Help with Presentation Event

[Justin Meehan]

I am a sophomore from a school who will graduate most of our FSAE members this spring leaving mostly underclassmen to take up the task of continuing the program. After having witnessed the vast amounts of talent at this years event, I was hoping to get some advice from those teams who performed well this year especially in the presentation and the design events. I am really interested in what other schools have found to work well in each event and any ideas that may have to help improve our ability to compete. This includes content, visual aides, and anything that may help our young team become more prepared for next spring. Your help is greatly appreciated, and congratulations to everyone for another great year of FSAE.

[Justin Meehan]

I am a sophomore from a school who will graduate most of our FSAE members this spring leaving mostly underclassmen to take up the task of continuing the program. After having witnessed the vast amounts of talent at this years event, I was hoping to get some advice from those teams who performed well this year especially in the presentation and the design events. I am really interested in what other schools have found to work well in each event and any ideas that may have to help improve our ability to compete. This includes content, visual aides, and anything that may help our young team become more prepared for next spring. Your help is greatly appreciated, and congratulations to everyone for another great year of FSAE.

[Denny Trimble]

Perhaps someone who took notes at the Presentation Seminar can post them here?

University of Washington Formula SAE ('98, '99, '03)

[Brent Howard]

well, we didn't really do so hot at any of the events, but one piece of advice is sleep the night before, it's hard to answer the judges when your entire team only got between 2-5 hours sleep in 2 days.

Brent

www.ucalgary.ca/fsae (http://www.ucalgary.ca/fsae)

[Driver_chick]

What do ya'll think are good qualities or at least qualities you look for in people to do each of the Static events. In the future (As in when I'm not just a snotty nosed little 1st year and I can actually contribute in design...)I want to get into presentation and stuff...

What would make you choose someone on your team to do a particular roles???

[Michael Jones]

We look for people who can speak smoothly and confidently about the car both technically and with respect to business/marketing questions. We have a mini speak-off to select people from those interested, and a backup person just in case that person loses her/his voice or something.

Get your presentation done early and practice is the only way to get it down.

Same with cost, actually, since there's some presentation elements involved there.

Also have people available who are good at thinking on their feet - you never know what questions they can throw at you. Sometimes it's a breeze, sometimes it's nasty. And this doesn't necessarily correlate with finishing position - in 2002, we thought we did well, and finished 20th in presentation. Last year, the questions were nasty and our answers sucked, IMO. We finished 7th. WTF?

[Charlie]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Driver_chick:

What would make you choose someone on your team to do a particular roles??? <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

If they wanted to do it and I thought they could http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_wink.gif

I did cost and presentation last year, believe me if someone was enthusiastic about doing either one it would have been thiers. http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_biggrin.gif

[polimi]

Hi, I'm a team member of Dynamis PRC. This is our first experience in the Formula Student competition. We'd like to know how the presentation event is organized and how to design the stand. Could you mail us an example or photos of posters?

Thanks,
fsae.polimi@virgilio.it

[Erick Scarpone]

Hi After 3 days of sleeping 2-4 hours just one day, some of our buddys how were in charge to go to the presentatiotn seminar went, but as sleep they were they did not take notes, or anything and the remember vage thinks about itcould anyone post the info it was given, or send it to my e-mail eass_18@hotmail.com, we would really apritiated!!! thanks a lot!!!

[Big Bird]

Hi Justin,

The Presentation Event is one area of this competition that offers huge scope for points scoring, and one that it seems most teams just pass over and wait for it to go away. With a bit of research you can pick up quite a few points on your opposition, and personally I think it is a lot easier to pick up points in this event than the equally ranked (in points) acceleration event. (How many teams have you seen spending huge amounts of time and effort working on their cars for the latter - and yet give the presentation little more than a few hours effort in the week before the event. I've seen quite a few).

I'll be careful about how much I give away, as that would be unfair to the people who I've worked with that have put a lot of effort into this event. But I'll offer the guiding principles that we have worked to, so you can form your own opinions.

The point of the Presentation Event is to convince a bunch of venture capitalists that your vehicle design will offer them greater return for their money than those of your opposition. As venture capitalists they are minimally interested in the specific details of your car - they are not looking at it with the passion that we do as engineers, nor even with the passion that the end user might have for it. It is a commodity to them.

Think of your car as a bathroom fitting, or a hamburger, or a light switch. The people who profit from such things most likely don't give a stuff about the item itself - but they will certainly be excited by the money they can make from it. So this is where your presentation should lead.

Say you were looking at starting up a business in wholesaling light switches, and you put out tenders for design blueprints. What would you want to know? You would like to know what market research has been done, where these switches fit into the market, what sort of demographic they are aimed at and what makes these light switches better in the eyes of the customer. You would also want to know what sort of setup costs would be incurred in getting the business going, how many staff you would need, what level of trade skills your staff would require, how much floorspace (manufacturing, storage, office) you would need, what fittings/machinery/furniture are required, how and where to market these switches, all that sort of stuff.

If you are swimming with all this, then take a wander through any business and have a look what is there. (Ask your parents to take a look at where they work, or uncles/aunties, brothers/sisters, friends etc). There will be common elements in most businesses - office space, storage space, a work area, overheads like gas and electricity, rent, reception staff, computers and software, a tearoom, wages, OH&S issues, safety equipment, etc etc. Take a lot of notes - and then see if you can draw links between what is happening in your sample workplace and convert/extend that to a vehicle manufacturing facility.

You don't know anything about these hypothetical venture capitalists, what equipment they already have, where they market their other products? Well prepare a worst-case scenario business case for them - whereby they are completely starting from scratch. Give them projected profits per unit, tell them how long it will be worst case before they pay off their setup costs and start making pure profits. It is not too difficult to prepare a spreadsheet outlining setup costs and per-vehicle costs - and from that, profits. The venture capitalists have already told you they plan to build and sell four cars a day, so it is not too hard to calculate some rough estimates. Since we are all role-playing here, the judges are generally impressed by the depth you go into within your presentation. So if you make an effort, you will be rewarded.

In presentations I've been involved in, we generally break the ten minutes into
* 30 seconds of introduction and overview
* A couple of minutes on benchmarking and market research - establishing the need in the marketplace and the demographic
* A couple of minutes on vehicle design and development - to assure the judges you are offering a quality product
* Maybe a minute discussing manufacturing issues, to convince the judges that you have considered mass production in the desing of your car
* The rest of the time on a business case, outlining setup costs, projected profits, quality management, marketing, all that sort of stuff.

Finding good presenters can be hard, but you can work on that during the year. Hold design reviews through the year, get various team members to make presentations to other team members and staff on simple stuff like where the team is up to, what promo stuff you have done, etc etc. It doesn't even have to relate to the presentation event specifically, be creative. Any public speaking practice is good practice, and it is better to have some experience under your belt before fronting up to the event.

Powerpoint is cool. You can embed all sorts of stuff like CAD pictures, subtle background art, links to spreadsheets, etc. Use its capabilities - nothing is a greater waste than an electronic presentation presented in plain text on a plain white background.

The Presentation event isn't the place to offer an indepth engineer's analysis of the car - that is the design event. The judges are looking for awareness of the issues faced in setting up a business, and a lot of this is common sense. We are presenting a business case, which means considering such issues as profit to revenue ratios, quality management, etc etc. The bottom line all comes down to money, and that is a good line to take when preparing your presentation.

Well, I think the above is thesis number 6 I've posted on these forums of late. Hope it helps.

Cheers all

[jonno]

spot on post Geoff, that sums up what the presentation judge (Richard Brown) told us at the Formula Student seminar a few months back. His presentation covering what he wants is here... (http://www.imeche.org.uk/formulastudent/pdf/Apr05%20presentation%20event%20RB.pdf)

[Mad Ruska]

Geoff really bring it on the point.
Where else you can get Points so easy.

Think about what you want to know before you would invest Millions of Dollars in a new Project.

Is it the product, the market, the ROI (Return of investment) and think about why we would invest in your team. Why people buy companies. They want earn money. The will increase their profit and don´t lose money.

Tell them what is the market, how big he is, tell them what the market want and then tell them that your car would be the perfect product for the market. (it should be)

We are not interessted in thousend of technical details, just few. We are buisness people!

What we want to know as investors is, how many money you want from us, and how fast we will become back our money and how many profit we can make, like real buisness.

Powerpoint or Macromedia Flash (never saw a Macromedia Flash presentation @ FS) are great Tools. Use them! But be carefull. Don´t show how many functions these tools have, use only these how helps to support you. The slides should give us further informations, keypoints. We want not read what you just told us. Keywords, nice Pictures, charts with details etc.

Little help: Not to much slides!

And please make a good layout, it is so easy. Check your presentation @ home. We saw teams with colors which hurts our eyes, ligth blue on orange! Do you can image how it is when you have to watch for 10 min on a orange background?

Practise is a major point. Check your presentation as often as you can. Make these presentation in front of your teammates more then once!

AND: You have 10 Minutes. Use them! The time couldn´t be enough. Use a stop watch during training!

And finally: Read the Rules!

See you in UK and good Luck.

Frank Roeske
Presentation Judge @ FS

[SBehn]

Hi there,

i just want to thank you all for the information - especially Geoff from RMIT - your hints help a lot http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

Greetings from Germany