"Hmm, he does not understand it..."

Some potential clients walk away after a first meeting to discuss a presentation design project, and you can read the face that clearly says "he does not understand it (and how does he have the courage to charge such a fee for the project".

Well, that is exactly the point. If you failed to explain things to me in a low risk 1-hour briefing of a presentation designer, you will for sure fail in a high-stake 20 minute investor pitch.

There are 2 important milestones you need to pass as a presentation designer:

1. A certain level of visualization skills
2. The confidence to know that if you don't get it, nobody will, i.e., the target audience also does not get it. "Not getting it" is not your problem.

Getting number 2 right is a lot harder than number 1.

The most expensive part of the project is getting me to a level where I understand things, once that happens, designing the slides is the relatively easy part of the process.

Tedious number updates

I am not a believer in copy-pasting Excel numbers into PowerPoint. Excel is for analysis, PowerPoint for presenting, and presenting numbers is different from analyzing them. The charts I use to present are often so simple (only one data series, rounded digits) that I tap them in by hand.

There is an exception though. If you are the junior analyst on the team, and you are the last step in the "supply chain", i.e., constantly updating charts with new versions of numbers that roll out of the spreadsheet, it might be time to change working practice. Personally, I remember many McKinsey projects I did as an analyst where I designed a model in week 1 of a project, and ended up updating numbers on slides for weeks after that.

In these cases, add a worksheet to your Excel file, and pull the numbers from the analysis. Apply all rounding, i.e., if the chart or table requires millions, divide by 1e6. For tables, put all numbers in the right order, invert rows, columns if required.

You can go further and actually create objects in Excel that can almost literally be copied into PowerPoint. Create data charts, fix fonts, colors, etc. exactly as in the PowerPoint file. Format Excel cells exactly as the table in your PowerPoint document.

The cost of this effort is time: it will take some effort to get it right, but it will pay off in subsequent number update rounds, and it can prevent you from making mistakes in last minute model changes.

Be careful not to introduce new mistakes though. This type of work can best be done when things are relatively quiet. Take an existing, stable version of the deck, and start recreating the charts in Excel, constantly double checking whether you can replicate the numbers you put in by hand in the charts. Once you are confident that everything works for an old/trusted version of the document, you can use it for future versions. Still, some spot sanity checks are always a good idea.

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The print and VGA versions

The number of screens on which your presentation will be viewed is expanding:

• Laptop screen (office)
• Mobile device (airport)
• High quality desktop screen (the one the designer is using)
• Crappy VGA projector (conference room)
• Old Plasma screen (conference booth)
• Super High Definition giant LCD monitor (CEO office)
• Crappy office paper printer (old school manager giving handwritten comments)
• High quality paper printer at a print shop (investment bankers)

Do a test run on one of these devices if that is the one that is critical to your presentation, and adjust colors accordingly. The result might be a presentation that only looks good on that display, you have to keep separate files. The crappy office printer version has gray shadings that are far too blunt for the HD monitor, the crappy VGA project version has no thin fonts.

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Investors only need to see big $, right?

Some entrepreneurs think they can leave out the "details" of the technology, or the mechanism of action of a new biotech drug: the potential market size is all that matters. "Technology is detail for nerds."

Not really. It depends on the stage of your company, if your company is early stage and the only asset it has is basically a PowerPoint presentation, technology is not really a small detail, it is the main thing the investor puts her money in.

"Will it work, what are the risks?"

"Does this person know what she is doing?"

"How much does it cost to develop it?"

These are fundamental questions, and a good way to address them is a deep dive in one part of your solution to give investors confidence that the risks can be managed, and that you can trusted with doing that.

"This chart says it all"

One chart with a few circles explains the product roadmap, pricing strategy, customer segmentation, and competitive differentiation. Perfect!

When I push back, clients are often surprised. The problem: the chart works perfect for people who have been sweating over it for 6 months. They remember how they inverted the direction of the arrows back in December, how they added the color layer, how they got rid of these long sentences that used to sit at the bottom left.

The person who sees the chart for the first time misses that context. It is the visual equivalent of the poetically beautiful but utterly vague mission statement.

Two solutions:

1. Go for a completely different visual approach
2. Use the existing concept that the presenter got used to, but carefully layer all the concepts one by one

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Art: Malevich, "White on white"

Looking good vs explaining well

Experts, anyone who is deeply into a subject, usually finds it very hard to explain a concept to a layman. They no longer see what is obvious to the novice and what is not, and lack the full, rich, memory picture that is associated with a buzzword or industry jargon term.

So often when I sit down with a client, they will point me to a website or presentation of a competitor / similar company that is beautifully designed: nice pictures, nice fonts, nice infographics. "I want something like this". 

They forget that these marketing materials are mere pretty packaging of the same buzzwords. Yes, they look pretty, but as a layman, I usually still do not have a clue what it means.

In these cases, I usually start asking questions. The client explains without noticing initially why I am asking the questions. After 10 minutes. I remind her what I asked her about and give proof that a pretty presentation does not equal a clear presentation.

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Writing good emails

"Cover letters" that introduce a pitch are often poorly written. Think about the latest spam email that you received from a head hunter offering to help you with recruiting staff for your startup. You open it (maybe the subject line was decent), and as soon as you started reading 3 words you knew what was going to come and deleted the message.

A cold email is a shot at someone who is looking for the earliest opportunity to shorten the email inbox with that satisfying "delete", "archive", "done". The skill is to postpone that moment.

• If your email is a huuuuge amount of text, people don't read but eyeball and hit "delete" after spotting the usual "that's why you should invest" at the bottom after pagedowning the text. A lot of text in one block is scary.
• How did you get to the person? "[x] gave me your name", is OK, but "[x] told me that you should be really interested in this" is better if that is what she did.
• Line break, then a super short and to the point sentence what you are: "Startup raising series A, with x in sales, in the drone market, with [famous investor] as a Seed investor"
• Line break, this is a critical moment where you can feel the finger going to the delete button. You need to present the hook. "Yes, everyone know that drones will be big, but there is something that is blocking progress and we fix that [name of thing you fix]" Or "our team consists of [famous person, famous person, famous person]
• Then point to a short slide deck that you attached that explains your company. The objective of that slide deck is not to land the investment, but to create enough intrigue to initiate a phone call. (Confidential) product details and financials, long market backgrounds, detailed implementation plans, are all for a later stage of the dialogue.

In short, avoid delete button triggers: long paragraphs of text, buzzwords, lack of clarity of what it is you do, what you want, lack of clarity of how you got to the person, generic pitch deck that is not tailored to the email stage of the due diligence process.

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The pitch to the entire VC partner group

These observations by Jason Lemkin are spot on. By the time you have made it to final presentation to the full partnership of the VC, it is likely that the partner you were in touch with until then wants to do the deal. The main challenge in this presentation is not to make mistakes in front of an audience who has done far less homework than that partner. Do your thing that worked before, and treat ignorant questions with respect.

Sizing IT markets

The Internet is full of IT market forecasts with highly precise predictions of product sales 5 years from now. Will citing a piece of research convince an investor? No. A $1b market forecast in 2021 does mean that the investor should open up the check book and invest in your startup with zero sales.

How to use these market forecasts? Here are some thoughts:

• Always approach market sizing from multiple angles. A top down market research estimate is one source. Trying combining it with a bottom up analysis, look at how the IT budget of one company could change and extrapolate that to the entire market.
• While forecasts by market research companies might be highly speculative, their quantification of today's market is probably reasonably accurate. Established firms have been around for many years, gathered input from many sources, including sanity checks such as adding up the turnover of all the suppliers in an industry. Your company is unlikely to be the size of IBM in 2 years.
• IT as a whole does not grow that fast anymore, single digit % growth every year. What fluctuates are sub segments inside the overall IT spend. When you are sizing your market, think about which IT spend category are you going to cannibalize?
• Market research is a useful source of "boxes" in which a VC can put you. "Where do you sit?" is probably a question you get often. While the numbers might not be 100% correct, market research gives a shared vocabulary about how to think about a market, and whether things are roughly big or small.
• Related to this, while VCs might not believe the point forecasts of market research reports, the junior analyst at the VC firms is likely going to use them as a starting point in due diligence. It is good to be prepared and go through the same process as she will.
• When selecting which market research firm to use as a source, think about not only whether they produce data that exactly matches the category you are in, but also look at the breadth of their overall coverage. A firm that covers a lot of ground will provide a nice broad, consistent definition of the world of IT.

Chart hygiene

Here are some slide make over suggestions for messy PowerPoint presentations that do not require any changes to content. They fix basic graphical hygiene:

• Make sure all slides use the same slide master template: titles, page numbers, logos (if you want to use them), all sit in the same place
• Find/replace fonts: make sure all fonts in a deck are the same
• Create a frame of guides in the master slide and make sure all slide content fits inside the frame on each slide
• Apply a consistent color scheme to all the slides
• Eliminate italics
• Make sure that characters in the same box, paragraph have the same font size (huge differences are OK, but very small size differences do not look good)
• Un-stretch photos with the wrong aspect ratio
• Align and distribute slide elements where ever you can
• Play with line breaks and font size to avoid orphan words on a second line
• Remove multiple, overlapping "confidential" labels and page numbers from pages
• Draw a shape, set proper colors and fonts, and make it the default shape, delete the shape, repeat for a text box and a line

That was presentation make-over V0.1, the content might be bad, the layouts could be poor, but it will look organized.

If you have been working in my presentation app SlideMagic, you will have noticed that is almost impossible to make the mistakes I am correcting in the above.

Getting stuck on page 1

Often, presenters get stuck on page 1. The long list of bullet points which are supposed to summarize the story becomes speaker notes to deliver the entire presentation verbally without the visuals.

Well, that is great right? A captivating story standing on its own with out the need for slides. Things are usually not that perfect. Instead of a captivating story, the presenters reads out the summary bullets, adds some "uhms", hints a bit at the key points but stays at a generic level, saying that the real story will follow. After 15 minutes, the actual presentation starts, which the audience has already heard, more or less. And then, when the presenter reaches the final summary slide, the whole things gets repeated again in 10 minutes.

When presenting live, it is best to consider your first slide a teaser slide, not a summary slide. Hint at what is about to come, but resist the temptation to spend too much time on it. Instead, run the presentation using the visuals.

For presentation documents that are meant for reading a summery page is appropriate (not a teaser page), and in that case I would actually add more text in a smaller font for someone to get the full essence of a story in 1 page, just in case she does not click through to the end.

Business document production workflows

Production of documents and reports inside corporations is a hugely inefficient process, because of a number of reasons:

• Using the face-to-face meeting format to discuss small text edits
• Do zero preparation for such a meeting, and start reading analyzing the text with the junior analyst in front of you
• Because of this lack of preparation, completely upend the start of the presentation because critical bits are missing, without reading things to the end
• Having too many people involved: lots of captains on the ship giving contradicting input
• Refusal of senior managers to make tiny text edits directly into the text themselves

I remember this from my early days as a junior analyst at McKinsey. Fight 1 hour of traffic to drive to a meeting with a senior client and/or partner. Listen to small talk, get send out to make paper copies, multiple people making edits to slides with pens, make copies again, back into the car, in the office at your desk failing to read the hand writing, going back and forth via fax machines until you get it right. Technology has moved on a bit, but document editing is still pretty much the same today.

When I start to work with a new client there is usually a small adjustment process, especially when we are on different continents. Am I a junior analyst who needs paragraph by paragraph instructions? He is 7 hours ahead, but hey, I am the client and get to set the meetings. Better schedule frequent update calls to make sure he stays motivated to press on. 

After a while, clients discover the luxury of an overseas design partner. Make small text edits yourself, jot down broader comments in a box on the slide, hit send before leaving the office, and hey, all is done when you come in the next morning. Sometimes not being in the same physical location makes life easier for everyone involved.

Start with action verb?

Back at my days at McKinsey I was taught that every item in a list should start with a an "action verb": "Agree next steps", "Build customer list", "Sell unwanted subsidiary". I am no longer sticking to this principle:

• In many case you need to invent a verb that just add words and line breaks to a text box without adding meaning. If the viewer will understand it without the verb, it is OK.
• Worse: this search for action verbs is a major cause of consulting speak with repetitive use of similar verbs: highlight, identify, uncover, map, etc. etc.

"Years ago, I invested in..."

An investor is heavily influenced by the successes and failures of past deals. There might be no scientific evidence that "you can't make money in healthcare diagnostics", "ad tech is dead", "companies founded in Italy are hard to scale", "that sounds like IT management, and that is a feature rather than a market" but the investor, with sample size n=1, is a true believer.

In the first few seconds of an interaction with an investor, they will try to put you in a box of something they understand and/or have invested in in the past. Help them do it, and say that you will clarify later why "mobile social network" is not exactly what you are doing.

If the dialogue with the investor continues, pay careful attention to of the cough comments about past experiences where she burnt her fingers on something that sounds similar. These reservations go really deep, an investor won't trip over the same stone twice. Understand the concern, and really explain why your situation is different. If you don't know the answer right away, get back to her later after you have collected the facts.

Blunt sentences

I sit in many meetings where a startup leadership team tries to figure out a company strategy or product positioning. Everyone is talking similar but different things and it is impossible to bring things to a conclusion.

The first step in these situations is actually to establish what the options are. If you don't know what you are trying to decide about, it is pretty hard to make a decision!

The traditional management theory approach is to draw up some table with the options, and write down what is the difference between them on certain dimensions. This requires some on the spot puzzling to get the column headings of the table right.

Another approach is to try to define the strategy in a simple sentence. Now, when people start writing company strategies in sentences you tend to get woolly, fluffy, statements full of buzzwords. So, the challenge here is to avoid doing that. This is an internal work meeting, not the vision statement on your web site. They key is to catch the essence of the strategy in as little words as possible, including possible uncertainties. For example: "We are trying to acquire as many users as we can with all means (including free product), collect their data, and use/sell that data somehow in the future."

This allows the team to have a good discussion about the options. The discussion will flow even better if you can find catchy 1-word labels for each of the strategic options. 

After the meeting, a volunteer can take all that away, turn it into a proper trade off table and/or word them in the proper way for the next meeting.

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Image via WikiPedia

Making photo cut outs in PowerPoint

If you are not a Photoshop master, here is a crude way to cut out an object out of an image in PowerPoint:

1. Take an image
2. Draw a freeform shape over it
3. Remove the image
4. Fill the shape with the original image
5. Select crop, and then "fill", then scale up the cropped image until the shape is filled with just the bit that you intended
6. I added the original image back in the background

Behind the projection screen

I watched an opera a few days ago in Tel Aviv, where the singers were performing behind a perforated projection screen, and in front of another regulator projection screen, which created a very interesting stage backdrop. Here is an idea for a presentation set up: put the presenter literally inside the slide.

In the image below, you can see the 2 screens. The battlefield background is a regular projection, the barrels in front are semi transparent. I googled for another demonstration of this stage setup:

Data leakage in PowerPoint

Be careful with sending PowerPoint presentations that could have left overs of confidential information hidden inside that you do not want outsiders to see:

• Comments in the speaker notes field at the bottom of the slides ("Let's don't tell our investors yet, about the disappointing Q1 results, we will do that in 2 weeks"). When you use an old presentation to "copy-save" it as the master of a new one, comments get copied across as well. 
• Regular comments on slides that have not been removed
• Information, comments, analysis, that sits in the Excel engine of data charts, when someone clicks "edit data", the full Excel sheet opens
• Also, even if you remove the data labels or axes from a data chart, the data still remains visible when hovering over it with a mouse.

It is best to share your presentation as a PDF file, but even then watch out with information that becomes visible when hovering over with your mouse (data points, file names of images, etc.)

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Image via WikiPedia

Read human signals

The investor asks you a question, and the instinctive reaction of an entrepreneur is to fire back with data, slides, and arguments to prove that the investor is wrong. "No, that concern does not apply to me because, because. because". Part of the rhetoric includes a repeat of what just has been presented, to eliminate the possibility that the investor did not understand it the first time around. Boom, boom boom.

Pick your battles. Especially if the investor bases the question on 5 other startups she has seen in the same field, it is 5 people she knows and trusts against you she just met 20 minutes ago. Maybe she has a point, maybe you need to find out a bit more about the background of her concern, after which you can give a more balanced answer, which could well be, let me check and I will get back to you.

Read the human signals, if the investor does not engage anymore and says "OK, I understand", but her eyes say something different, it might well be that she simply does not want to hear a repetition of your arguments she does not believe.  

Pitching to investors

I have written a guest post on Presentation Guru, the digital magazine for presentation professionals. Here you can find my post about designing presentations that will convince investors.