Make up the financials?

It is impossible to predict the financials of a business that does not exist yet correctly. And therefore, every financial prediction you see in a startup pitch is made up. Is there any point in doing it? I think you should.

Numbers are a powerful way to check your story for consistency. You cannot sell to more than 6b people on earth, if you are tripling an existing market, are all constraints you should think about. If takes more variable cost to make something than the price you charge, something is wrong. If you want to sell to 10 large Fortune 500 customers, but you only have one sales person in the office, something might not be right. If you plan to hire 300 people next year, that means 1 a day, how are you doing so far?

The key is to translate top level numbers to things you can touch. Sales are customers x products per customer x a price they pay for it. Sales costs are sales people. Etc. etc.

People are not be convinced by the $100m sales in year 5 because your spreadsheet says so. They will believe that you are someone who know what she is doing when the logic behind the $100m stacks up.

---

Art: Victor Dubreuil, Money to Burn, 1893

Big meetings or email input

Usually big meetings to collect input on a presentation draft are an inefficient use of time. Conversations get side tracked, people make ambiguous comments, introverts who might have intelligent points to add do not speak up (and vice versa). For smaller comments, it is best to have them send to you by email.

There is one exception though: when the overall way to pitch the story is not clear, you have to discuss it with everybody present. Otherwise you end up going back and forth in numerous iterations with a fundamental re-write of the whole pitch. When you do run this kind of meeting, try to keep it focussed on that subject: the overall approach to the story, and not editing sentences and headlines on individual slides.

Sales versus investor presentations

CEOs are used to doing the company's product sales pitch. When they look for investors or acquirers for their company, it is temping to just press play and do that same sales pitch again. But they can be very different stories.

An investor needs to hear the sales pitch. It makes her believe that the company makes products that people want to buy. Also, it shows that the company CEO is actually good at selling (or not). But investors needs more: strategy, financials, margins, funding requirements, and a more explicit comparison versus the competition than you would put in the sales deck.

Potential acquirers might not be interested at all in the sales pitch. Maybe they are considering to buy the company for a very specific asset they need. (Technology, people, distribution). Acquirers need a very specific, tailored presentation. To make it, you need to put yourself in their shoes and resist the temptation to hit "play" and run the sales pitch.

---

Image from WikiPedia

Video briefing

You know how to give that perfect sales presentation, but do you sales reps in the field as well? Probably not. One way to get them to say the right things is write the messages down in bullet points that can be read of the screen. But that does not create the most engaging presentation for your potential customers.

A better approach might be to record yourself delivering the presentation on video and share that with people in the field.

"It takes too much time to get to the solution"

Clients say they get this feedback after giving a pitch. The initial reaction to this would be:

• Cut slides from the deck
• Take the specifics out of your text, make it shorter and more high level
• Combine multiple slides into one

The danger of this is that you end up with a few slides of highly generic and dense bullet points.  Remember:

• Slide count does not equal time spent presenting them
• Smacking someone with the solution in their face instantly takes away the opportunity to lead them by the hand in an interesting story that covers the problem you are trying to solve.
• The best way to sell the solution is to sell the problem

Here is what I do:

• Create a super short intro slide that explains the audience what you solve and what you do. So they can stop guessing about the point you are trying to get to.
• Now, lead people through a sequence of visual slides that highlight the problem, slowing down sufficiently to make sure that the audience "feels" the issue. "Production cost is too high" is too generic. Why is it so expensive, and why could no one do it cheaper until today?
• Then, present your solution and use the framework of the problem you set up in the previous section to mirror your product against markets that are out there in the market today

---

Image by David Felstead on Flickr

Natural stock photos

I stumbled across yet another stock photo site that tries to offer "real" rather than cheesy, stages stock photos: Twenty Twenty (www.twenty20.com)

What I like: good images, big library, useful "collections". Pricing is relatively steep for the casual user (starting at $20 per image, or a $225 monthly subscription for 25 images compared to some of the free stock image sites that are popping up everywhere. Still, only marginally more than the big brand stock photo sites.

My prediction: iStock and shutterstock will add a "non-cheesy" filter option to their image sites soon.

PowerPoint 2016 now lets you customise toolbars

In the latest PowerPoint 2016 software update, Microsoft started to fix one of the last remaining issues in a great product: customisation of the top tool bar. Here is a screen shot of what is new:

Things are limited to just these functions though. In PowerPoint 2011 it was possible to add any function you want to the top bar. File, save, and definitely print, are not the actions a PowerPoint user needs to access all the time. What I would like to see are buttons to align and distribute objects, and move things to the front and the back. Here is my toolbar from PowerPoint 2011:

---

Image from WikiPedia

The eyes need to smile

Selecting profile pictures for a presentation or web site is always tricky. My advise is to take a huge amount of photos to have as many options as possible to select the best one.

The first and most obvious selection layer are obvious mistakes. Closed eyes, the tie not sitting straight, basic face expressions.

The second layer is more tricky. If you look carefully at a portrait image, it is usually possible to guess the sort of mood the subject was in. The face can be smiling, the eyes not. The person can look embarrassed, amused, shy, uncomfortable, curious.. Pick the one that suits best.

Think about this when your picture is being taken. Look at the lens of the camera, the way you would want to look at a potential investor or client standing in front of you. Professional actors can do this for every possible mood they want to project. For you, it is enough to do what comes naturally to you.

Teach them how to think about you

This debate on the Fred Wilson blog whether you should look at Twitter in terms of monthly active users who log in, or (the much larger number of) people who view/get exposed to tweets is an important lesson in investor presentation design: sometimes you need to educate your audience how to think about you.

Investors like benchmarks that they can compare quickly across stocks, like features of car: EPS, CAC, churn, MAU, eye balls, beta, EV/EBITDA. If your company does not fit the traditional pattern you need to make sure your audience understands it.

---

Image from WikiPedia

Clever categorisation

Categorisation is a key skill for presentation designers. Raw material usually consists of lists of bullet points: some are detailed, some are generic, some are important, others not, some overlap, sometimes lists are not complete.

Moving around these points, grouping, categorising them is an important part in the design process. Next is the decision what issues to tackle on what slides. Where can you condense, where do you need to break things up over multiple visuals.

---

Image from WikiPedia

No longer a power user

Back in the 1990s, buying a new computer used to be something very exciting, today it is the replacement of a work tool after the previous one breaks down.

As a presentation designer I used to fit in the category of "power users", people that need to manipulate images and store large files. No longer, for my work, I can use an average computer and everything will be just fine.

Portability is not as much as a big deal as it used to be. I can access all my files online. I focus my creative design work to my calm office environment and need a simple device to run a presentation in a meeting or make last-minute edits if necessary. And when I move around, I want that device to be as light/small as possible. (Five years ago I used to carry around a 3kg 17" laptop).

What is important though is the largest screen I can get my hands on. This is such an improvement in productivity.

Now, my personal hobbies (electronic music creation), complicates all this. It needs huge hard drives and processing power...

Decisions...

A business card web site

I made a brief side step into web design last week, when a VC fund for which I created the fund raising presentation needed a web presence as well.

This fund (like many other businesses), needed a simple "business card", a decent, professional-looking web presence that works on all types of browsing devices. It was not trying to sell a product to consumers, it was not giving access to a content library, it was not powering a market place. 

Many of these business card web sites look poor:

• People pick the wrong platform. A template that offers too many features, that can only be maintained by a web developer.
• People let the design be driven by the menu structure that the template offers, rather than the content
• People enthusiastically create active content sections (blog, news, links to social media pages) that then are not maintained.

For business card web sites, keep things very simple, but over-invest in the design of the web site. And design does not mean spectacular effects, video, and clever popups. Does the page look balanced and good (on both large and small screens). Pretty much like you would design paper/print work.

Your SlideMagic creations

From the SlideMagic presentations that people have shared with me, I can see that the app is used in unexpected ways. I would like to understand better how you use SlideMagic. If you feel comfortable with it, you can send me your SlideMagic presentation (jan at slidemagic dot com). I will keep things to myself, and might even drop in some improvement suggestions here and there.

---

Art: Cornelis de Baellieur, Interior of a Collector's Gallery of Paintings and Objets d'Art, 1737

Freelancer at capacity

After McKinsey, I now spent almost 14 years as a freelance designer. And my work has gone through a pattern that many others are experiencing as well:

In the beginning you run after every piece of work you can get your hands on, invests tremendous amount of energy in projects to over-deliver, producing work that would not meet today's quality standards (I sometimes cringe when I encounter my early design work). At dinner parties you have a highly elaborate pitch of what you do, and what you don't do (that story changes monthly).

After a while your work pipeline starts building up. Reputation spreads, and happy customers come back to you for more work. You become more efficient at what you do. And at some time, that efficiency starts eating into your work. You try to please everyone and the only way to do it is to start cutting corners. The result: stress and work that is not as great as it could be. Designs still look a lot better than when you started out (you have learned a lot along the way), but the sparkle in the eye of the client is less bright than it used to be. I hit that point a couple of years ago.

I made a conscious decision to change things. Only accept projects that I knew I could add great value, and take things all the way. This means saying "no" to a lot of distractions. Creative work requires a lot of concentration and even the shortest coffee chat can render an entire morning useless. Out go:

• Clients who want to salami slice your pricing
• "Oh, just do a quick polish"
• Favours to friends and family, I can't afford it
• Deadlines that get moved forward
• "We can meet tonight at 22:00 if you want"
• "The meeting is tomorrow"
• "Let's just meet for quick coffee, we can start working in 2 weeks"

The result: much better work and happier clients. The problem is that you have to go through the first 2 phases in order to be able to pull of the third one.

---

Image taken from WikiPedia

Conference booth slides

Presentations that run in conference booths have a few special requirements

• Smaller screens, probably a 16:9 aspect ratio. One set of people will stand close to watch it, the other will see the screens far in the distance. The screens become part of the overall branding of the booth. For the latter group, it is important the the graphical look & feel of your company pops out. Not through the use of big logos, but by applying the corporate colours boldly.
• Viewers are unlikely to watch through the whole thing, but rather look at a slide here and there out of context. There is no one nearby to explain, each slide needs to stand on its own. This calls fro big bold visuals, with a clear headline that spells out the message of the slide.
• Go for a relatively slow page rotation. If you are focused in the office, the presentation might run very slow, you have read the slide 10 times over before it goes on to the next one. In a conference booth, especially with more screens, things can start to look ver nervous when each screen is moving quickly. 
• Related to this. If you keep the differences between the layout of the slides similar, the page transitions will look less dramatic, creating a calmer overall feel of the presentation

---

Art: Pieter Aertsen, Market Stall, 1569

The competitor analysis first

Whenever I need to get my head around a new presentation I often start with scribbling a map of competitors and the differentiation that my client has versus them. The result is a messy table full of scribbles which is definitely not the right end product to put in a presentation.

It informs however the whole story. Now that everything is on a piece of paper in front of you, you can start to think about what story you need to convey all this information.

Most management consultants stop at the busy table. That is the end of the analysis and the beginning of the presentation design.

Explaining complex things

If your technology is very complex, you have 2 challenges:

1. Still explain the principle of the technology in a simple way
2. Show that the incredible complexity is an asset that is hard for competitors to copy

Don't mix the two. If you cannot resist and make the explanation of the basic idea behind your technology complex, people won't get it. If you oversimplify things and hide the complexity, people will think that this is something obvious and not worth investing in.

You need to separate (sets of) slides.

---

Image by Panayotis on Flickr.

Too good to be true

If this is the main message of your presentation, very few will believe you, unless you have a very credible explanation why you can offer a free lunch where others can't. "It is like magic" will not cut it. 

---

Image by Eva Peris

Searching for images inside one specific site

In order to make a nice profile slide about a company, you need to find good images of their products, ads, head office building (no, not the reception desk). One good trick to mine one specific web site for images is to go to the main Google Image search page: https://images.google.com/, and enter a query that says "site:domain.com". Here are the images that are stored on slidemagic.com.

It takes too much time...

Some new users of my presentation app SlideMagic complain that you cannot import any existing PowerPoint presentations, you have to start from scratch to design your pitch. "This will take me too much time!"

There are 2 reasons why SlideMagic does not import PowerPoint presentations (export is OK though):

1. Technical: SlideMagic uses a very strict slide layout, which simply cannot be matched (automatically) to the wide variety of PowerPoint designs
2. Behavioural: SlideMagic aims to make corporate communication simpler and less time consuming. The fact that it takes too much time to re-create a PowerPoint presentation one-for-one in SlideMagic probably says something about your presentation. SlideMagic has excellent tools and templates to take your message and show it in simpler form.

If you really need to import that one complex PowerPoint slide, you can always use a screen shot and import it as an image.

---

Image by Alexandre Duret-Lutz on Flickr