SlideMagic Blog

Nobody can accurately predict a P&L five years from. But, most entrepreneur have a pretty good idea about the cost of running the business over the next 12 months. Product development, giving a free 1 year subscription to new customers, designing the marketing materials, hiring an investor presentation designer, etc.

Still there is value to putting all these floating numbers in a coherent P&L. In the short term, you can fix the exact timing of your expenses. “Free subscription to new customers” is a zero entry in the budget, but in a P&L becomes a real cost. Thinking about year 5 forces you to do the check whether your business is actually vaguely plausible. Can you recruit the required 10,000 enterprise customers with a 5 person sales force? Is it viable to have $500 server cost per customers if they are only paying $400 at best, before even getting to R&D and marketing costs?

The P&L is a thought exercise, not a tool to calculate your $20m profits in year 5.

The empty template in my presentation app SlideMagic uses pretty much the same layout as my bespoke work in PowerPoint/Keynote for clients:

Big slide headline that can run over 2 lines (I like elaborate titles, similar to newspaper headings), without any graphical elements (lines, banners, logos)

• Small logo in the bottom right, I compromise here and give in to most companies insisting that the audience should be reminded to whom they are listening on every page. Many clients want to move that logo left, which creates a graphical imbalance: the bottom right logo balances the weight of the left-aligned title in the top left. Also, a logo at the left creates problems with footnotes.

It is surprising to see that most of my clients have very few images of their staff, their products, their client installations. The result: very poor product image shots, and a set of inconsistent headshots of the management team in the presentation.

Make it a habit to build your image library constantly using your smartphone. Snap a picture of the management team meeting (when everyone is in the same room together), the product demonstration, the big shipment of product that goes out of the door, maybe the strategic partner visiting.

In that way, you always have a rich library of images to chose from.

Design is hard because there are many small decisions that lead to a great-looking page. Everyone knows the concepts: white space, big images, good-looking fonts, but even with that knowledge it is hard to get it right. Pretty much like composing music: everyone can master music theory or playing an instrument with a little effort, very few can compose master pieces.

Very often, I email a deck back to a client at the end of a project and say “I might a few very small changes, you probably won’t notice them”. But, these small changes added up can make a big difference to a layout.

So what is it I do in the final stages of a presentation design project? It is hard to capture.

The main thing I think is completely stepping away from the actual content, i.e. the text that is written in boxes. Instead I see black/light grey patterns of characters, boxes in different shapes and colors. Almost “squinting” at the page and making adjustments until this “cubist painting” looks right in terms of proportions and balance.

Most of the times, it work but yes, there are pages where even me as a professional simply cannot get it right.

Image via WikiPedia

In PowerPoint, you have to option to display drawing guides that help you align objects on a slide. A common application is to have some sort of frame around your slide to make sure that you have the same margin around all your slides in a presentation.

I find these frames very useful, but there is a small issue you need to watch out for, when making compositions, my brain actually assumes that the dotted lines are part of the slide, and I start positioning objects accordingly. When you switch of the frames, or look at the slide in presentation mode, the whole balance looks wrong somehow.

So: always check your slide compositions with those drawing guides disabled.

PS. In my presentation design app SlideMagic, there is no need for drawing guides, since you are forced (kindly), to use a predetermined grid. Try it out!

In a recent blog post, Nick Morgan advises to pitch your voice lower when presenting. When we are nervous, we tighten our vocal chords, which results in a high “shrieky” voice that radiates lack of confidence.

I see many people do this even in smaller meetings, and especially some women are dropping their voice pitch dramatically to come across stronger in a male/testosterone-loaded world. In many cases this sounds very artificial.

 Part of the exercise of lowering your voice is probably not related to your voice at all, it gives you something to focus on that simply calms you down. When you are in your mental low voice mode, you feel more confident.

I would treat lowering your pitch as a last resort, and hopefully other stress reduction techniques (including having tremendous confidence in your story) enable you to keep your own natural voice.

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Some clients ask me. The answer: “no”. Each situation and story is different. I jump back and forth between high level story line design to graphics design details to numerical analysis.

Is this the best approach to presentation design? Probably not, but I can pull it off for a two reasons: many years of experience, being a 1-person operation, mostly having 1 contact person at a client, and having clients that self-select, i.e., if they uncomfortable with this approach they would not choose to work with me.

As soon as you deal with multiple people, at different levels of experience, and an agency that tries to scale up, there is no escaping to a formal process with specific end products at specific times.

I ask this question often in client briefing meetings. “Your approach seems obvious, why did it take humanity as 2017 to come up with this, why is it so hard to do?” It is a useful question to take the position of the outsider. For the expert/insider the answer is so obvious that it does not even have to be included in the slides. For the outsider, it might be the most important piece of information.

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This is a complaint I often get from startups that deal with private equity investors. The analyst is asking for the number of customers, the number of sales people, the number of engineers in 2021. Who knows, right? Does this make sense?

Well, partially. Building a financial model for 2021 can be a valuable exercise in checking wither your business model makes sense. If you need to recruit 30 Fortune 500 customers in 4 years with 8 months sales cycles and head quarters which are based on a different continent, you cannot get away with 2 sales people and some search engine optimization in your marketing and sales budget. On the other hand, a consumer-focused company that needs to sign up 500,000 user does not need a huge enterprise sales operation.

It is this sanity check that investors want to do. Your “sales and marketing cost is 30% of our $100m 2021 sales” does not show - in most cases - that you have thought about what it would take to build such a company.

Everyone is constantly pushing you to make your investor pitch shorter, get rid of slides. And after a number of feedback rounds you are left with a very short deck: the summary bullets, an about page, team, IDC/Gartner market forecast, milestones, use of proceeds, for example.

These charts are all very generic, and you will find them in every investor pitch. The content is obviously important, but you have chopped out the charts that tell the story of your company. Why it was so hard until 2017 to tackle a particular issue, and why your company is so brilliant at doing it.

The tell tale sign of a deck that is too short is that you are not using it when presenting. You know your story inside out, so on page 1, you give the the presentation without using any slides, then you quickly click through the slides with the technical company information.

This works great when you are in the room, it does not work at all when you email the deck. Think about the MVP: minimal viable presentation.

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