4 levels of presentation improvement

"Oh, I just want to pick your brain", is what clients on a low budget often say. Two things they do not realize: 1) it is hard to add any serious value in 10 minutes, 2) 10 minute conversations never last 10 minutes, especially when in person, 3) taking a creative person out of the workflow for 10 minutes comes at a cost of around 60 minutes.

Here are 4 levels of improvement in a presentation:

1. Quick content check: the main feedback I can give is whether something is missing in your pitch, and/or whether you spend too much time on something that is obvious or not relevant. In most cases it will be hard for a non-professional pitch designer to turn this high level feedback into a better deck
2. A quick template fix: fix fonts, colors, images, alignment. This is work that any designer can do, you can count down the work it takes by the amount of pages, there is no need (and time) to go into what is actually written on the slides
3. Slide-by-slide content fixes. One step further than step 2, I dive in the content, start changing text, layouts, everything, but pretty much on a slide-by-slide basis. Regular designers will struggle here since I am often editing the words of very senior executives in companies here, it requires some background knowledge, but most of all confidence to contradict a CEO. The effort such a project is pretty much driven by the number of pages
4. The full re-do of a pitch, starting from a blank sheet of paper. This is my usual bread and butter work, and is pretty much a fixed time effort: my biggest effort is to understand your particular story. Once I am there, it does not really matter anymore whether I product 20, 30, or 40 slides.

Don't expect the output of level 4 with a level 1 investment.