MT494 Unit 7 Pitch Rehearsal Seminar Reflection Example

What Does One Booked Event Cost Me? An MT494 Unit 7 Seminar Reflection on Rehearsing the Sandberg Lanes Pitch

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

MT494: Bachelor's Capstone in Marketing

Unit 7 Seminar Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Sandberg Lanes, the classmates and the budget figures are composite; the sources cited are real.

The Pitch as I Rehearsed It

In our Unit 7 seminar each of us rehearsed the client presentation in front of classmates cast as the client. I opened my pitch for Sandberg Lanes with three slides of creative work. The first named the weekday package, Strike Hour. The second showed a mock video reel the center could send to company newsletters, with clips of office groups cheering at the lanes. The third laid out the planners' open house. Only on the fourth slide did a number appear, and it was the total budget.

I chose that order deliberately. I believed that a strong concept would win the room and that the owners would care about the budget only once they were excited. Most pitches I have watched in my working life began with the idea, and in class the creative slides had drawn the most comments. I was not trying to hide the money; I simply thought it belonged at the end.

Ninety Seconds In

The classmate cast as co-owner had managed a restaurant for eight years before returning to school. Ninety seconds into the pitch, during the mock reel, that classmate stopped me and asked one question: what does one booked event cost me?

I answered with the total, $31,800 for the year. The classmate shook their head and asked again: not the total, one event. I did not have the figure. I had built the budget as a list of channels with amounts, and I had projected the number of events in a separate document, but I had never divided one by the other. The rest of the rehearsal went politely, but I knew the question had found the gap in my plan. A second classmate commented on my slide colors, which was fair but did not matter in the same way.

The owner's question had an answer; I had simply never calculated it.

The Figure I Worked Out Afterward

That evening I divided the draft spending by the projected bookings. The plan projects 150 weekday group events in its first year, ramping from five a month to eighteen. Dividing $31,800 by 150 gives about $212 per booked event. From the point-of-sale data, an average weekday package for 22 guests at $34 a head, with food, brings in about $750, and after food and staff costs it contributes about $470 toward the building's fixed costs. On those figures, each booked event pays for its marketing more than twice over.

The figure is less flattering when only the added events are counted. The center already hosts about 60 weekday group events a year without any marketing, so only 90 of the 150 are new. Dividing $31,800 by 90 gives about $353 per added event, still below the $470 contribution but with a much thinner margin. I now think the second figure is the one an owner should hear, because it is the one that tests whether the money did anything.

The Concept I Had Skipped

Our course reading on budgeting describes the objective-and-task method: a firm sets objectives, decides what tasks will achieve them, and adds up what those tasks cost (Kotler & Keller, 2016). My budget had the tasks and the costs but had never been connected back to an objective measured in events. That is why I could not answer the question. The restaurant manager in the room had lived the method for years, asking of every expense what it would bring in, and the question came naturally.

Schön's idea of reflection-in-action describes a practitioner noticing a surprise and reframing the problem in the moment (Schön, 1983). I did not manage that in the moment; I managed it that evening. But the reframing was real: I stopped thinking of the budget as a set of channels and started thinking of it as a price paid for each result.

The New Running Order

The revised pitch opens with the problem in numbers: idle lane hours on weekday afternoons and what they cost the business. The second slide gives the cost per added event, $353, set against the $470 contribution. The package comes third, then the channels, and the reel moves to an optional appendix slide. Wood (2017) recommends that a plan presentation open with the problem and the request before the tactics, which is the order I now use. I will carry the same order into the Unit 8 budget, where every line will carry its own cost per result, and into the final presentation in Unit 10. The question I still want to answer is how quickly the cost per added event should fall as the coordinator learns the market, and whether the owners would accept a higher figure in the first three months.

References

Kotler, P., & Keller, K. L. (2016). Marketing management (15th ed.). Pearson.

Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Basic Books.

Wood, M. B. (2017). The marketing plan handbook (6th ed.). Pearson.