Profitability forecast sanity

Entrepreneurs are optimistic by nature, and every financial forecast I see shows a shiny company company after 5 years with huge sales, profits, and cash flows. Nobody believes the forecast anyway, and it cannot possibly be accurate, but still, the 5 year revenue and profit scenario serves a purpose.

It enables the investor to think "what do I have to believe" in order for this to become reality. There is the sanity check on the revenue side, that I have written about before, but the cost side is actually equally important.

Yes, a company with big sales will probably have big profits. But it is good to go beyond the basics. A sensible cost structure shows the investor that you understand the business you are operating in. If you aspire to become a global software company, your economics are likely to look like that of other global software companies. $200m in sales and $190m in profits don't usually work.

A financial forecast also guides your operating plan. If you need to convince 30 enterprise customers per month to sign up, each requiring a 6 months sales cycle with 5 on site visits, you can work out what sort of sales force you need. Sales costs are no longer "30% of revenue", but you can make a more informed forecast.

So the point estimates of the 5 year forecast are not that important, it is the logic that went into them that is.

"Flattening" a video

Most of the corporate promotion videos I see are enhanced presentations: text movements with animations, still images with slow zoom added, piano background music and maybe some custom made illustrations. They look good, but have 2 problems when it comes to pitches to busy people:

• They make files very heavy (email attachment bounce and/or consuming 500MB of mobile download data)
• They take too much time: like a bullet point chart, you will have read that one sentence 10x by the time the pianist is finished with the 8 bar melody and ready to move on to the next shot.

That is the reason why I often "flatten" these videos, take the 5 best screen shots and paste them as images in a regular presentation deck. Looks great, quick to read, easy to download.

Anticipating this issue, when you brief a video production company ask them for 2 versions of the video, one with all the graphical elements, and one with less text, so you can use it as source material for still images over which you can place your own text in a presentation. Also handy when your messages change over time.

There are many other situations where you might actually need to keep the video in its full size: demonstrations of products, interviews of people, etc. If it is just about adding drama to a still visual, why not go with a well designed still visual though.

The over-ambitious cover image

Often, my clients want a cover image on the presentation that says it all: the entire message of the presentation in just one smart visual. There are 2 problems with this approach:

• A technical one. The ideal image will probably not exist in some stock photo site, so there is significant photoshopping and editing required to get that elephant to balance on a skateboard while enjoying the benefits of flexible ROI. This image is unlikely to look good from a technical point of view.
• Even if you were to make this happen, it is highly unlikely that the audience who walks into the auditorium while sipping a coffee will actually understand what it means.

Lower the ambitions, and pick a professional looking cover image that is somewhat connected to what you are going to talk about and use your presentation to get the full message out.

Making image grids in PowerPoint

It is tricky in PowerPoint to make a nice grid of images that comes from different sources, in different sizes, and in different aspect ratios. How do you get them all the same size? It can be very tedious to crop them all to the same proportion, and then line them up correctly. There are always one or two that are wrong.

Here is what I do. Crop each image to a certain aspect ratio, don't worry yet about the exact size. Now select them all and give each the same height, the width will automatically be adjusted as well! Pro-tip, crop to 1:1 and then try cropping to a circle.

In my presentation app SlideMagic, it is impossible not to lay out images in a grid :-)

Need your help with finding a bug

We are constantly squatting small bugs in SlideMagic to make it better and more stable. There is one tiny and mysterious issue that I cannot reproduce whatever I try. A small amount of presentations get a green INSEAD logo inserted in their presentation, despite the fact they have nothing to do with INSEAD. Can you let me know if this happened to you, on what sort of device/operating system you were working and what you were trying out. You can email me on jan at slidemagic dot com.

Copying a look

You see a great layout in a poster, brochure, web site, but you find it impossible to replicate it in PowerPoint. You figured out the font, you copied the color codes, and it still does not look nowhere near the example. How can it be?

There are more variables when it comes to layout than just a type face and color:

• How are colors used? Take a step back from your example page and try to estimate the % coverage of a page has a certain color. Yes, the accent color could match exactly, but maybe the designer uses it only very sparsely, and in fact the dominant color of the page is grey, not bright yellow.
• How is white space used? You matched the font, but maybe those bold PowerPoint headlines and text boxes full of text does not fit the loosely spaced, thin text lines that the designer used. 
• What sort of images are in the example? Color or B&W? Busy or calm? People or objects? Stock images or "real" photos?
• What sort of page element does the designer use? Graphs? Icons? Narrow columns of small body text? Big bold typography?
• How are accents created? A bullet point? Bold? A different color? Is the main text color actually black, or a lighter grey, or a different color all together?
• Does the designer use some sort of grid to group items on a page?
• Where does the headline sit when compared to the other elements on the page. What is the proportion between the headline and the other elements?

There are lots of choices that set the look & feel of a page. That is why it can be hard to get it right. Even if page layout does not come natural to you, you can still learn to recognize the elements and shamelessly copy from an example you like.

Alternatively, you can try my presentation app SlideMagic, where I made some choices for you.

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Art via WikiPedia

Too many things in your head

When you are deep into your own story, your mind has hard-wired all aspects of it in one complex mesh network. Everything is related to everything, everything is connected. The upside: you are the expert and know what you are doing. The downside: it is extremely hard for you to explain your idea to someone who comes in cold, without the bits of information, and without the connections between them.

After I return to my office after a client briefing, I usually open a blank piece of paper, take a pencil, and jot down the big ideas I heard in the meeting, after I have given the brain to calm down in the 30 minute journey back. No worry about story lines, no worry about structure, no judgement about what is detail and what is a big message, and no going back to my meeting notes. 

These thoughts often become the core building blocks of the presentation. These are the points that I want others to remember when leaving a meeting.

Many people get to this point, they figure out the key messages of a presentation but make the mistake of communicating them in an overly simplistic, or minimalistic way. Just writing "the competition is not flexible" as a big, minimalist statement in a nice designer font is not going to make it stick. Many times, proven/showing these high level messages actually requires going into some depth.

So, a good presentation does not dumb down content. It unravels the wool ball in your head and creates a sequential line of ideas that can ultimately form the basis for a wool ball in the minds of your audience.

40 minutes in

They exercise is good for many things, creativity being one of them. I do the occasional exercise in the form of mountain biking. Preferably, I would roam around on single tracks all the time, but time constraints often limit me to loop around Tel Aviv, close to my home.

And here is the weird thing that is happening to me: every time at about the same time/distance in the run, I get some pretty useful ideas for design problems I am struggling with. I started to notice, because the choice of tracks around my home is not that big, the weather in Israel is pretty much the same every day, so these bike runs happen at more or less the exact same circumstances.

So, the inspiration comes 40 minutes or about 16 km in. Maybe it is this exact amount of exercise you need, or there is something about that specific location....

What are good slides?

We all understand that the ultimate slide is a visual composition that has such an emotional impact on us that the moment we walk out of the auditorium, we go and do something we did not plan on doing before.

For most day-to-day presentations, the objectives of a slide will be a bit more down to earth:

1. Can you actually read what is written on the slide from a distance (font sizes, graphs)?
2. Does it look as professional as the company/entity you are representing? Comic sans, clip art, low resolution pictures, distorted aspect ratios, PowerPoint bevels. (Professional and pretty are not the same things).
3. Does the chart just have one message?
4. Is information laid out so it supports the message? A trade requires pros and cons, a trend should come out of a graph, A implies B, there is a clear differentiation
5. Does the slide actually look pretty in terms of design, composition, balance?

Slightly related: here is a Dutch TV commercial from the 1970s with a quality inspector stamping "OK" on peanuts. 

Humor in investor presentations

Should you put it in?

A joke can break the ice and make a presentation more memorable. But, and there is but, be careful with hardwiring your jokes inside the slides. Sometimes, you start your presentation and you will find that the "vibe" of the room at that moment is just not good to crack a joke. If you know your funny but maybe inappropriate slide is coming up, you need to be a master of the presentation remote control to save the meeting.

Also, when you are sending a deck ahead of the presentation, and you are not in control in what circumstances the recipient will be reading it, it is better not to include that hilarious image.

So, the best is to keep humor verbal, add it in your story if you feel that moment is right.

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Art via WikiPedia

Making things look random

A page full of dots, a cloud of text labels, boxes. It is hard to make things look "random".

I try to replicate the effect of shaking a glass box full of cookies in a different color. Copy paste your presentation objects on the slide. Then start moving them around. Resize to make them more or less the same size. Avoid clusters/clots of similar shapes or similar colors on the page. Take a step (or 3) back from the screen and see how it looks, repeat the above process again.

Randomness is actually a very organized state.

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Image via WikiPedia

Logos in M&A and customer pages

Logos: VC and PE funds like to put them in their exit slides, startups put their customers, investment banks showcase their M&A deals, CV pages highlight logos of companies people worked for. Logos can create instantly recognizable endorsements by major companies, but it comes at a cost: clutter. Here are some guidelines.

• To declutter your logo page, consider putting them in B&W to reduce the number of colors on your page. Also, adhere to a strict grid when placing them on a page: 5x4, 7x5, etc. (SlideMagic makes it easy to take the color out of an image, and it is not possible to escape the grid)
• Think which logos actually matter: well-known companies. Logos of companies people have never heard from before, just add clutter. Things are even worse when they are written in a language few people can read (Hebrew). On M&A deal pages, consider only putting the logo of the big acquiring company, not the acquired company. On CV/team/bio pages, put only logos of well-known companies and maybe use text for the lesser known ones.
• At some stage there are simply too many logos on a page. For example, the famous industry landscape charts that started off looking decent, but over the years span out of control as more logos got added. 

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Image by Loren Kerns on Flickr.

Feedback from a UI designer

A few weeks ago I had a call with one of the staff of my client, who was a user interface designer for mobile apps. Although the investor presentation was not his responsibility he wanted to give some feedback, speaking "designer-to-designer".

In the discussion I noticed that I am actually violating some design principles that are thought in design school (I never went to such a place). Being an opinionated designer, I still think that my approach is correct, but the debate was interesting. Here are my "sins":

• Long headlines that run over 2 lines. Yes, the font looks a bit smaller, yes, the slide has less of a punchy/pretty headline, the title is basically a small text block. BUT it allows me to put in a slightly more sophisticated message which is especially useful for decks that are read on a screen, rather than serve as a background for a live presentation.
• While I cut text and clutter to the maximum extend possible, I tend to make the slide content really big, actually: too big according to the designer. The proportion between the headline and the core graphic of the slide is off. Technically correct, BUT I am trying to keep my slides readable on a mobile phone screen.
• Some of my data charts actually of a lot (too much) data in them. BUT I like to create layers in a data chart. The super simple, most important message jumps in your face, but if you ponder a bit longer, you can see additional layers of information and get the full picture of the data.
• I reduce the number of colors as much as possible (SlideMagic allows you to use only one), but I splash healthy doses of that accent color on the the slide. Designers might cringe at all that bright colorfulness. BUT it allows me to really rub in the message of chart, especially for highlighting a contrast, and/or connecting multiple "dots" that belong together.

Interesting discussions. There is one lesson here for clients, pick your designer, just one, and stick to that one. Two design captains on a ship will not work.

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Art via WikiPedia

Editing the bullets in a cafe

I have seen it many times in coffee shops. Two people at a laptop. One doing the typing. The other stretching back, looking at the ceiling, and rephrasing that sentence until it is just perfect and encapsulates everything: "With flexible automation, value delivery is now ensured throughout the customer journey". "No, I think that should be "value creation". "Yes, you are right, change it". "Make "automation" bold, italic, underline", that is the key message here". "Red color as well?" "Yes, this starts to look perfect".

• Noisy coffee shops are not the best environments to do design work
• When you really get into the story you are touching on highly confidential issues (weaknesses, strengths, competitive positioning, development pipeline) that you do not want to discuss in public places
• Bullet point phrasing does not equal visual slide design

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Image by Gavin St. Ours on Flickr

Clean that keyboard

Clean crisp design work is unlikely to happen in a messy working environment. No, most employees have little influence over the interior design of an office, but your own desk? You can do it. Apple keyboards look horrible after a year of use, but are easy to wipe clean. Buy a nice pen/mechanical pencil, invest in a beautiful notebook (buy it yourself if it is against corporate purchasing policy), peel off the Intel inside sticker from your corporate laptop. Clean up the outdated post it notes on the whiteboard. Wipe the whiteboard. Open the blinds.

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Art via WikiPedia

Back from Japan

I just returned from a wonderful holiday in Japan. What a great country with such a rich culture. Having been there before in the early 1990s, I was preparing my kids (10 and 12 years old) for a small "culture shock", but Japan has opened up a lot in the last 25 years and has become very open to visitors from the west.

Anyway, i will pick up my blogging routine soon. Apologies for violating the social media rules and dropping my blog for 2 weeks, but for me holiday = holiday, which means minimizing the opportunities for my mind to start thinking about presentations.

Lower posting frequency

I am taking a short spring break with my family, so posts might appear less frequently over the next weeks. Apologies! Image via WikiPedia

Videos that make presentations too heavy

Videos can make presentation files too big for email. Many corporate email server are still set to a maximum of 10MB for attachments. Some thoughts.

• Yes, there are many alternatives for email attachments, Box, Dropbox, WeTransfer, etc., and sending email attachments might look like a thing of the past. But, if you are fundraising or on a sales campaign, you want to take all possible friction out of your funnel. One in 50 recipients might be working in a company that does not support Dropbox for security reasons, another might be a 65 year old angel investor who does not know how to use box. Your document has to fit all possible audiences.
• Think about that video in documents that you sent. When you are there in the room, presenting, you can make take action when people do not connect to it (switch it of, explain, etc.). When someone is watching your video and does not have the patience for that spectacular opening animation scene, you cannot prevent her from abandoning your pitch all together. Some videos are useful or even essential (product demos, real estate project walk through), others might simply try to add some sparkle to the deck. Make the call whether they are essential.
• If you decide to take the video out and it contains essential information, don't simply paste a YouTube link (again, think of the impatient investor watching the deck on a mobile phone, or the 65 year old angel investor), or even worse, nothing. This will take an essential element out of your story. Instead think of alternatives for a video: add a series of screen shots with explanation bubbles, or pack the message of the video in a more traditional slide.

"Why should people invest in my company?"

Google is full of free investor presentation advice and presentation layouts. The problem with all of these is that they are generic and not specific to your situation. So blindly filling out a presentation template is unlikely going to give you the best pitch.

Here is another way to craft your pitch. Think of an investor you respect, and even better, an investor whose reasoning you sort of understand resulting from conversations and or blog posts. Now, jot down an imaginary conversation that could have taken place if you find yourself next to her in the check in line for a flight. The most important part of the exercise is to anticipate the likely questions are face expressions you are going to encounter: "Really, what is it about?" "Hmm, that is a sort of [x] for [y] right?" "But are any of your users actually sticking around?" "What do people pay today for this?" "But you have no machine learning expert on your team" "Yes, I know that online video consumes a lot of bandwidth, but what does it have to do with you"

 Now take you notes from this conversation and use it to craft the flow of your investor pitch. Then, go back to the standard investor presentation templates and use them as a check list to see whether you haven't forgotten anything important.

Why is the business school, standard, investor presentation structure not always the right one?

• Investors might already know a lot about a market, a technical vertical segment, so there is no need to do the 101
• Investors might actually know nothing about a particular market, and you will have educate them before getting to the actual pitch
• There are "elephant in the room" questions screaming to be answered first, even if they allow show up on page 25 of your template
• Visual or verbal analogies might require a story sequencing that clashes completely with a standard investor pitch template
• If you have 500 pages and/or 3 hours of material there is no alternative but to structure things orderly. ("Hey, where were we again?")  In 10 to 20 minutes, you have a bit more creative freedom to shuffle things around
• Standard presentation structures might not work in a conversational pitch style, if you start rattling down your Harvard-approved pitch the investor already gets worried: "Huh oh, we are going to get this one for the next 10 minutes" and you are likely to be interrupted with a question that invites a dialogue.

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Art: Leonid Pasternak, The Passion of creation

The secrets of making system diagrams

System architecture charts can be incredibly complex, and I need to include them sales/investor presentation for almost every client that I work with. They serve an important purpose: 1) demonstrate that you know what you are doing on an emotional level, 2) ability to answer detailed technology questions on a factual level.

As I dig into these puzzles, I discover that in most cases the diagram is very complex, but the underlying system architecture is not. Most diagrams are created with some kind of drawing tool. Their main purpose is system specification, make sure that people are designing the right system. They are not meant at all for communication. (In that respect things are similar to Excel: a great tool for analysis, a poor tool for communication).

The solution is to disconnect from the diagramming app and start sketching your system architecture again, purely for the purpose of communication.

• Grid, grid, grid. Line up all the boxes properly, space things out. Keep boxes the same size/shape as much as possible 
• Eliminate as many overlapping connectors as you can. Try again, again, again, again, and one more time. Overlap spaghetti is a sign that you have not really understood how to explain your architecture.
• After you eliminated your overlaps, you should be left with a grouping of boxes that is more or less logical. If there is a sequential process, there is a high chance that your boxes line up according to it. If things are related, they are probably located next to each other. In the previous steps, you looked purely for overlapping connectors, now go over your diagram again and think about function.
• Next, use color to group things together. The great thing about color is that it can make a connection between objects which are not necessarily sitting next to each other on the page
• Omit, collapse boxes that are not that important (this would have disastrous consequences if we did this in the system design diagram)
• Think hard about what text, titles to use in the boxes, cut words where you can, use rectangular instead of circular shapes to fit more text if needed. Go for a smaller font size, but don't fill the entire box with text to make your composition look calmer.