(Not Yet) a Reality

Eight years ago, a marketing email showed up with my name in the subject line, and it changed the way I think about making a business case, forever.

Eric, We Have an App!

I almost deleted it out of habit. Then I checked the date. 2018.

The App Store opened in 2007. This email was from a national sandwich chain that’d built its whole reputation on speed, and it took eleven years to ship a mobile ordering app.

I knew someone on their marketing team, so I called and asked what took so long. She sighed, then walked me through it. A CTO and a CMO both had to approve the development budget. Neither one would. Getting them in the same room was impossible, let alone on the same page.

Sound familiar?

The idea had bounced through inboxes. It had filled slide decks. Research, benchmarks, projections, hundreds of hours, and it lived everywhere except reality.

Built to Survive a Meeting

Most of us know exactly how that document comes together. The business case is written so nobody can argue with it. You source every number, anticipate every objection, and name every risk yourself so nobody else gets there first. Then you send it to people who are building documents exactly like it, and you all sit down in a conference room where everyone’s job for the next hour is to find the hole.

The document succeeds when nobody objects.

Nobody can audit a document and picture themselves inside its outcome at the same time. Scrutiny and imagination pull from different places. You handed them something to inspect, so they inspected it, and inspection has never once produced belief. They nod. The document survives. Nothing moves.

Finance isn’t the problem. Neither is the CFO, and neither is some failure on their part to get it. The problem is the shape of the ask.

Q4 is when we reach for that shape most, on the ideas we care about most.

Ninety Seconds Moved What Hundreds of Hours Couldn’t

I asked her what finally changed.

She laughed. “When we finally got the opportunity, we didn’t really present. We talked.” What she described followed the textbook-perfect arc of a Movie Trailer, whether her team meant it that way or not.

She opened on the setting.

“We live in a world where people expect to get what they want on their terms.”

Then the subjects living in it.

“Millennial women carry an average of seventy restaurant apps on their phones, and their phones are the sun in their ecosystem.”

Then that customer’s actual options, all of them bad.

They could fight through the clunky mobile web experience. Or order from one of the hundreds of competitors already doing it better. Or keep walking into stores. “But I’m not sure how long we keep her if that’s what we’re asking her to do.”

Then the hero idea, and its super powers.

Our new app remembers her favorites, lifts average ticket, and delivers on our promise as a brand.

Ninety seconds. No deck. No defensiveness. No over-explaining.

She Asked for a Look. The Money Showed Up.

And finally, here’s how she closed.

She lowered the bar.

“All we need from you is this: Join us for the kickoff of our usability sessions. See it in action. Then decide if this is worth pursuing.”

Years of asking two executives to approve something. In the end she only asked them to attend something.

Saying yes, in this case, cost nothing but time, so it cleared a bar that a budget request never cleared. It was public. It put them in the same space as the work. From there, they stopped evaluating the idea from across a table. They were literally standing next to it.

The budget cleared on the spot.

“We Already Wrote the Business Case.”

I know. And it’s probably pretty good.

But…

In a world where budgets are tightening and everyone’s being asked to do more with less, you have an idea you actually believe in and about twenty minutes to get someone to imagine their future inside it.

Your options aren’t very attractive. Write it up again, tighter, and hope the tenth draft lands where the ninth didn’t. Wait for Q1 and watch somebody else’s line item take the space. Or walk in with what you have and let one hard question turn your ask into a defense.

Thankfully, there’s a fourth.

Shape it and practice it with your team before it counts.

That’s the workshop. Your budget request on the whiteboard. Your team building it with you.

Come see what it looks like.

🔥 Hi, I’m Eric, and every week, I share insights, observations and tools so you can ditch decks and light a fire in your high-stakes presentations. If you like what you see here, follow me on LinkedIn.