SlideMagic Blog

Busy investors do not have (want to make) time for long verbose cover letters/emails for your presentation. Write for a skimmer:

1. Keep it really short
2. Cut out all management buzzwords and padding (synergies, engagement, strategic, flexible, ROI, etc.) that everyone else is using and which have become verbal white noise. Use conversational, human language
3. Say how you got to her (our dads were in high school together)
4. Say what you want early on (advice, money, intro to someone), and ask for a very specific next step.
5. Prioritise interesting content of the pitch (unusual facts, case example, unexpected advantage over a well-known competitor (2x as many users as Facebook, etc.) over a well structured, complete, business school essay. You are not trying to get a grade for your mid terms, you are trying to get a follow up phone call.
6. Make it highly/relevant/specific to her: complements portfolio company x, y, z, matches what you spoke about at a conference last week.
7. Use typography to break the text, to make it easier to speed read: big concept, 3 (short) supporting bullets, another concept, supporting bullets.

Newspaper headline writers are masters in packing a lot of information in very few words, link bait bloggers write titles that people just have to click on.

In day-to-day business presentations, you might not have time, energy, budget to come up with an artistic visual master piece on every slide. The biggest difference to the quality of your slides might simply be your writing.

1. Cut words that add no content: in order to, etc., avoid passive sentences (Harry was seated on by a bird), management cliche verbs (monetize/strategize/analyze/incentivize)
2. Avoid long words (small/narrow boxes create uneven line breaks)
3. Think carefully where you break a line, do it manually
4. Work with labels, introduce a short catchy name for a more complex strategy, option early on in the presentation, so you do not have to repeat the enter-the-Indian-market-first sequence all the time.
5. Stay within the constraints, if you have 2 lines, do not make it 3.
6. Emphasise the contrast between a series of boxes and cut text that is common to all of them: entry in China, launch in India, Japanese entry: becomes China, India, Japan
7. If you have to, write exceptions or other details in a tiny footnote

You write that paragraph, again, and again, and again. Share it with the team, incorporate the input, re-write, again, and again. In the end, you probably got a politically correct piece of prose, but at the same time you killed of the spontaneous, raw enthusiasm about why your company/idea is so great.

Maybe say the pitch out loud one more time and just write down what comes natural to you?

I see that only a handful of my facebook friends follow Humans of New York: a photographer taking pictures of strangers in NYC, adding a little personal story. The way these stories are written is brilliant: an unexpected starter question, followed by a very short story, that usually ends in an unexpected twist or life lesson. Add them to your facebook feed if you have not already done so.

I live in a tense part of the world and have observed many discussions on social media where people trying to convince others they are right. I convince people for a living, so I am jotting down some thoughts below on how to engage in these discussions, and hopefully turn war-like exchanges into dialogues.

In order not to have this post hijacked by a political discussion, I am leaving my political viewpoints out here. Here we go in no particular order:

1. Be polite, correct, calm, composed, rational. Nobody believes a screaming maniac.
2. Listen, listen, listen and look for a very specific mistake, misconception that can be corrected. Generic statements that answer another point then the ones raised are not useful and ignored.
3. Set your ambition level. You are unlikely to correct someone’s fundamental beliefs in just 1 paragraph.
4. Realise that your most important audience might not be the person you are interacting with, but rather the many more that glance over the comments, the secondary audience is bigger
5. Make your point very personal, human, and show that there is a normal person on the other side of the line
6. Nobody likes to see more detail of gory images or screaming graphics
7. Be short and to the point, on social media, nobody reads long paragraphs. If your text is longer, add lots of paragraph breaks
8. Be sure to engage/correct a big opinion leader with lots of followers/readers: polite, super short, very specific fact to correct a very specific mistake/misconception
9. Use sources that are credible, close to the opposite site of you. Linking to a highly biassed patriotic web sites full of the wrong flags is not going to make people read them
10. Highlight facts or details that are not widely known/used in the media
11. Try not to start with me, me, me, but start with the opposing viewpoint and show why it is causing a problem. Understand the stereotype that the other side might have of you, and try to soften it (you can even refer to it directly).

Most presentation design projects can be split up in components, you can even have different people work on the individual bits. Two components go hand in hand though: convincing/reminding the audience of the problem, and presenting your solution. The way you portray the problem should guide the way you show the solution. In fact, the best way to show the solution is the highlight the problem.

Business presentation design requirers a combination of skills:

1. Content story: the strategy consultant. Somehow all the raw material, content need to be in place. All in a logical order, no holes, no overlaps, all the items of check list need to be ticked off: need/problem, solution, market, competitors, business model, financials, etc. etc.
2. Slide layout: the designer. Colours, fonts, look and feel, white space, layout, image cropping/scaling/positioning, diagramming.
3. Data visualisation: the strategy consultant. Challenge one: pick the right message you want to emphasise from the thousands of options that a data set gives you. Challenge two: actually emphasise it with the right chart, the right colours, the right rounding.
4. Pitch story: the movie director. Now take all the structured, analytical, and boring base material, and turn it into an exciting, emotional, convincing 20 minute pitch. (Note the difference between content story and pitch story)
5. Outside reality check: seasoned business executive. What are the weaknesses in the story, what are the difficult (and/or obvious) questions the audience will ask, what elements of the story are totally obvious?

I was trained in 1 and 3, got 5 through the years, taught myself 2 (clean, good enough, but not at the level of a master illustrator), and trying my best at 4.

Many professional designers in the market will lack 1, 3, and 5: but they will still do fabulous work on presentations that have less hard core business content.

Many corporate executives lack 2, 3, and 4. They also will have trouble with number 5: being able to look at their story from a true outside perspective.

Most appliances comes with a user manual and a quick starter guide. The manual resembles most business presentations today, the quick starter guide is what you should aim to design.

Manual:

• Long
• Lots of words, long paragraphs, clumsy translations into multiple languages
• Regulatory disclaimers
• Logical structure

Quick starter guide:

• Short
• Visuals only (no need for languages)
• Only info that matters (regulatory statements are out)
• Story structure (the order of what needs to happen when you take the thing out of the box)

Many bullet point heavy presentations are in fact speeches. You read and correct every paragraph over and over again and after hours and hours of work you see that you got it exactly right this is what you want to say!

Congratulations, you have arrived at the starting point of your presentation design project, not its end.

Whenever I need to send out a version of a presentation, I tend to do it in the morning after I had a chance to glance over things one more time, making small corrections here and there. Sending a deck straight after a big design push leaves errors that can easily be fixed by a well-rested mind. Story flow design in particular gets a bit hazy when you are in the trenches to turn out one slide after another.