SlideMagic Blog

My wife and I organised a team photo shoot for the web page of our upcoming business. It had been a while since I did one.

Nice pictures can add greatly to the quality of your web site and/or presentation. Head shots are up to date, all look consistent, and best of all, you have an opportunity to take an image of the entire team together, given you the opportunity to show the energy that you are radiating as a group of people.

We decided to bring the professional photographer into our home rather than venturing out to her studio. Luckily, she was flexible enough to bring the required equipment. A photo shoot at home has the advantage that you feel more comfortable, and that you unlimited access to your wardrobe incase certain outfits/colours do not come across very well.

Ten years ago, many professional photographs were taking in front of the “gradient grey” screen. Fast forward to 2021, with Zoom calls in front of blurred bookcases, these backgrounds look very staged and dated. It makes the photo look like a high school yearbook picture.

They key thing the photographer brings is no longer the camera. It is the ability to engineer a relaxed pose of you, and even more importantly, get the correct light. A was amazed by how a modern “umbrella flasher” can give great image results in pretty much any lighting condition (so no longer the need for the studio).

While a woman can still dress up in a great outfit, I find that for men (me), wearing a full suit looks awkward, you get the “wedding groom” look on your corporate web site. Jacket/no tie, or a turtle neck work great.

I am currently working flat out on a new business that my wife and I are putting together in the field of healthcare. With a bit of luck, we can take the covers of at the JP Morgan Healthcare conference in San Francisco next January. (Hopefully after that I can boost the SlideMagic product more, I have a few interesting ideas).

I am becoming better and better at designing web front ends, fusing what I am learning about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with what was already in my head when it comes to slide, spreadsheet, and data dashboard design.

I am surprised of the impact the look & feel of a prototype makes on early users. Investing in design can take a lot of time, and can be wasted when you are taking your product into an entirely new direction.

My approach is similar to presentation design. Focus on easy wins that make your product look professional and organised, and skip the “marketing design” for the moment.

• Minimal effort on the public facing web site

• No investment in “flashy” animations, videos, and other spectacular effects

• Instead get the little details right that make a big impact, and fixing them does not take a lot of time:

  • Layouts of screens
  • Lining things up
  • Colour contrasts
  • Font size and emphasis
  • Rounding of numbers
  • Etc., etc.

Having a prototype that looks good makes it also a lot more fun to work on.

Most business presentations in the world are written in English, most people who write them are not native English speakers. Different type of errors pop up:

1. Typos and grammatical errors that can be caught by a spell checker / other software
2. Typos and grammatical errors that are hard to spot by software
3. Mistakes in word choices, a literal translation from another language into English produces a result with a totally different meaning, or double meaning in slang

Number 1 can be avoided, no excuse here.

Number 2 are also made by native English speaker, they look sloppy but are not a deal breaker. To catch all of them, you might need to help of a professional editor.

Number 3 can be a big problem and really damage the credibility of your presentation. Having your presentation read by anyone who is an English speaker will catch these, also no excuses here.

The quote from the Jerry Maguire movie. Some pitches go well. Maybe because the other side knows you, trusts you, knows the industry/competition well, and is ready to take things to the next step. No point in trying to pick up the pitch at page 15 with that very optimistic revenue forecast, and/or booting up that demo with potential bugs. That can happen in the next meeting.

Startup competitions are different from regular investor pitches. Your are on stage to deliver a show to a crowd, not to a VC partner group. The jury members do not have to put their money where their mouth is. I asked a recent jury member for such an event to list feedback on investor presentations from the top of her head, without too much thinking. Here is the raw result:

• Have someone speak who masters the language. This is a back-to-back show, and if all candidates speak fluently, the one who does not will stand out negatively.
• Personality, attitude, enthusiasm, passion are far more important than professionally crafted slides.
• If you have to send a very junior team member to present, because the you, the CEO, has better things to do than to attend the startup competition, it is probably better not to show up at all.
• Contradicting myself, a presentation by (recorded) video was received remarkably well.

Startup competitions might suit some startups better than others. Things that score points for a big crowd: an unusual, non-typical, entrepreneur; an impact/green/environmental/healthcare-related company objective, a market that a non-technical audience can relate to, etc. etc.

When preparing for a startup pitch event, customize your slides and story and don’t bring your standard investor pitch to the event.

Professional communication is getting more efficient, informal, and to the point. Long memos, turn into emails, turn into quick messages. Polite greetings that used to be the protocol in letters are left out.

In certain settings, the formalities of the past are still present. The dinner speech for example. We look back at the past year, summarise our achievements, thank everyone involved. A good speech can be inspiring and a joy to listen to. It can be great to see someone get the thank you she deserves.

A routine speech is boring though: running through a long list of names, waiting for a round of applause for each one of them, becoming softer and softer as the we read down the piece of paper. The audience is polite, but is probably secretly hoping for the thing to be over, and/or, curious to hear what the real news is that is coming at the end of the talk.

When writing an update email (or update-presentation-attachment), the politeness is no longer required, you no longer have a captive audience. People speed read through your paragraphs to the things that really matter.

Keep that in mind when writing it. Make the things that matter stand out. Make that thank you that you really mean stand out.

Here is a very common presentation scenario. You have a good relationship with a middle manager in a potential client, and she meets the CEO next week and could take “a few slides” with her in her briefcase for a 30 second pitch.

What not to do? Send your full 30 minute pitch deck that you have used in so many successful Zoom meetings before. Especially that slide with just a golf ball on a green lawn always drives your point home.

You are not presenting, your friend does, and you don’t have 30 minutes, you have 30 seconds. But this might be good news. Thirty seconds of your friend with the CEO, is a better shot than 10 minutes with a purchasing officer who you do not know.

What to do?

Take the time to explain to your friend what it is you do, and then make a “placeholder” slide that she can use to give the pitch. It is not possible to go through a slide deck in 30 seconds, so the pitch is basically a verbal one. Your placeholder should look nice, and actually not distract too much so that the CEO can keep her focus on the audio track. (Typos, calculation errors….)

You need to rely on your friend to do the pitch, but you need to compensate for the fact that you are not in the room, nor on the Zoom screen to give the CEO the opportunity to use her intuition to answer the “who are these people?” Question. A CV/bio type slide with a picture could do the trick (again a placeholder) , “hey they also went to INSEAD…”.

A boxy table caught my eye on Twitter:

The biggest flaw in this table is the White House line, that suggests a separate group of people. Then, you can shift the columns around a bit, until you get this result:

Automation is likely to take out a large share of middle-level jobs in the economy. Gardners, hairdressers, etc. will always be needed. Top scientists, managers, creatives, probably will not be automated anytime soon. In between, it is a different story.

“Automation” has made its inroad in the workplace as well. Most visibly in the area of storage and filing. But also in the way we work. Think of the amount of people that were employed typing up formal documents and memos, planning meetings, arranging phone calls. Back in the 1990s, running analysis on your business required armies of analysts, often sourced from external consulting firms (I was one of them).

The same trend is happening in presentations. Back in the 1990s, we would discuss interim project results using hand drawn charts, that then would be produced by professional graphics designers into a final document. The production of such a document could take weeks, where the sole focus was one communication, and the underlying analysis barely moved.

Bit by bit, the professional designers were replaced by analysts skipping the hand drawn charts and making them directly on their computers. Analysts first, followed by more senior staff. Every meeting now looked like a final presentation.

The trend will continue. “Presentations” will become simpler and quicker to make. In 10 years we will look back and remember the days when we used to spend so much time trying to put a complicated slide deck together for a simple decision.

SlideMagic is here to help.

It can take a lot of time to get your presentation slide just right. However, once you got to that point, it should be super quick to recreate it. You can call this a ‘live test’. Take pen/paper, or open SlideMagic, and create the chart on the fly while someone is watching and listening. “We have 3 options, each has distinct pros and cons, I think number 2 is the best one”. If you are struggling to do this quickly and in a logical flow, your chart is probably too complex to be understood by a live audience. This is similar to a school teacher using the blackboard in the proper way.