Yesterday, we presented a webinar discussing letters of intent in small business acquisitions. We worked through a slide deck for around twenty minutes and answered questions for nearly an hour. None of the questions were too surprising, though a few of our answers likely surprised some as I hold some positions that run counter to those held by many others who work with members of this audience.

This was the first time I’d been on the presenter side of a zoom webinar. I’ve done several similar events times before, but those were smaller and were normal zoom meetings. This one maxed out around 130 people, which might be my biggest audience since my valedictory address during my high school graduation. The way things were set up on my computer, though, I could only see three people (myself, the host, and my partner who was also presenting) along with the PowerPoint slides we used as the lattice for our initial presentation. I did not even look at the Q&A tab as people wrote in their questions but left that to the host. In many ways, this made it very similar to the zoom calls I have multiple times per day. It’s just that this one was recorded and will be uploaded for people to watch later.

There was a time when I would’ve suffered for days in the buildup, needing to take antacids and struggling both to fall and stay asleep. None of those things happened. I have done the work to be ready to give a presentation like that as I’ve been doing these transactions for years now and have seen them shift along with market conditions. I was still anxious during the minutes before the event, though, because we hadn’t conducted a dry run of the initial presentation and my computer completely froze during a call the day before. As I’ve joked many times, technology is great until it isn’t. There weren’t any technical snafus.

My activity just before the presentation was much more limited. I wrote a few notes to organize my thoughts, but I only used them as a set list and not for substance. I watched the famous “F—it, we’ll do it live” clip right before signing on for a last little pep talk. Then I did the thing. Someday soon I’ll watch the recording and turn into my own harshest critic, but I’ll save that exercise for a few weeks after there is more distance from the event itself.