SlideMagic Blog

Back at my days at McKinsey I was taught that every item in a list should start with a an “action verb”: “Agree next steps”, “Build customer list”, “Sell unwanted subsidiary”. I am no longer sticking to this principle:

• In many case you need to invent a verb that just add words and line breaks to a text box without adding meaning. If the viewer will understand it without the verb, it is OK.
• Worse: this search for action verbs is a major cause of consulting speak with repetitive use of similar verbs: highlight, identify, uncover, map, etc. etc.

An investor is heavily influenced by the successes and failures of past deals. There might be no scientific evidence that “you can’t make money in healthcare diagnostics”, “ad tech is dead”, “companies founded in Italy are hard to scale”, “that sounds like IT management, and that is a feature rather than a market” but the investor, with sample size n=1, is a true believer.

In the first few seconds of an interaction with an investor, they will try to put you in a box of something they understand and/or have invested in in the past. Help them do it, and say that you will clarify later why “mobile social network” is not exactly what you are doing.

If the dialogue with the investor continues, pay careful attention to of the cough comments about past experiences where she burnt her fingers on something that sounds similar. These reservations go really deep, an investor won’t trip over the same stone twice. Understand the concern, and really explain why your situation is different. If you don’t know the answer right away, get back to her later after you have collected the facts.

I sit in many meetings where a startup leadership team tries to figure out a company strategy or product positioning. Everyone is talking similar but different things and it is impossible to bring things to a conclusion.

The first step in these situations is actually to establish what the options are. If you don’t know what you are trying to decide about, it is pretty hard to make a decision!

The traditional management theory approach is to draw up some table with the options, and write down what is the difference between them on certain dimensions. This requires some on the spot puzzling to get the column headings of the table right.

Another approach is to try to define the strategy in a simple sentence. Now, when people start writing company strategies in sentences you tend to get woolly, fluffy, statements full of buzzwords. So, the challenge here is to avoid doing that. This is an internal work meeting, not the vision statement on your web site. They key is to catch the essence of the strategy in as little words as possible, including possible uncertainties. For example: “We are trying to acquire as many users as we can with all means (including free product), collect their data, and use/sell that data somehow in the future.”

This allows the team to have a good discussion about the options. The discussion will flow even better if you can find catchy 1-word labels for each of the strategic options.

After the meeting, a volunteer can take all that away, turn it into a proper trade off table and/or word them in the proper way for the next meeting.

If you are not a Photoshop master, here is a crude way to cut out an object out of an image in PowerPoint:

1. Take an image
2. Draw a freeform shape over it
3. Remove the image
4. Fill the shape with the original image
5. Select crop, and then “fill”, then scale up the cropped image until the shape is filled with just the bit that you intended
6. I added the original image back in the background

I watched an opera a few days ago in Tel Aviv, where the singers were performing behind a perforated projection screen, and in front of another regulator projection screen, which created a very interesting stage backdrop. Here is an idea for a presentation set up: put the presenter literally inside the slide.

In the image below, you can see the 2 screens. The battlefield background is a regular projection, the barrels in front are semi transparent. I googled for another demonstration of this stage setup:

Be careful with sending PowerPoint presentations that could have left overs of confidential information hidden inside that you do not want outsiders to see:

• Comments in the speaker notes field at the bottom of the slides (“Let’s don’t tell our investors yet, about the disappointing Q1 results, we will do that in 2 weeks”). When you use an old presentation to “copy-save” it as the master of a new one, comments get copied across as well.
• Regular comments on slides that have not been removed
• Information, comments, analysis, that sits in the Excel engine of data charts, when someone clicks “edit data”, the full Excel sheet opens
• Also, even if you remove the data labels or axes from a data chart, the data still remains visible when hovering over it with a mouse.

It is best to share your presentation as a PDF file, but even then watch out with information that becomes visible when hovering over with your mouse (data points, file names of images, etc.)

Image via WikiPedia

The investor asks you a question, and the instinctive reaction of an entrepreneur is to fire back with data, slides, and arguments to prove that the investor is wrong. “No, that concern does not apply to me because, because. because”. Part of the rhetoric includes a repeat of what just has been presented, to eliminate the possibility that the investor did not understand it the first time around. Boom, boom boom.

Pick your battles. Especially if the investor bases the question on 5 other startups she has seen in the same field, it is 5 people she knows and trusts against you she just met 20 minutes ago. Maybe she has a point, maybe you need to find out a bit more about the background of her concern, after which you can give a more balanced answer, which could well be, let me check and I will get back to you.

Read the human signals, if the investor does not engage anymore and says “OK, I understand”, but her eyes say something different, it might well be that she simply does not want to hear a repetition of your arguments she does not believe.

I have written a guest post on Presentation Guru, the digital magazine for presentation professionals. Here you can find my post about designing presentations that will convince investors.

Entrepreneurs are optimistic by nature, and every financial forecast I see shows a shiny company company after 5 years with huge sales, profits, and cash flows. Nobody believes the forecast anyway, and it cannot possibly be accurate, but still, the 5 year revenue and profit scenario serves a purpose.

It enables the investor to think “what do I have to believe” in order for this to become reality. There is the sanity check on the revenue side, that I have written about before, but the cost side is actually equally important.

Yes, a company with big sales will probably have big profits. But it is good to go beyond the basics. A sensible cost structure shows the investor that you understand the business you are operating in. If you aspire to become a global software company, your economics are likely to look like that of other global software companies. $200m in sales and $190m in profits don’t usually work.

A financial forecast also guides your operating plan. If you need to convince 30 enterprise customers per month to sign up, each requiring a 6 months sales cycle with 5 on site visits, you can work out what sort of sales force you need. Sales costs are no longer “30% of revenue”, but you can make a more informed forecast.

So the point estimates of the 5 year forecast are not that important, it is the logic that went into them that is.

Most of the corporate promotion videos I see are enhanced presentations: text movements with animations, still images with slow zoom added, piano background music and maybe some custom made illustrations. They look good, but have 2 problems when it comes to pitches to busy people:

• They make files very heavy (email attachment bounce and/or consuming 500MB of mobile download data)
• They take too much time: like a bullet point chart, you will have read that one sentence 10x by the time the pianist is finished with the 8 bar melody and ready to move on to the next shot.

That is the reason why I often “flatten” these videos, take the 5 best screen shots and paste them as images in a regular presentation deck. Looks great, quick to read, easy to download.

Anticipating this issue, when you brief a video production company ask them for 2 versions of the video, one with all the graphical elements, and one with less text, so you can use it as source material for still images over which you can place your own text in a presentation. Also handy when your messages change over time.

There are many other situations where you might actually need to keep the video in its full size: demonstrations of products, interviews of people, etc. If it is just about adding drama to a still visual, why not go with a well designed still visual though.