considering in that context, please feel free to email me. I'd love to hear from you there. In the meantime, I hope this lays the groundwork for our further discussion of preparing and presenting an effective business presentation.