SlideMagic Blog

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.

Often, my clients want a cover image on the presentation that says it all: the entire message of the presentation in just one smart visual. There are 2 problems with this approach:

• A technical one. The ideal image will probably not exist in some stock photo site, so there is significant photoshopping and editing required to get that elephant to balance on a skateboard while enjoying the benefits of flexible ROI. This image is unlikely to look good from a technical point of view.
• Even if you were to make this happen, it is highly unlikely that the audience who walks into the auditorium while sipping a coffee will actually understand what it means.

Lower the ambitions, and pick a professional looking cover image that is somewhat connected to what you are going to talk about and use your presentation to get the full message out.

It is tricky in PowerPoint to make a nice grid of images that comes from different sources, in different sizes, and in different aspect ratios. How do you get them all the same size? It can be very tedious to crop them all to the same proportion, and then line them up correctly. There are always one or two that are wrong.

Here is what I do. Crop each image to a certain aspect ratio, don’t worry yet about the exact size. Now select them all and give each the same height, the width will automatically be adjusted as well! Pro-tip, crop to 1:1 and then try cropping to a circle.

In my presentation app SlideMagic, it is impossible not to lay out images in a grid :-)

We are constantly squatting small bugs in SlideMagic to make it better and more stable. There is one tiny and mysterious issue that I cannot reproduce whatever I try. A small amount of presentations get a green INSEAD logo inserted in their presentation, despite the fact they have nothing to do with INSEAD. Can you let me know if this happened to you, on what sort of device/operating system you were working and what you were trying out. You can email me on jan at slidemagic dot com.

You see a great layout in a poster, brochure, web site, but you find it impossible to replicate it in PowerPoint. You figured out the font, you copied the color codes, and it still does not look nowhere near the example. How can it be?

There are more variables when it comes to layout than just a type face and color:

• How are colors used? Take a step back from your example page and try to estimate the % coverage of a page has a certain color. Yes, the accent color could match exactly, but maybe the designer uses it only very sparsely, and in fact the dominant color of the page is grey, not bright yellow.
• How is white space used? You matched the font, but maybe those bold PowerPoint headlines and text boxes full of text does not fit the loosely spaced, thin text lines that the designer used.
• What sort of images are in the example? Color or B&W? Busy or calm? People or objects? Stock images or “real” photos?
• What sort of page element does the designer use? Graphs? Icons? Narrow columns of small body text? Big bold typography?
• How are accents created? A bullet point? Bold? A different color? Is the main text color actually black, or a lighter grey, or a different color all together?
• Does the designer use some sort of grid to group items on a page?
• Where does the headline sit when compared to the other elements on the page. What is the proportion between the headline and the other elements?

When you are deep into your own story, your mind has hard-wired all aspects of it in one complex mesh network. Everything is related to everything, everything is connected. The upside: you are the expert and know what you are doing. The downside: it is extremely hard for you to explain your idea to someone who comes in cold, without the bits of information, and without the connections between them.

After I return to my office after a client briefing, I usually open a blank piece of paper, take a pencil, and jot down the big ideas I heard in the meeting, after I have given the brain to calm down in the 30 minute journey back. No worry about story lines, no worry about structure, no judgement about what is detail and what is a big message, and no going back to my meeting notes.

These thoughts often become the core building blocks of the presentation. These are the points that I want others to remember when leaving a meeting.

Many people get to this point, they figure out the key messages of a presentation but make the mistake of communicating them in an overly simplistic, or minimalistic way. Just writing “the competition is not flexible” as a big, minimalist statement in a nice designer font is not going to make it stick. Many times, proven/showing these high level messages actually requires going into some depth.

So, a good presentation does not dumb down content. It unravels the wool ball in your head and creates a sequential line of ideas that can ultimately form the basis for a wool ball in the minds of your audience.

They exercise is good for many things, creativity being one of them. I do the occasional exercise in the form of mountain biking. Preferably, I would roam around on single tracks all the time, but time constraints often limit me to loop around Tel Aviv, close to my home.

And here is the weird thing that is happening to me: every time at about the same time/distance in the run, I get some pretty useful ideas for design problems I am struggling with. I started to notice, because the choice of tracks around my home is not that big, the weather in Israel is pretty much the same every day, so these bike runs happen at more or less the exact same circumstances.

So, the inspiration comes 40 minutes or about 16 km in. Maybe it is this exact amount of exercise you need, or there is something about that specific location…