A significant part of our time and effort as entrepreneurs and managers is devoted to communication. We communicate our vision to the people of the organization so that together we can translate it into a list of tasks, we communicate our operational plan to investors to raise capital, we communicate the merits of our product to customers to generate revenue and our achievements Media people to raise awareness.
One of the activities that takes up a lot of our time and is perceived as a constant nightmare by many is creating a company presentation. The defined target group of this presentation are potential investors who should help to convince them of the capital raising potential of the company.
But the same presentation, with slight modifications, is also used by us to communicate with our other audiences. Although the slides related to the budget structure are removed from the presentation presented to clients and those detailing the quarterly development plan are omitted from the one presented to investors at the end when we move to the Build sit down a presentation that we actually define for the ecosystem around us, the company’s vision, plan and operating system.
Just as high school or college exams require memorization, preparing a presentation also requires us to refine our plans and grapple with questions, some of which remain in our minds up to this point. The challenge in preparing a company presentation is threefold. Technical control of the design, layout and creation elements of the presentation, building a coherent and clear narrative to communicate our messages, and at the heart of the matter – making concrete decisions related to the company’s strategy and operations. We often only decide when we sit down in front of PowerPoint, Keynote or Google Slides what our strategy is, what our action plan is and what answers we have to the many questions and doubts floating in our heads.
So creating the presentation is less of a technical and design challenge and more of a state of self-reflection, in which we have to give ourselves answers to crucial questions before we share them with others. When we refine our strategy and make clear decisions about the many issues that define the company, we can more easily grapple with the structure of presenting the messages, and then with the design and construction of the presentation itself.
One of the reasons a presentation format is effective is that it is very limited and limits our ability to get off course and avoid making decisions. When you have an infinite length canvas, such as in a word processor, you don’t need to be short and concise. In slide presentation format, you need to pre-break your messages into relatively small chunks, which requires precise outlining, message collation, and a commitment to clearer definitions. Also, the fact that the presentation is usually guided, meaning that you, as the presenter, move slide by slide, requires that you consider the experience of the user – that is, how much the person viewing the in-person presentation sees each step understands the presentation Argue before moving on to the next slide. The web is full of articles full of advice on how to build your presentation: use a minimum of text, boil it down to one main argument per slide, and more. The most important advice, as far as I’m concerned, is to only sit down to build the presentation after you’ve made very clear decisions about the content you’re presenting. When you know exactly what you want to say, it’s easier to turn to storytelling and design techniques.
A company presentation is usually built around a structured narrative: it begins with a statement of a need, i.e. what is the problem for which the company is seeking a solution, a presentation of the vision of the solution itself, a breakdown of the company’s action plan, budget and human capital, and then a few additional slides to highlight the strengths and answer the key doubts. Some break it down into a series of questions: What is the need? What is the solution? Why us? Why now? If too many slides and background explanations are required to present all of this, the concept is probably not solid enough. If you find yourself repeating certain parts over and over again, you’re probably not sure what you really meant to say. If you’re having trouble getting the ideas into the short and to the point format of slides, chances are you haven’t formulated a sufficiently concise and clear story. Creating this narrative is the stage where we encounter gaps and question marks in the foundation of our strategy.
After wrestling with them and defining them, we take on the storytelling challenge. How to refine the message, how to choose the most memorable sentences, how to communicate detailed plans, technical concepts and working assumptions that you get after a long and thorough discussion of the details, in a way that is clear even to those who are not necessarily experts in the field. It’s usually easier to approach this step when the first step is done thoroughly and our decisions are clear and concise to us.
The third step, the one that usually takes the most time, is getting all of those points onto the slide. Here we’ll look at font size issues, how to align the title with the image border, how to make sure the image border doesn’t cover its edges, and how to unclutter data in a table or graph. It is precisely this step that I recommend outsourcing, i.e. leaving it to someone who specializes in it. When we place the information on a slide, you can count on a designer to make it look clear and beautiful to the eye. As managers, we have to make so many decisions that the people associated with visibility can be left to specialize.
Like any platform, it has its pros and cons, but the foundation is what matters most: it forces the creator to craft their message as accurately as possible, figuring out exactly what they want to say and making sure they come up with the best possible answers on the gaps in the strategy and the various aspects of their plan.
