Frankensteining market background charts

Google for "market developments" in a specific industry, and your search engine will serve you thousands of consulting charts that fit the bill. It is tempting to "Frankenstein" a deck together with 25 of these and call yourself an industry expert and/or convince investors that you are one.

Here are some health warnings.

• Frankensteining a deck (stealing charts from different presentations and stapling them together to form a new slide deck), will never give the most coherent story. Start with the points you want to make, and decide in what order they come, then create visuals
• Google has a long memory and most of the consulting charts out there are dated: old data, expired insights and stale, overused case examples
• Most charts designed by consulting companies are written for their core customer base: large corporates who are trying to catch up with smaller, leaner, more innovative startups around them. If you are a startup yourself, you are a different audience.
• Many of these charts are complex frameworks that aim to visualize some micro-economic concept. These frameworks are great for solving a problem, they are less suited to communicate the conclusions. If your message is "it is complex", use a consulting framework as a chart, if it is something else, try a different one.
• Every consulting project covers the basics: figuring out market sizes, growth rates, segments, shares. All the results of this analysis gets put in charts that shows the homework that has been done, but they are unlikely to be the key insight from the work. Presenting slide-after-slide with growth rates by subcontinent is not going to excite your audience.
• Long-winded recommendations out of a consulting project specific context or quotes from experts people have never heard of never make for the most appealing or convincing charts in a presentation.

In short, think what you want to say, then create your own charts to say it.