SlideMagic Blog

I noticed that among successful investors you will find a lot of introverts. People that don’t mind working in relatively small companies, like to mull things over, don’t get career satisfaction with being the new sales director which can address the entire company at the next sales kick off meeting. Quietly, these investors did some good deals over the years, and as a result managed to raise subsequents funds. (No offense to extravert successful investors, I know many of them as well).

But be sure to take feedback from these type of investors seriously. She might mumble: “the differentiation versus competitor [X] is not clear”, followed by silence. This is not feedback about redrawing the competitor slide, this is not feedback about reshuffling the order of the slides in the deck, this is not an invitation to repeat your 3 arguments one more time (this time a lot louder). This might be well-thought through fundamental objection against investing in your company, she understood your arguments perfectly well, she simply does not believe them.

Sweater featured in the picture seems to originate here.

Apple’s product announcements are probably business presentations with the largest audiences ever and an example for all of us on slide design and stage delivery. Yesterday was no exception: a well-rehearsed performance and great looking slides in minimalist Apple style.

In about 5% of the slides, Apple slipped into the feature list trap though. Whenever it was time to wrap up the presentation of a product, a slide with a beautiful photo appeared, with a list of bullet points appeared, summarizing the features. Phill Schiller was rushing through the list, mentioning certain bullets, skipping others, repeatedly looking down at the stage monitor to keep on script.

Bullet points can happen to the best of us.

“Oh, I just want to pick your brain”, is what clients on a low budget often say. Two things they do not realize: 1) it is hard to add any serious value in 10 minutes, 2) 10 minute conversations never last 10 minutes, especially when in person, 3) taking a creative person out of the workflow for 10 minutes comes at a cost of around 60 minutes.

Here are 4 levels of improvement in a presentation:

1. Quick content check: the main feedback I can give is whether something is missing in your pitch, and/or whether you spend too much time on something that is obvious or not relevant. In most cases it will be hard for a non-professional pitch designer to turn this high level feedback into a better deck
2. A quick template fix: fix fonts, colors, images, alignment. This is work that any designer can do, you can count down the work it takes by the amount of pages, there is no need (and time) to go into what is actually written on the slides
3. Slide-by-slide content fixes. One step further than step 2, I dive in the content, start changing text, layouts, everything, but pretty much on a slide-by-slide basis. Regular designers will struggle here since I am often editing the words of very senior executives in companies here, it requires some background knowledge, but most of all confidence to contradict a CEO. The effort such a project is pretty much driven by the number of pages
4. The full re-do of a pitch, starting from a blank sheet of paper. This is my usual bread and butter work, and is pretty much a fixed time effort: my biggest effort is to understand your particular story. Once I am there, it does not really matter anymore whether I product 20, 30, or 40 slides.

As a professional presentation designer I deal with highly confidential information in almost every presentation I work on. Let’s look at NDAs (non disclosure agreements) from different perspectives.

As a founder, inventor, entrepreneur, you have every incentive to get people to sign an NDA before sharing confidential information. You have this fragile idea that anyone could just steal and replicate. Also, NDAs are important when applying for patents. If someone can prove that your idea was “out in the open” without NDA protection, you could lose your claim as its inventor.

Investors see thousands and thousands of deals in a year. Signing an NDA for each single one of them creates some practical problems. You would have to thoroughly check 4 pages of dense legal text for each one of them, you need to keep track of all the agreements over time in order not to forget the thousands of legal obligations you entered into over the course of 20 years. That is the reason most investors won’t sign an NDA.

Since investors hold the check book, they are in a pretty strong negotiation position versus the inventor. What to do? In most cases it is possible to explain an idea without signing an NDA. Simply leave the very specific bits out of the pitch. When the due diligence process advances, you might have a chance to get the investor to sign later on, as the probability of making an investment increases.

Even if the investor had bad intentions, it is pretty hard to copy a startup idea after glancing through an investor deck. You need to have the required technical know-how, the team, etc. etc. to make it happen. And even if you have all that, you need to put in the sweat to make it actually happen.

There are endless ways to show financial ratios and benchmarks. Each industry has their own specific ones.

Beer brewers think of the manufacturing cost of beer in terms of cost per hecto liter (not liter, not kilo), but when they think about distribution cost, they think per 6 pack case (not liter, not kilo, not bottle). The cost of sending a letter is usually in weight, the cost of sending a package is usually expressed in terms of volume. Retailers think in terms of sales per square meter. Technology startups think often in terms of per user per month.

Find out what the norm is in your industry and adjust your financials.

The Internet is full with research reports on any subject you ever wanted to explore. In theory therefore, it should be easy to Google together a pile of slides on a certain subject, “Frankenstein” a deck together and go on stage as an expert in a particular field.

Unfortunately, it is not that simple. The audience will figure out very quickly when your knowledge of a subject is exactly the amount of content that is written on the slides. It shows in the way you answer questions, it shows in the way you present your slides.

This can often happen when an executive in the technology industry gets invited for a conference to speak about “the latest in [fill in technology buzzword]”. People take too little time to prepare their talk, and the result is a stumbling performance that recycles some cliches about the subject.

The same is true in consulting firms, where a junior analyst gets charged with “pulling some slides together” on a subject and gets sent of to present to client at the last minute to stand in for a more senior consultant who could not make the slot.

What to do?

Option one is to adjust the topic you are speaking about, often conference owners will be open to this. Speak about something that is really close to what you do day to day. Even if you do not answer the big question on this huge issue everyone is thinking about, that very personal, very specific experience that you have will be very valuable.

Super high resolution images of small slide elements can inflate the size of your PowerPoint or Keynote file without you noticing. A common culprit is an innocent looking page with 30 customer logos. Compress your images often to keep file sizes in check.

Another common file size mistake is to include high resolution images in the slide master to make it easer for people to understand template slides that are meant for photos. As a result, even a simple text slide will create a huge file as the slide master gets saved as an integral part of the document. This can add up in a company with 10,000 employees.

Image compression in PowerPoint can sometimes produce unpredictable results, especially when you tick “apply to all” and you have a presentation with a lot of photographs. I often see cropped images going haywire, the only rescue is to compress images one by one. Always save a copy of your file before attempting to compress the file.

Handy link: how to reduce file sizes in Office

Image via WikiPedia

Slightly off topic today. I am into F1 racing and was watching the Italian Grand Prix at Monza yesterday on 2 screens: the regular TV program, and a mobile app that provided me with every statistic I possibly needed. They are 2 languages that cover the exact same event.

The TV program covers things the way people are used to: camera mainly on the leading car which was up to 30 seconds ahead. Reporters chatting casually in the background. Close ups of supporters. Audio of roaring engines.

The data screen gave a completely different picture. You could see which driver was gaining, losing, when they might come in to swap tires, how long they might last on their tires. It takes a bit of practice to be able to interpret everything, but the weird thing is that when you get there, you could pretty much imagine, actually “see”, a car race without actually seeing the camera feed.

Image via WikiPedia

Most of the presentations I design are to support a 30 minute discussion with an investor. The hardest part of the fund raising effort is often to get to that 30 minute meeting. Some thoughts on elevator pitches via email.

Most people understand that these emails should be short. But people make the mistake of making the email short by cramming in the entire pitch in as few words possible. The full story gets put on a boiler plate, but the fire is left on too long until there is nothing left: big market, great team, strong user traction, multiple business models.

You don’t need to put the entire pitch in 2 lines, your objective is not to land the investment, it is to be invited to a phone call. You want to intrigue enough that it is worth 15 minutes on the phone.

Start with a strong connection. “Your portfolio company CEO [x] thought you might be interested in this.” “We are in a complementary field to your other investment”

Bring a new insight, or a surprising fact, without going into the details. “In 2017, nobody pays for dating sites anymore, but 90% of our users do”. “Everyone knows that electrical cars will only sell if you can get 500 miles on a charge, our batteries could just enable that”. “Google just spent $400m on acquiring a company that we can beat easily”

Avoid empty buzzwords, generic statements, superlative adjectives (300% month-on-month user growth). Keep it human and surprising.

When you write text on a presentation slide, the way the text looks is almost as important as what the text actually says. All the time, consider the typography, the layout of your text when crafting titles and headlines.

• Orphan words that drop to the next line
• Filler words, passive verbs that fill space but don’t any meaning
• Uneven distribution of words across boxes with similar visual priority
• Etc.

Image via WikiPedia