I run a course on How to Write a Business Case, and here are five of the most common questions that come up.

1. Is a business case different to a proposal?

Some people use the terms interchangeably. In my experience, a proposal is usually directed at an external client, whereas a business case is a document for internal decision making. Consultants or suppliers may still write part or all of a business case. The key point is that it is robust – it compares the costs and benefits of more than one option. One of these is the status quo, which acts as a benchmark for the others. See my previous post What is a business case? for more on this.

2. Where should I start?

Start with a clear brief – identify as clearly as possible the problem you’re trying to solve. This might be saving costs, increasing revenue, or reaching a strategic objective such as environmental sustainability. This is a key step as it defines and narrows the scope of your case, so that you know what to include and what to leave out.

Don’t define the brief so narrowly that there’s no room for alternatives – that defeats the object of the business case. It’s also a good idea to get approval at this stage. Trust me, it saves time later.

3. How long/detailed should it be?

It depends on the audience. After you have approved the brief, analyse the audience and find out what level of detail they expect. If you can’t talk to them directly, look at previous cases that have been successful, and check if there is a preferred template.

Even if your organisation insists on a one-page summary, you will still need the supporting evidence to back up your recommendation. So understanding your audience is key. What are their priorities and biases? What questions will they ask?

4. How many options should I analyse?

It depends on how you defined the brief, but the minimum is two – the status quo, and your recommendation. This applies even if ‘do nothing’ is not a viable option.

For example, if there was a new law coming in, you would compare your option against the risk of not complying with it – such as potential fines and damage to corporate reputation.

Too many options may confuse and distract your audience. Three or four is optimal for a robust case. You may be able to eliminate some from your detailed analysis due to high risk, or conflict with other projects. Remember to state what options you eliminated and why.

5. Isn’t money the only thing that matters?

Not necessarily. Obviously it’s easier to justify investment in the project with the highest ROI (return on investment) or NPV (net present value). But common sense, timing and strategic fit are also crucial in executive decision-making. I’ve seen financially attractive cases rejected because a more strategic opportunity took priority. So try to link your case strongly to strategic objectives or values such as sustainability, innovation or faster decision-making as well as building the financial case.

Good luck!

Jakki

PS To learn how to write better business cases, check out my How to Write a Business Case course.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Why? Because it’s often unclear what, exactly, is required. The definition of the business case has become very woolly in recent years. Depending on who you ask, it can be a highly structured formal document, or a back-of-the-envelope calculation.

With no clear guidelines, the hapless employee risks delivering a document that misses the mark. This can be costly in terms of time and credibility.

Demystifying the business case

A business case is a decision-making tool for comparing several options, and making a robust recommendation.

It’s exactly what many of us do when we are deciding which TV to buy, or where to go on holiday (assuming we are not making these decisions on impulse). We look at several alternatives, compare the costs and benefits of each , make a decision, and work out how and when we’re going to make it happen.

The advantage is that by comparing our proposal to other viable alternatives, we have more faith in our decision. And it’s easier to sell our ideas to others.

In the business case we compare at least two alternatives – our recommendation, and the ‘do nothing’ or status quo option, which acts as a benchmark. This would be like comparing going to the Maldives for two weeks with staying at home.

Obviously my case for the Maldives might be strengthened if I also compare it to, say, a fortnight in the Cotswolds (risky with the weather, almost as expensive).

Business case elements

A business case can be a one-page summary or a seventy-slide presentation. It depends on the audience and what they need to make a decision. Broadly speaking it will cover the following elements:

• The problem or need your case is addressing
• Your proposal, its features and scope
• The options you considered
• Your rationale for choosing the recommended option
• The implementation plan
• The expected costs
• The risks, and how you will mitigate them

A good business case can earn you the resources you need. It can be good for your career if it demonstrates your clear-thinking business acumen.

If you’re inspired to have a go, look out for next week’s article: “Business case: FAQs.” Good luck!

Jakki

PS To learn how to write better business cases, check out my How to Write a Business Case course.

Within a few hours, social media was buzzing with the buzzwords that people found most annoying. Top amongst them were “going forward” – meaning in the future – and “reach out” – which translates as call, write to, or meet.

There’s a serious side to this. “Management speak gets in the way,” says Chrissy Mahler, founder of the Plain English Campaign. “It acts as a barrier to procuring new business.”

My experience supports this. When I ask people on my workshops, “what makes a bad bid or report?” jargon always tops the list of gripes. If your aim is to generate new business, take note.

“When you cut away the management school jargon, what you usually find is a manager who hasn’t really got a clue,” was a popular comment on the Telegraph website.

“Management jargon is used most by intellectually insecure people who would struggle to construct an elegant sentence in plain English,” was another. “It’s a fig-leaf which, when worn, proclaims the wearer to be a bit thick.”

Management clichés are not the only issue. Overused, empty phrases were also cited as evidence of lazy, meaningless writing. For example, “we take these matters most seriously,” “a full investigation will be conducted,” and “there are lessons to be learned.”

And my personal favourite: “Our company no longer has problems, only issues. We overcome them by devising and initiating robust staff motivation measures and incentives, by teamwork and offering solutions to customers.” As opposed to what, exactly?

Readers are people too, and I’ve never met anyone who was impressed with clichés or waffle. So purge these from your business writing if you want to make a good impression.

What management jargon and empty phrases do you find most annoying?

For information on how I can help you or your organisation write better business documents, including bids, reports, letters and emails, visit my pages on coaching and writing courses.

Handling complaints well often creates more customer loyalty. I recently received a very sincere apology letter from an internet retailer after an order failed to arrive. I was so impressed with their response I felt warmer towards them than if they’d delivered on time in the first place.

So complaints are an opportunity to impress your customers – but only if you handle them well. Follow these steps to do just that.

1. Say sorry

Don’t forget to apologise. Often this, together with an accurate acknowledgment of the complaint, will be enough to satisfy a disappointed customer.

2. Summarise and empathise

In your first paragraph state your understanding of the complaint as clearly as possible, and empathise with how the customer feels. For example, ‘I am sorry that we did not despatch your order in line with our delivery promise. I fully understand your disappointment when it did not arrive in time for your mother’s birthday.’

3. Make it personal

Don’t be afraid to address the customer directly, using personal pronouns such as ‘I’ and ‘you’. This assures the reader that you are taking ownership of the problem, and are not hiding behind a faceless corporation.

Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. If your order hasn’t shown up, do you want to hear some vacuous statement about how committed the company is to excellence? Probably not.

4. Tell the customer what you’re going to do, and when

Your sincerity will be self-evident if you act on the complaint. Again, make it personal and state what is going to happen – even if you aren’t offering compensation. For example, ‘I have told our warehouse manager about your complaint, and he is now reviewing the processes to make sure this does not happen again.’

5. Say thank you

A complaint is a gift. Think about it – companies spend thousands of pounds every year on research to find out what their customers think of them. A complaint is free market research, and the customer has gone out of their way to tell you what hundreds more may be thinking. A simple ‘thank you for bringing this to my attention” is fine.

Finally, read your letter and ask yourself – if you were the customer, how would you feel reading it? If the answer is less than positive, go back to point one and start again.

Jakki

PS If you want to learn more about handling complaints by letter, email and phone, check out my Handling Complaints & Enquiries course.

Do you know someone who’s a bit of a wind-bag? Then you might appreciate this little article I found down the back of the internet:

Pythagorean theorem:………………………………………24 words.

Lord’s prayer:………………………………………………….66 words.

Archimedes’ Principle:……………………………………..67 words.

Ten Commandments:……………………………………..179 words.

Gettysburg Address:………………………………………..286 words.

US Declaration of Independence ……………………..1,300 words.

US Constitution with all 27 Amendments:…………..7,818 words.

EU Regulations on the sale of cabbage:…………….26,911 words

Thanks to Paul Lewis, Acting Director of Communications at the RSPB, and Andy Maslen of Sunfish Ltd for this.

Do you have any similar examples to share?

Jakki

PS To learn how to write more clearly and concisely, check out my Business Writing Skills course.

Luckily, the KISS (Keep It Short & Simple) acronym can help keep you, and your readers, relatively sane.

We all know that business is becoming more complex by the day. But it’s a mistake to think that complex ideas need complicated means of expression.

Shorter documents, familiar words and concise sentences make your writing clearer. Clear writing is easier to read, and helps you get your message across with more focus and impact. It also indicates clear thinking.

Yet a lot of business people struggle to put KISS into practice. “It will make my writing sound dull and robotic” is a common protest. “My readers will be insulted if a dumb down my language” is another.

These concerns are understandable, but you can avoid them if you follow these five guidelines.

1. Use familiar words

Firstly, use words that your audience will understand. This may mean avoiding jargon – but not necessarily. If all your readers are lawyers, you probably don’t need to explain what an affidavit is. If they are all IT specialists, they will understand the term “USB”.

If you are writing a business case, your readers are likely to come from a variety of backgrounds and functions. Perhaps your divisional manager commissioned the report, but they will be influenced by other stakeholders – the finance, IT and support staff who may have to implement your proposal.

Whatever their level, function or average education level, few of them will appreciate a document written by someone who swallowed a thesaurus. Use familiar (not necessarily short) words – such as ‘try’ instead of ‘endeavour’ and ‘interpret’ rather than ‘construe’.

Secondly, prefer concrete terms to abstract ones – use ‘car’ instead of ‘mode of transport’ for example. Concrete terms are less ambiguous.

2. Short, but varied, sentences

Yes, shorter sentences are easier to understand. I recommend an average of 15-20 words, but you can still vary the sentence to give the language a natural flow. This paragraph is an example.

There are two main ways to shorten sentences; you can cut out unnecessary words, or you can break up complex and compound sentences (like this one) into two or more sentences.

“But if I use shorter sentences, won’t I have to write more words in total?” Maybe. The issue here is clarity over brevity – most people can understand a 15 or 20-word sentence in one go. Once that number goes over 30, most of us would have to read the sentence again.

So I suggest you vary your sentence length, but avoid going over 30 words, even if that means a slightly longer paragraph. It will be clearer. And you’re also less likely to have trouble with punctuation.

3. One idea per paragraph

This has always been a fundamental rule of writing, but I often see it broken when a writer considers a paragraph ‘too short’.

If you can sum up your idea in one sentence – great! I love one-line paragraphs – they are easier to read and show that the writer is confident with being concise. Nothing is more off-putting than half a page or more of unbroken text.

A good rule of thumb is to keep paragraphs under seven lines. You can usually break down a longer paragraph into shorter ones. Arguably this whole section could have been written as one, long paragraph about paragraphs!

4. Clearly laid out documents

What would you rather read – a half page report or 20 pages?

Most of us are so busy we spend, on average, less than ten minutes on any business document, so the shorter the better.

But it isn’t always that simple for the writer – you may have multiple audiences, all needing different information at varying levels of detail. How do you cope with that?

The answer is structure and navigation. For longer documents such as reports, bids and proposals, your readers won’t have to read every word. Your job is to make it easy for them to find the bits they need.

Consider a table of contents, an executive summary (1-2 pages), and appendices for the detail. The body of your report should be broken down into sections with clear headings and subheadings that summarize the content they contain.

Headings are hugely underestimated in business writing. For example, instead of a heading that says ‘Costs’, what is the point you are making about costs? ‘Pay-back in first year’ gets the key message across with much more impact. It is memorable, and will grab the attention of those stakeholders whose job it is to evaluate the investment.

5. Don’t be dull

It is true that many business documents benefit from being shorter and simpler. That doesn’t mean that they have to be dull and unimaginative. Business readers are human beings too, and you won’t make an impact with your writing if you bore them to death.

Rather than using stuffy, formal language to make your point, use figurative language, such as metaphors and similes, to bring it to life. You can also use quotes and illustrations to great effect when you use them appropriately – a graph or table can often summarize several pages of text.

Be careful though –these tools need to earn their place. Simply stuffing an occasional pie-chart in won’t sharpen your message if you can’t justify why it’s there.

In summary, KISS is a great way to think about your business writing – it’s about making every word count. Apply these guidelines and your language won’t get in the way of your message. That’s good for you, and for your business.

For information on how I can help you or your organisation write better business documents, see my pages on coaching and writing courses.

As it happens, there’s a tool on MS Word that does exactly that. It’s called ‘readability statistics’ and it calculates all sorts of useful data such as the average length of your words, sentences and paragraphs. What’s more, it gives you a readability score out of 100.

And very few people even know about it.

How to access readability statistics

On the task bar go to Tools, Options, Spelling and Grammar. Then, under the Grammar section, tick the ‘Show readability statistics’ box. Click OK at the bottom of the screen. Now you’re all set!

Now, find a Word document (choose a short one, or highlight a couple of paragraphs to save time). Press the F7 button on your keyboard.

Then work your way through all the grammar and spelling suggestions. You can ignore or change as you wish.

When you’ve finished this step, the Readability Statistics text box should appear.

What do the statistics mean?

The Counts section is self-explanatory – it simply calculates the number of words, characters, paragraphs and sentences.

The Averages section is more useful. Here you’ll find your average words per sentence (for business writing, 15-20 is recommended). Also sentences per paragraph (aim for less than 4).

Finally the Readability section gives you the percentage of passive sentences. If this is hitting 40% or more, chances are you could make your writing much punchier by converting these to active sentences. Try to get it below 20%.

Next in this section is the Flesch Reading Ease score (out of 100). This calculates the readability of your document using a formula that includes things like sentence length, passive percentage and syllables per word (google it if you’re really interested in the formula itself).

The score you are aiming for depends on your intended audience. Broadly speaking:
80-100 Anyone can read it, even a child.
60-80 Good range for most business letters, emails, tabloids, websites.
40-60 May be OK for harder business documents such as reports and proposals.
0-40 Highly technical or academic. Very difficult for the average lay person to read.

Finally the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level indicates how many years of education you would need to read the document, based on the US grade system (again, you can google the formula). So a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 8 would equate to 8^th grade, or someone with a reading age of 12-14.

Remember that most people working in a busy office environment won’t welcome a business document pitched at the upper end of their education level. And if you’re writing for the general public, note that the UK average reading age is less than nine years old.

On the other hand, your CEO may feel patronized by a report that assumes a reading age of five…

Like all Word tools, readability statistics are not foolproof. Don’t forget to use common sense.

And I’m not suggesting you stick to the recommended ranges for poetry or literary fiction. As Robert Gunning began his book The Technique of Clear Writing: “Writing is an art. But when it is writing to inform it comes close to being a science”.

How readable am I?

This article above has a Flesch Reading Ease score of 58.2 (needs some work to get it over 60) and Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 8.5 (average reading age of about 13).

The passive percentage is 0% and the average sentence length is 13.5 (lower than the recommended scale for business writing, but OK for web copy).

Jakki

PS Find out if I can help you or your organisation improve written communication skills through private one-to-one coaching or one of my writing courses.

1. Making an Impact
How to Make an Impact by Jon Moon does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s packed with hands-on, practical tips on using tables, graphs, bullet points and diagrams to get your point across – how and when to use them, and (just as importantly) when not to.

This book also contains tons of detailed advice on layout, formatting, comparing options and showing numbers – techniques that could take you years to figure out through trial and error. Invaluable.

2. Writing Persuasively
Andy Maslen’s Write to Sell  is subtitled ‘the ultimate guide to great copywriting’. However, it’s one of the most entertaining and readable guides on effective business writing that I’ve come across.

It gives an overview of structure, tone of voice, punctuation and editing – guidelines you can apply to any business document from emails and reports to marketing materials and CVs. And if you loathe grammar, it won’t bore you to death either.

3. Small But Comprehensive
The Oxford Guide to Plain English by Martin Cutts is a bit drier, but works well as a pocket-sized reference book. It’s also inexpensive – good if you’re trying to instill Plain English usage across a large team.

4. Best Free Online Resources
I have used the free guides and glossaries on the Plain English Campaign website  a lot over the years, especially the A-Z of Alternative Words, a searchable dictionary giving Plain English versions of formal words and phrases like ‘expeditiously’ (quickly) and ‘subsequent to’ (after).

It’s also worth having a giggle at the winners of the Golden Bull awards for some truly eye-watering examples of corporate gobbledegook.

5. Best Example Documents
If you’ve got to create new documents from scratch, adapting an example is often the quickest way. Shirley Taylor’s Model Business Letters, Emails & Other Business Documents contains samples of pretty much every piece of business correspondence you can imagine – complaints, quotations, enquiries, recommendations, cover letters and so on.

What are your top five business writing resources?

Jakki

PS To learn more about business writing including bids, emails, reports, handling complaints and web writing, check out my Writing Courses.