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WGU C219 Task 1 (Investor Presentation): What a Perfect Score Actually Requires

By Dan Palmer, MBA

I’ve had experience with enough capstone candidates through this specific task to know where it goes sideways, and it’s rarely the parts students expect. The simulation math intimidates people going in, but the simulation itself is mechanical; you make decisions, the software spits out numbers.

Where candidates actually lose points is in the writing: treating a SWOT quadrant loosely, describing a decision’s effect without naming the number that proves it, or delivering a pitch that sounds like a class presentation instead of an actual ask for capital. Let me walk you through exactly where those failures happen and how to close them off before you submit.

Assignment

Introduction

An important aspect of running a successful start-up business is acquiring funding from potential investors based on information about the business. In this task, you will use the skills you have acquired in the MBA coursework to complete the start-up phase in a business simulation. The simulation is accessed through your course. Using data from the Q1–Q4 phase of the simulation, you will create and deliver a presentation for potential business investors using the attached “Presentation Template” PowerPoint slide deck and information from the scenario. The objective of the presentation is to obtain capital to grow your business.

Before you begin working on Task 1, you must finish and submit the simulation up to the end of the third quarter (Q3). Begin working through the fourth quarter (Q4) and load the data from the simulation into the tactical plan. Next, manually fill out your projections for the fifth (Q5) and sixth quarters (Q6) within the tactical plan, ensuring the tactical plan is fully updated through Q6 before beginning this task.

Submit Task 1 concurrently with submitting your decisions for Q4 within the simulation. When you have passed Task 1, submit Q4 again and you will be allowed to proceed with the simulation into Q5.

Scenario

You are the owner of a start-up business that creates 3D-printed, carbon fiber bicycles. Up through the business’s third quarter (Q3), you have used your own money to fund the business. The business model shows promise, but you are now seeking an additional $2.5 million in equity funding to execute your business plan. You will create and deliver a multimedia presentation that shows your business plan to potential investors and illustrates how the additional funding will be used and will provide a return to your investors.

Requirements

Your submission must represent your original work and understanding of the course material. Most performance assessment submissions are automatically scanned through the WGU similarity checker.

Students are strongly encouraged to wait for the similarity report to generate after uploading their work and then review it to ensure Academic Authenticity guidelines are met before submitting the file for evaluation. See Understanding Similarity Reports for more information.

A. Attach a completed copy of each of the following:

an Excel file (.xlsx) containing the company’s completed tactical plan from quarter four (Q4), downloaded from within the business simulation

a PowerPoint file (.ppt) using the attached “Presentation Template,” including presenter notes to accompany the slides

a link to the Panopto recording of yourself delivering the presentation created in part B

Note: The company’s completed tactical plan, cumulative balanced scorecard, and market share or sales report must be exported from within the simulation. You may copy and paste the information for the cumulative balanced scorecard and market share or sales report directly into the attached “Presentation Template,” or you may take a screenshot of the information to insert it into the template as an image file.

B. Create a Panopto video recording (suggested length of 20–30 minutes) that includes you delivering the presentation slides from part Using the attached “Presentation Template,” you will present your business plan to ask venture capitalists for $2.5 million in funding based on the scenario. The slides in your presentation should include only the main points you wish to make. More extensive information should be included in the presenter notes section of the presentation to refer to when speaking about the slide. In the presentation of your business plan, you must do the following:

Note: The audiovisual recording should feature you visibly presenting the material (i.e., not in voice-over or embedded video) and should simultaneously capture both you and your presentation slides.

Note: For instructions on how to access and use Panopto, use the “Panopto How-To Videos” web link provided below. To access Panopto’s website, navigate to the web link titled “Panopto Access” and then choose to log in using the “WGU” option. If prompted, log in using your WGU student portal credentials, and then it will forward you to Panopto’s website.

To submit your recording, upload it to the Panopto drop box titled “C216: MBA Capstone – C216 (Student Creators) (Drop Box).” Once the recording has been uploaded and processed in Panopto’s system, retrieve the URL of the recording from Panopto and copy and paste it into the Links option. Upload the remaining task requirements using the Attachments option. Submitting the video on an external site (e.g., Prezi or YouTube) is not permitted.

Analyze how specific decisions made within the simulation affected your company’s competitive sales and financial performance during the previous three quarters (Q1–Q3) by doing the following:

a. Explain two decisions that have affected the company’s past competitive sales performance in the carbon fiber bicycle market as shown in either the market share report or sales performance

b. Explain two decisions that have affected the company’s past financial performance as shown on the financial summary table in your presentation slides.

Note: The cumulative balanced scorecard, market share report, and sales performance report are all provided in the business simulation. The Q3 numbers can be found on the Q4 tab.

2. Conduct a SWOT analysis and include the completed SWOT table in your presentation

a. Discuss your company’s greatest strength and biggest

b. Discuss your company’s best opportunity and greatest

3. Explain each of the following company strategies for the next three quarters (Q4–Q6) based on past performance in the simulation:

marketing strategy

sales channel strategy

human resource strategy

manufacturing strategy

financial strategy

a. Discuss two anticipated benefits the strategies will yield for your company in the next three quarters of the business

Note: The accepted model for a SWOT analysis defines strengths and weaknesses as internal to the organization and opportunities and threats as external to the organization.

4. Select two strategies from the bulleted list in part For each selected strategy, recommend two specific implementation steps (decisions planned to occur in Q4, Q5, or Q6).

C. Acknowledge sources, using in-text citations and references, for content that is quoted, paraphrased, or summarized

D. Demonstrate professional communication in the content and presentation of your submission

Part 1: What Separates “Competent” from Everything Below It

Ten scored criteria here. I’ll take them in order and tell you, specifically, what the line between Approaching Competence and Competent actually turns on; not the rubric language restated, but what an evaluator is really checking for when they read your submission against it.

A. Attachments

This one’s pure completeness, and I mention it first because it’s the easiest tier drop to avoid entirely and the one I still see candidates take unnecessarily. All three deliverables — the Q4 tactical plan as a native .xlsx, the PowerPoint built on the actual “Presentation Template” with presenter notes filled in, and your Panopto link — need to be present and in the exact specified format. I’ve seen candidates export the tactical plan as a PDF because it “looked cleaner,” which is an automatic tier drop regardless of how good the underlying numbers are. Don’t improvise on format here; the rubric isn’t ambiguous about it.

Presentation Template (Click to Download)

B. Panopto Recording

Three things have to be true simultaneously: you’re using Panopto specifically (not a YouTube link, not an embedded video file), you’re visibly on camera at the same time as your slides are visible — a voiceover with slides doesn’t satisfy this — and your delivery actually functions as a pitch to venture capitalists, not a narrated walkthrough of your deck. That third point is the one candidates underestimate.

I’ve watched otherwise well-prepared presentations get marked down to Approaching Competence because the tone read like a class assignment being explained rather than capital being asked for. Practice the ask itself — the specific dollar figure, the specific return you’re proposing — the way you’d actually say it to a room of investors, not the way you’d explain it to an instructor.

B1a. Past Competitive Sales Performance

This is where I see the most avoidable point loss on the entire task. The failure pattern is almost always identical: a candidate names a decision in general terms — “we increased our marketing spend” — without tying it to a specific, named metric movement in the market share or sales performance report. Competent requires a visible causal chain: decision, mechanism, measured effect, with that effect cited from the actual report rather than asserted.

“We increased marketing spend, and market share grew from 14% to 19% between Q2 and Q3 per the market share report” is what gets you full credit. “We focused more on marketing, which helped” is the same idea with the specificity stripped out, and it won’t clear the bar.

B1b. Past Financial Performance

Same structural demand as B1a, but there’s a second failure point candidates don’t see coming: the financial summary table inside your slides is graded independently of your written explanation. I’ve reviewed submissions with genuinely strong two-decision analysis that still dropped a tier because the table itself had a stale or miscopied figure. Populate that table last, after your numbers are final, and check it against your actual Q4 export before you submit — don’t let it be the thing that undercuts otherwise solid writing.

B2. SWOT Analysis (Table)

No partial credit here. The table is either complete or it isn’t.

B2a. Greatest Strength and Weakness

The internal/external boundary is where I’ve watched more candidates lose this criterion than any misjudgment about which strength or weakness to pick. Both selections have to be internally focused — under your company’s control — and grounded in the SWOT table itself. I’ve read strong, well-argued paragraphs identifying “increasing competition” as a weakness, which is a fundamentally external factor and therefore off-criterion no matter how well it’s written. Sort your four SWOT items into internal and external columns before you write a word of this section; it takes thirty seconds and prevents the single most common mistake I see here.

B2b. Best Opportunity and Greatest Threat

The mirror image of B2a, and the mirror-image mistake shows up just as often: candidates describe an internal capability gap — “we don’t have an experienced sales team” — as a threat, when it’s actually a weakness. Same thirty-second sort fixes it.

B3. Company Strategies (5 required) + Anticipated Benefits

All five — marketing, sales channel, human resource, manufacturing, financial — need their own explanation, and each has to be grounded in specific past-simulation performance, not general strategic reasoning that could apply to any startup. I can usually tell within two sentences whether a strategy paragraph is actually anchored to a candidate’s simulation run or just restating MBA-textbook principles with the company’s name inserted. The second kind reads fine in isolation and still won’t hit Competent, because the rubric explicitly wants the rationale tied to “specific examples of past performance from the simulation.” B3a — your two anticipated benefits — needs to project forward from the strategies you just named, not restate what already happened.

B4. Implementation Steps

Two strategies from B3, two specific implementation steps each. “Specific” means something an evaluator can trace directly to an input field in your actual Q4–Q6 tactical plan — a price point, a production volume, a hiring decision, a channel allocation. I’ve seen implementation sections that were well-written but vague enough to apply to any company in any simulation (“improve our marketing efforts”) — that’s a sign the strategy was chosen for how it reads rather than because the simulation gave a concrete lever to point to.

C. Sources

Standard APA, in-text plus reference list, matched exactly. A mismatch between how a source is cited in-text and how it appears in your reference list — different year, different author formatting — is enough to drop this criterion even when the source itself is legitimate and well-chosen.

D. Professional Communication

Different mechanically from every other criterion: Grammarly for Education screens this before a human ever reads your submission, and the task instructions are explicit that the whole submission fails to pass without this gate clearing. Treat every flagged Correctness-category issue as mandatory to resolve, not optional polish — I’ve seen candidates submit anyway with unresolved flags because the writing “read fine” to them, and that’s a real way to fail the whole task on a technicality that had nothing to do with the quality of their analysis.

Part 2: How I’d Approach Each Section

B1a and B1b: Pull up your market share report, sales performance report, and financial summary before you write anything. Scan your full decision history and pick the two decisions with the cleanest, most defensible line to a measured effect; not necessarily your two highest-stakes decisions, but the two you can trace without hedging. Write the number first, then work backward to the decision. Candidates who write the decision first and the justification second tend to produce softer, more hand-wavy paragraphs than candidates who anchor to the number from the start.

B2a/B2b: Do the internal/external sort before you draft a sentence. It’s the cheapest insurance on this entire task.

B3: Give every one of the five paragraphs the same skeleton; name the strategy, cite the specific past-performance data point justifying it, state the forward direction for Q4–Q6. If a sentence would read the same in someone else’s paper, cut it or make it more specific to your own numbers.

B4: Choose your two B3 strategies based on which ones give you the clearest, most concrete implementation options in your actual tactical plan inputs; not which ones make for the most compelling narrative. Concrete beats persuasive here.

Part 3: Annotated Example — Illustrative Company, Not Your Assigned Scenario

I’m building this around a fictitious company, GreenPod Home Systems (a hypothetical hydroponic-garden-unit manufacturer), rather than the carbon-fiber-bicycle scenario in your actual task instructions. That scenario is the fixed simulation every KAM4 candidate works from, it doesn’t vary by student the way a dataset might, so an example built directly on it would function as a drop-in template for the real assignment rather than a teaching tool. What follows shows you the analytical pattern and the level of specificity I’m looking for; your actual submission needs your own real numbers in every one of these slots.

B1a — Annotated

Decision 1 — Price reduction on the flagship unit. Between Q2 and Q3, GreenPod reduced the retail price of its flagship hydroponic unit from $349 to $299 to compete more directly against the two lower-priced entrants that had been pulling budget-conscious buyers earlier in the simulation. Per the market share report, GreenPod’s unit share rose from 11% in Q2 to 16% in Q3 — the largest single-quarter gain of the simulation to that point.

Why this works: the paragraph states the decision, states the competitive mechanism behind it, and cites the specific report and specific percentage change. That’s the causal chain an evaluator is scanning for — swap in your own numbers and this is the shape to follow.

Decision 2 — Expansion into the direct-to-consumer online channel. GreenPod added a direct e-commerce channel in Q3 alongside its existing retail-partner distribution. The sales performance report shows direct-channel sales made up 22% of total Q3 unit volume despite being active for only half the quarter, while overall unit sales grew 34% quarter-over-quarter.

Why this works: it isolates the new channel’s specific contribution and reports the aggregate effect separately — a distinction candidates often collapse into one vague “sales went up” statement.

B2a — Annotated

Greatest strength: GreenPod’s most significant internal strength is its low per-unit manufacturing cost, driven by the decision to bring injection molding in-house rather than outsourcing — the Q3 financial summary shows cost of goods sold at 38% of revenue against a simulation-wide competitor average closer to 47%.

Why this works: internally controlled, tied directly to a SWOT-table item, backed by a specific number from the financial summary rather than an unsupported claim of “efficiency.”

Biggest weakness: GreenPod’s greatest internal weakness is its underdeveloped customer support function — with no dedicated support staff through Q3, defect-inquiry response time averaged six days, and the simulation’s customer satisfaction index fell from 72 to 61 over the same period.

Why this works: strictly internal, and grounded in a specific simulation metric rather than a vague admission that support “could be better.”

B3 — Annotated (Manufacturing Strategy)

Given that in-house injection molding was the primary driver of GreenPod’s Q3 cost advantage, the manufacturing strategy for Q4–Q6 is to add a second production line rather than outsource overflow demand — Q3 data showed outsourced-unit costs running 22% higher than in-house production. This is expected to preserve the company’s cost-leadership position as demand grows and to reduce the 11-day average fulfillment delay that emerged once in-house capacity saturated in Q3.

Why this works: the strategy is justified with a specific Q3 comparison rather than general manufacturing-strategy theory, and both anticipated benefits are logical forward projections tied to a documented, named Q3 problem — satisfying B3a in the same paragraph.

B4 — Annotated (Implementation Steps)

Q4: Allocate $180,000 of the funding round to a second injection molding line, sized for 2,500 additional units/quarter based on current single-line output.

Q5: Cross-train two existing production staff on the new line rather than hiring externally in Q4, cutting onboarding lag before the line reaches full output.

Why this works: both steps name a specific quarter and a specific, tactical-plan-traceable action — a dollar figure, a staffing decision — rather than a vague intention like “increase manufacturing capacity.”

Where I Can Actually Help Further

Everything above the annotated example is transferable technique. The annotated example itself is deliberately built on a company that isn’t yours, for the reason I gave up top. If you want to work through your own real Q1–Q3 numbers — pressure-testing whether your two B1a decisions have a clean enough causal chain, or double-checking your SWOT sort — bring me your actual simulation output and we’ll go through it the same way I just walked through GreenPod’s.

Resources

For Part B2 (SWOT Analysis)

How to Conduct a SWOT Analysis for Your Small Business — SCORE — SCORE is an SBA resource partner; this page gives the clearest plain-language breakdown of why strengths/weaknesses must stay internal and opportunities/threats external — directly relevant to the B2a/B2b sorting mistake the guide flags as the most common point loss.

For Part B1b (Financial Performance / Balanced Scorecard)

What Is a Balanced Scorecard? — HBS Online — since your task pulls figures from the simulation’s cumulative balanced scorecard, this gives the underlying logic of why the tool blends financial and non-financial performance measures, which is useful context for writing a B1b analysis that goes beyond just restating numbers.

For Part B (the Panopto Pitch itself)

How to Pitch a Business Idea: 5 Steps — HBS Online — covers researching your investor audience and structuring a funding ask, which maps directly onto the rubric’s requirement that your presentation function as an actual pitch, not a narrated slide summary.
How Venture Capitalists Really Assess a Pitch — Harvard Business Review — research-based look at what VCs actually weigh when evaluating a founder’s pitch, useful for calibrating tone and delivery in your Panopto recording specifically.

For Part C (Sources)

APA Style Formatting and Style Guide — Purdue OWL — same APA 7 reference I used for your C717 sub-articles, applicable here for in-text citation and reference list formatting.

Dan Palmer, MBA, writes and coaches WGU MBA capstone candidates through simulation-based performance assessments, including KAM4/C216, C215, and C207.