SlideMagic Blog

We have seen them all: a slide that describes four market segments. 4 boxes with a couple of bullet points next to each box: some detail about growth, size, remarks about a competitor, some new product development that happens in one market, in short: stuff.

This slide is the end product of an analysis, you did your homework, all the facts are in, and most people put it straight in the presentation deck. They are skipping an important step: create the slide that tells the story.

How to extract and visualise it?

1. Put your busy slide aside
2. Write down in “broken” short-hand bullets what is actually going on. “There are 4 markets, 2 big slow growing, and 2 small high growth, and it is in one of these where we have a unique opportunity”
3. Now decide on the visual composition. Eye balling the story above, it looks like it is some sort of 2x2 showing the 2 types of markets alongside axes of size and growth, with a call out coming out of the market with the opportunity showing why.
4. Create your slide and double check against your busy starter slide whether you forgot anything absolutely essential.
5. Now, make your busy slide even more busy, adding all the facts and figures and store it as a backup in the appendix.

Now you have 3 levels of story:

1. There are 4 markets, and we should go for market number 3.
2. The reasons why number 3 is so attractive (requires a bit more reading/listening)
3. The full detail of all the markets (requires a lot more reading).

Presentations should look beautiful, but they should also be practical. PowerPoint decks are the main vehicle used in organisations to make and document decisions. PowerPoint decks are used for collaborations among colleagues, PowerPoint decks are shared on different computers with different operating systems. PowerPoint deck versions often last longer than the length of the job posting of the original creator.

So, when evaluating pitches for a new presentation design, weigh that practical component as well.

Cover image by Lachlan Donald on Unsplash

Space on presentation slides is scarce, and you need to think twice about every word you put down.

• More text takes longer to read
• Text blocks are as important as shapes in setting the layout of your slide
  • More text makes the slide look cluttered and busy
  • More text can create visual imbalances: some boxes have lots of text others not, some boxes have 2 lines of text, others just one, etc.

So what to do? Some of these are so obvious and basic, but hard to forget in the middle of the night before the deadline:

• Use short words… Yes as simple as that: “rationalise operational infrastructure” vs. “cut costs”. Long words take up lots of space and hyphenation looks ugly.
• Rely on mental short cuts that the audience already has: “non-organic growth strategies and portfolio restructuring” can be replaced by “M&A”
• Eliminate words that do not add anything to a sentence (buzzwords, filler words), or repeat what has been said before, (hey I am doing it myself here).
• Regroup things. Box one: “Improve the basics: operations, purchasing, pricing”, box two: “Enter the US market with product [X]”, instead of 4 boxes with uneven content.

Cover image by Jelleke Vanooteghem on Unsplash

I came across this slide in an investor presentation of a public company the other day. The slide is in the public domain, but still I disguised the branding in order not to “picking” on a specific company. It is an example of a slide that is probably a leftover of an internal consulting project that evaluated different market segments. In that context, it was probably useful, in this context (the investor who was never part of the consulting project team), it is hard to grasp what is going on in five seconds.

Below you can see my makeover.

• On purpose, I stuck to a simple, no-nonsense, everyday, “anyone-can-do” presentation style. Managers should be spending their time on running a company, not experimenting with fancy graphics in presentations
• I changed the design to a simple column chart that ties everything together. The original slide had market sizes, growth, potential, history, all in different places.
• I removed that 1 data point column chart that never makes sense
• I took out the packaging images with labels that were hard to read

Spam 1.0 was a blind barrage of emails sent to as many people as possible, hoping that the law of big numbers and a 0.01% response rate would make the economics work. You had to highlight your email address (jan at slidemagic dot com) in order not to end up on the global spam email distribution list.

Gmail spam filters pretty much solved that problem.

Spam 2.0 is the next wave. As a startup CEO I am bombarded by emails plugging developers and SAAS software tools. They are better targeted, have at least an offer that is vaguely relevant to me, and somehow get through the gmail spam filter.

And the worst part, the CRM systems that are powering these emails are incredibly persistent, they go on and on and on of apologising that I must be very busy and do not have time to reply to the email. It is a bit like the Crowded House song in the above video, after the CD track is finished (1990s…), the song starts again at 3:38 with “I am still here”.

I have developed a new instant archive “knee jerk”, as soon as you read an email with a familiar tone “Hey, we that as a startup CEO you are very busy but”, you send the email to the archives.

My response would have been different if the approach was really personal and tailored. Like the one you should be using when fund raising for your company and sending teaser decks. But that approach is too costly for selling monthly SAAS subscriptions. My opinion: mass marketing via email will never work.

We are constantly on a path to make company operations more efficient. First we tackled factories, assembly lines, supply chains, leaving us with that ballooning layer of middle management that spends time on meetings, memos, analysis, more meetings, doing the annual accounts.

But slowly things are changing. It is striking to see how state of the art analysis I was doing pretty much by hand at McKinsey in the 1990s (as in allocating cost to a product) is now automated and computerised. Projects that would require 3 months of management consultants can now be done with the press of a button.

One reasons for this is technology, but an equally important driver is the basic idea behind the original analysis. How to think about product costing, what you would have to measure, how to allocate it etc etc. Over the past 20 years, people have learned how to approach this problem, and mastered the skill of actually interpreting the data quickly.

Something similar is happening in the world of presentations. Long-winded memos are out, people now have the courage to say that a presentation meeting is useless, people have read thousands and thousands of business presentations that pretty much follow the same structure.

What does it mean for your presentation? (I am thinking of an “everyday” deck in a company, not a major TED Talk)

• Stick to the format/story line that people have gotten used to
• Cut all excess padding: things people already know are convinced of, buzzwords, background info
• Focus and spend time on what matters, what is unusual, unexpected, not obvious

Any business gathering, in any language is filled with hollow - English - buzzwords. Part of this is to blame on executives who want to show of by using “fancy” words. But a big part I think is simply people learning the new universal language in business: “Business English”.

Business English is spoken by non-native English speakers, unlike proper English, it has a very small vocabulary and people are in need of finding words/verbs/concepts to express common things. You hear others speak Business English, you read documents online in Business English, you see YouTube videos in Business English. And hey you learn, this is how you communicate.

Business language and culture are also deeply linked I think. Overhearing a conference room discussion as an outsider might soon completely ridiculous in terms of buzzword use, but to everyone on the inside, these are just verbal shortcuts that sound perfectly normal, and everyone knows exactly what everyone means.

The challenge is to be aware of this when you start talking to people outside of this inner circle.

Cover image by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

If you end up constantly changing a small bit of a chart or analysis, it might be time to change the whole thing. This all sounds a bit cryptical, 2 examples:

• At the beginning of the project you were clueless about the competitors in the market and created a big 2x2 matrix that shows the market environment. As the team becomes more educated you notice that the only thing you do is moving dots of a specific subset of competitors in the bottom right corner, and adding footnotes, text bubbles, and explanations. It is time to rethink how you show the market and ditch that chart you created on day 2 of the project.
• In the first week of the project your created a rough DCF valuation model. Now, as the project progresses, the team is increasingly interested in scenarios. You end up going back to that first model, tweaking and goal seeking assumptions, and then recreate each scenario manually again. Maybe it is time to throw the model out, and build a spreadsheet that can handle multiple scenarios quickly.

There is no point in doing a slide update when a whole new visual or analytical approach is required.

Cover image via WikiPedia

This is probably the most famous stock image around now. Read the full background story here, including who is the photographer, the other shots he took with the same models, and how it all spread over the past 6 months.

The creator of the one below did an exceptional job at finding the right expressions of the characters in the Photoshop.

Maybe the idea was not that new after all…

Post frequency will go down over the next few days as I am disconnecting from work for a couple of days. I hope you are enjoying the summer as well. Cover image by Malgorzata Frej on Unsplash