Knowing how to produce an effective business case is a vital skill for public sector managers looking for investment. Here are 20 handy hints to help you hone your writing style
When I was 41, I wrote a short but terrible novel. I had just got divorced and so, predictably, I wrote reams of bleak, angry and morose prose. I eschewed bourgeois conventions of style and structure, so it was full of single word chapters, RANDOM CAPITALS and unexpected changes of pace and direction.
I can laugh about it now but at the time I thought it was a showstopper, a brave new talent coming from nowhere to dazzle the waiting literary world. And this self-delusion was the problem. I had never written anything longer than an essay before, but cheerfully assumed I could go from almost zero to published author in a single leap.
My novel now languishes unloved in the dark corners of my hard drive, but I am occasionally reminded of it when I read other people’s business cases for investment. I read about 30 to 40 a year and every now and then I encounter something so badly written it takes me back to the dark days of my own dire first attempt.
Let’s say you have had a good idea for a project. Your peers, your wife and even your dog think it is a good idea, best one you have ever had, a copper-bottomed corker in fact. But now you have to write 10,000+ words for the first time since you left university and that’s when things tend to go awry.
In my experience, writing is like driving and sex. Early on in life, most people hone their technique, think they are pretty good at it all things considered and tend to take criticism of their approach very personally. But this, of course, is wrong; you can always be a better driver so why should you assume your writing style is a gift from god bestowed on day one of your career.
The private sector has long recognised that this is a teachable skill and it is not uncommon to find in house style guides, sub editors and even writers in residence. Investment cases are big-bucks decisions and writers tend to be cheaper and more malleable than bankers.
Predictably, the public sector has yet to cotton on to this, so a lot of good investment opportunities remain buried in badly written business cases and organisations lose out as a result. To address this imbalance I have set out below my own 20 rules of business case writing:
1. Ambiguity is your enemy. Limit yourself to no more than three ‘may’ or ‘could’ words every 1,000. Your reader wants a narrative, a clear structure that says ‘if we do A it will create B which will produce C’. Not ‘possibly D, which depends on whether or not we do A before B or C’.
2. Keep it simple – you should be able to explain your idea to a seven-year-old child while they are watching television. Even better if you only have to use a drawing.
3. The first sentence should tell me everything I need to know. When I got divorced, I wrote a bad novel. Period. Everything after that first full stop is detail and explanation.
4. Talk about money early and often. I once read a business case that didn’t have any numbers in it until page 26. The reader is only reading your business case because you want them to invest in your idea. So tell them how much you want and what they get in return. This should be right at the start and transparent not some guilty secret you try to sneak in at the end.
5. DNULOA – Do not use lots of acronyms
6. Your business case is how you are. Most of your readers will have never met you so how your writing comes across is how we picture you will be. If the text is vague, confused and evasive then I assume you will be the same to work with and I won’t invest in your idea. If your business case is straightforward, honest and easy to understand then I like you already and will be happy to trust you with my investor’s money.
7. Don’t use quotes. Seriously, don’t ever use quotes unless they are about your business. Using famous quotes from wikiquotes does not make you look educated; it makes you look lazy and pretentious. I once worked with a guy who used to pepper his prose with phrases like ‘as Aristotle once said’. Even now, ten years later, this still annoys me.
8. Use short sentences. Then sometimes use very long ones so that the text has a variation to it, has more rhythm and is more interesting to read. Never use single word sentences. Ever.
9. Focus on production quality. Your reader will see a lot of business cases all asking for money, so you will need to make yours stand out from the baying crowd. Make sure you invest in this. A nice glossy high production value job is so much more likely to succeed then 100 black and white photocopied sheets badly stapled together.
10. Use lots of pictures. Break up the chapters with stock art photos that vaguely relate to your idea. Blue skies and fields full of red poppies are good for renewable energy projects. IT ones tend to use pictures of glowing fibre optic cables and strings of computer code. If you get stuck for inspiration, a picture of somebody blowing a dandelion or little kids eating chocolate are your stone-walled certainties. Use lots of primary colours and happy uplifting scenes. Try to avoid ugly people or bleak black and white scenes of contemporary northern life. You are trying to get investment, not make an independent film.
11. Use diagrams to explain the complicated stuff. Page after page of text gets very tedious very quickly. How processes work or who is related to whom is much easier to follow with a diagram.
12. Exclamation marks! Use sparingly, if at all. They are the literary equivalent of shouting and tend to distract from your measured prose.
13. Signpost. Your reader is like a child on a car journey, so you need to show them where you are going and reassure them it won’t take too long to get there. This is hint number 13 of 20.
14. Don’t use hyperbole. Your project is not unique, it is unlikely to be fantastic and it won’t be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity unless your reader has the life expectancy of a fruit fly.
15. Use everyday words. Some writers, like Will Self, are deliberately obscure, but they are writing to an audience of pretentious English Literature graduates and not bored bankers. Try to write how you would speak but without the ………… pauses. Or the filler words. Or the swearing.
16. Keep it short. But not too short or too long. The Bible is 823,000 words, whereas the US constitution is only 4,400. Your business case should be about 15,000 and less open to misinterpretation.
17. Don’t make jokes. Readers have an anticipation of the format, so don't startle them with the unexpected. It’s very hard to be serious, then funny, then serious again. As a rule the two things that don’t contain humour are business cases or Mr Bean films.
18. Break up the text. Use the main text to develop your central argument then add cases studies in text boxes to evidence your points. Even better if you link these to the happy pictures you have added from hint number 10.
19. Think carefully about metaphors. They can be a useful tool for cutting through the dense thicket of your prose but they also tend to cause confusion. I once had to explain to a Dutch banker that flushing out a fox was a hunting term not a plumbing reference.
20. Use round numbers. I only had 19 hints but 20 is a better number.
Michael Ware is corporate finance partner at BDO
