What Does It Take to Be Ready?

[Music] we’ve worked with a lot of firms now helping them get ready for their interviews and we have come to recognize that there’s a pretty darn important question for firms to consider early on in the process and that question is what does it take to win what do we need to do and the reason I want to go through this is there have been firms who haven’t exactly talked through that question before the process starts and almost immediately they start to hedge they question should we commit the time and effort and energy that it’s going to take to really go all in on this so let me just lay out the steps as we see it like if you are going to pursue this thing if you’re going to do it right here’s what we recommend so we recommend something like two to four hours on strategy and what strategy means is figuring out what your perspective is on this project how do you see it why is your team a great fit how are you going to approach this how do you want them to think of you in relation to this project you’re also going to want to think about who are these folks who’s on the selection committee what do we know about them what do they care about what kinds of people are they how do they like to be communicated to you want to start processing all that stuff actually ideally you want to start processing that stuff way way way back when you started pursuing the project in the first place but now that you’re getting ready for the interview you want to reprocess it all so that you can interview with them the way that they want you to interview with them you can speak to them in the ways that they want to be spoken to finally in the Strategic process you want to ask yourself well what’s our approach going to be how are we going to do this how are we going to organize ourselves in such a way as to get what we need to get across in the most efficient and most enjoyable from their perspective way once that is done you should have an overarching theme kind of a a single best most important message that you want to communicate over the course of your interview from there you want the whole team to get together and figure out what are the messages inside of that overarching theme what all do we need to talk about how are we going to talk about these things what points are we going to make what recommend ations are we going to make how can we best use the amount of time available to us to communicate what needs to get communicated the most ideally while you’re doing that you’re also having your team get up and practice making these points so even as they’re figuring out what the points are they are taking the social risk getting up in front of the room and trying to just take a stab at making this point with zero preparation we call this a stumble through and a stumble through is a great way to not only break down the barriers that people naturally have when they present and at the same time figure out what they’re going to say once the stumble through is done once all the messages are figured out then you’re going to want to do some full-fledged rehearsals message design as messy as it can be you wna plan on that taking at least eight hours eight hours as an organized group there might very very easily be additional time where individuals and sub teams that are working on specific topics need to put in more time to figure out how they’re going to flesh out their topic and how they’re going to visualize it maybe what kind of slides what kind of boards they’re going to use of course that’s going to take work with your marketing folks as well the final step is group rehearsal again we recommend a full eight hours a full day at least plan on a full day of practices multiple practices so that you’re not just talking things through but you are experiencing what it’s like to present as a team ideally you’re not running through the whole message from start to finish multiple times you don’t want to drain people of their energy and you don’t want folks to get stale with the subject matter instead think of it as maybe one full-fledged walk through and one full-fledged run through how could this possibly take eight hours you ask well the runup to each of these can take uh time we have found that even when you try to be as efficient as possible there are going to be really important things that do consume time so all in all we recommend buting about two and a half days worth of time half day for strategy full day for message design full day for rehearsals and on the big big big big big ones maybe even more time if you do that if you devote that kind of group time then by the time you’re done your team should be ready you should all be on the same page you should be confident you’ve thought through this as well and as correctly as you possibly could you are feeling really great about the theme that you’ve landed on and the fact that all the messages that you’ve th thought through are the right messages and that you’ve come up with really good solid recommendations so that when your folks head out to meet with the selection committee they are in their right mind they’re focused they’re feeling confident they are energetic and upbeat and positive that’s our recommendation to you 2 and 1/2 days of full-fledged committed group work [Music] together