Presentations in General
Over the last ten years coaching and helping CEO’s create investor presentations, I’ve learned to adjust my technique to the skill level of the CEO and the quality of the presentation first offered to me as the starting point for my coaching. My approach to salvage a misguided mess is not the same as what I do with an already excellent presentation to take it up a notch.
But I found I had trouble convincing other people that guidelines and coaching had to be matched to presentation level. In particular, I have a running argument with venture advisors and event organizers who insist on imposing something like a twelve-slide template (or the “10-slide Rule,” or similar formulas) on all companies, with no regard for the skill and experience of the CEO presenter. In my experience, the templates are a lifesaver for some, yet a condescending and destructive intrusion for others.
Enter the BizClarity Presentation Scale. I devised it at first to argue against forcing all companies to squeeze their story into the same template. Now that I’ve worked with it for a while, I serves as a tool for making intelligent decisions about presentations at any level on the scale between disaster and perfection.
The BizClarity Presentation Scale maps four levels of presentation quality:
- Train Wreck
- Good Enough
- Outstanding
- Insanely Great
Trainwreck
A Trainwreck is a presentation that is, at best, confusing and forgettable. At worst, it alienates investors who remember the presentation–and the company–as a waste of time. A Trainwreck is characterized by any or all of the following:
- Wrong content, big gaps in the business story
- Too much detail
- Too technical, full of jargon and acronyms
- Too salesy, loaded with product features
- Bad slides, cluttered and unreadable
- Poor delivery, poor contact with the audience
- Rushing, or taking too long
- Bad attitude of the presenter
Trainwreck is not too strong a word for some of the regrettable presentations seen at every venture fair or endured by investors in private meetings. At the risk of being overly dramatic, I use the word to drive home the point that trainwrecks can’t be ignored because they’re a drain on the entire venture network.
Companies who show up at venture fairs or at investors offices unprepared and expecting to “wing it,” or who are ignorant and ill-advised, not only waste a good opportunity, but they do lasting damage to their reputation and their ability to raise money. Investors waste time and are unhappy. When otherwise deserving companies blow their presentations, the venture community could be missing out on a promising technology.
The good news is that Trainwrecks are avoidable. With the right knowledge and tools, it is possible and worth the effort to fix them.
Good Enough
A Good Enough presentation avoids the utter embarrassment of a Trainwreck. At a minimum, it is an organized run-through of a checklist of topics that investors expect to hear. The slides are legible, though often they still suffer from too much clutter.
A Good Enough presentation can be created by:
- Following a list of “recommended slides”
- Following basic rules for good slide design
- Targeting the presentation to the investor audience, and no other
- The CEO rehearsing the presentation, and responding to feedback
- Keeping within the time limit without rushing
A Good Enough presentation is accepted as the standard in the venture community. Although it may lurch from one idea to the next and force the audience to decide for themselves which ideas are primary and which are secondary, it gives enough information for investors to decide if they want to follow up. They may not remember the company a day later—presentations that follow formulas tend to all sound the same—but at least they weren’t left with a negative impression.
Good Enough delivery is confident, but not inspiring. The CEO demonstrates familiarity with the slides and expands what is on the screen while making good eye contact with the audience. (Curiously, it’s common to see a CEO give a limp delivery, then come to life during the Q&A.)
The main problem with a Good Enough presentation is that it gives investors just enough information to say “no.” It doesn’t make the case well for how the company is different or convey an urgency for investment.
Outstanding
An Outstanding presentation showcases the company as a special opportunity—the company stands out. It leads the audience to understand, without straining, the key ideas that make this company unique. It anticipates and counters major objections before investors can dwell on them.
An Outstanding presentation is constructed to highlight the core story that animates the company. The ideas unfold in a way that build the story from the beginning, ending with a persuasive argument for investment. All the elements—narrative, slides, and delivery—contribute to the impression of a quality company led by a CEO who communicates well.
An Outstanding presentation is full of reasons why investors should want to know more and say ‘yes’ to a second meeting. It is the one that investors recall first when asked that evening, “See anything good today?” Because the company’s story is so cogent and repeatable, it creates buzz.
Insanely Great
An Insanely Great presentation is very rare. The audience becomes so engaged from the first word and image, they forget to take notes. They follow the story, get excited, and make it a priority to follow-up to find out more. The quality of the presentation itself creates buzz.
Insanely Great presentations are the artful merging of ideas, images, and showmanship. They require the highest skill and inspiration to create. Many iterations of slides and content and hours of rehearsal are what it takes to rise to the pinnacle of Insanely Great.
The phrase “insanely great” is a Steve Jobs expression. His presentations are notorious examples of how exceptional communications can be a decisive factor in a company’s success.
Although Insanely Great is a level very few companies will ever achieve, it serves as the epitome of perfection, an ideal to aim for. The hope is that by working to be Insanely Great, more presentations will be Outstanding, and not just Good Enough.
How to Use The BizClarity Presentation Scale
The BizClarity Presentation Scale is offered as a tool to guide the efforts of CEO’s, advisors, and coaches. It is a language for talking about what works, what doesn’t, and why.
Specifically, it’s a framework for making tactical decisions about how much time and effort to commit to the investor presentation. What minimal effort is needed to avoid a disaster? How far do you want to take it? Is it worth it? What do you address first, second, third? What results can be realistically expected? At what point do you ask for help?
Too busy to read much? Look here.
A slide show.
How to use photos. How to use large text. Maybe you don’t go to this extreme. But here’s what hip people on the west coast are doing with slides.
(For more info on this style, see the Presentation Zen post, below.)
I found this slide deck while surfing SlideShare. It from North Venture Partners from Oakland, California, a firm with progressive ideas for helping entrepreneurs. Clearly this is a group that has seen a lot of start-ups fail and out of frustration are driven to prevent more companies from making the same mistakes.
All the points made in this deck ring true. Some of the “fails” have to do generally with getting your company venture ready. Some are direct hits on what to say and do–or NOT say or do–in an investor pitch.
The slides all use full-screen photographs. But the text obscures half of the photograph in each slide. So for that reason, don’t copy this style exactly as a model for your slides.
However, my guess is what you see here is a presentation deck that has been modified to work as a stand-alone deck on SlideShare and embedded in blogs (like BizClarity). It is a model to be emulated if you imagine the slides without the blocks of text, with only the “Fail,” “Fix” graphics and headlines positioned in a dead portion of each photo, and with the text delivered as a spoken narrative.
The photos themselves are a good example of how to do photo selection right. The photo in each case expands on the meaning of the slide, and adds humor or drama without being coy or cliched.
Photo selection is never as easy as it looks. It takes time, good hunting skills, and lots of trial and error. But when you find just the right photo, you know it. It pops off the screen, gets a chuckle from the audience, and gives a palpable boost to your narrative. (That said, there are a couple photos in this deck I don’t think work well. Can you guess which ones?)
If you’ve been reading my blog posts for a while, you’ve seen me refer to Presentation Zen more than once? What is Presentation Zen?
Presentation Zen is a book.
When I discovered this book last year, it changed the way I do and teach presentations. If you’re still among the millions who think that any respectable business presentation has to have slides of mostly text organized into bullets and sub-bullets, get the book. Spending just a few minutes leafing through the examples in Presentation Zen is the first step on the long journey to presentation satori.
The author, Garr Reynolds, is a product of Silicon Valley but now lives and works in Japan. Thus the “zen” part of his approach is somewhat authentic.
Presentation Zen is a DVD.
True story. I was invited to help coach the presentations of the ten companies incubated at DreamIt Ventures this summer. I hadn’t done the initial coaching of the presentations, so they were pretty far along before I joined the process.
I was blown away at what I saw. After the first few, I exclaimed to the group, “What’s going on here? These are great, visual presentations–exactly the style I teach! Who taught you to do this?”
What’s a wordle?
It’s a word cloud. Word clouds–called tag clouds if they include links–are common in the Web 2.0 universe. But a wordle is a special case, one created by the software at Wordle.net (NOT .com or .org). To my eye, wordles have class. They are intriguing. They look good.
At wordle.net, all you have to do is paste a text document into a field on the website, and out the other comes a tag cloud. Then you can play with a host of different font and color schemes, including greyscale for black and white documents, and a variety of layouts, from architectonic to crazy. Lots of fun. Easy, quick addition to a presentation, or document where you want to call attention to the content to follow.
Warning: could be a time suck. Once you start playing with it you’ll want to wordlize everything you can think of.
Here’s the wordle I created from the entire, 25 page document of presentation guidelines I use with my clients.
Wordle of "How to Talk to Money" by Steve Bowman
Here’s one of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction.”
Wordle of "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones (Jagger/Richards)
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:
Wordle of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you. And stay away from the “randomize” button! wordle.net
I know what the ultimate, modern-day slide presentation should look like. I can visualize it, and I’ve seen it done successfully in investor presentations. Rich visuals, minimal text, lots of white space. I push the book Presentation Zen on everybody I meet because it evangelizes the promised land of rich visuals, minimal text, lots of white space.
But when I’m working with a client and time is short, it’s unrealistic to expect somebody who’s been thoroughly inculcated in what I call the “old school” text-heavy style to make radical changes overnight. So I’ve developed a list of short cuts , a few easy steps for making slides more visual and readable that can be applied to an existing presentation literally overnight. These aren’t the ultimate solution, but they yield the highest return-on-effort for a time-crunched entrepreneur.
Here is the BizClarity Cure for Clutter:
Financial projections are, on the surface, a futile exercise. Nobody believes them. Studies prove that 98% of actual business results of start-up companies are less than projected and take twice the time, compared to the projections in the business plans. Yet investors insist on seeing them, and complain if you leave them out of your presentation. Why?
Because financial projections serve two functions.
A ten-minute pitch used at venture fairs and first meetings with investors should (almost) always include financial projections.
But most entrepreneurs do them wrong.
Any type of graph is useless. Use a table. Investors are numbers people who are most comfortable with real numbers. Save graphs for data sets of greater than 30 numbers.
THIS IS UPPER CASE.
this is lower case.
This is sentence case.
This Is Title Case.
Title case is for titles, not for bullets. When I see title case in bullets and sub-bullets, I cringe. This may seem like a minor point, but it’s not. Title case used incorrectly makes your slides hard to read, confusing, and makes you look like an amateur. Luckily, it’s a very easy mistake to fix so we can all move on to the bigger issues of presenting your business story.
Title Case Is Hard to Read for Anything More Than a Short Title Because When People Read Their Eyes Scan the Shapes of Words and Too Much Capitalization is Hard to Scan.
Title case can also cause confusion because proper nouns, as we all learned in grammar school, are capitalized to make them stand out from common nouns. Proper nouns get lost in the upper-case tangle, forcing the audience to work harder to puzzle out your meaning and distracting them from your narrative flow.
Here’s an example slide from an actual presentation, untouched. The author applies title case at random, compounding the confusion.
I attended DreamIt Ventures Demo Day last week in Philadelphia. Even though I had contributed some to coaching the company presentations, seeing it all come together in a formal event just blew me away.
DreamIt is one of those new programs, like TechStars and LaunchBox, that are a combination of business incubator + fast-track MBA + summer camp. 10 companies were selected from 300 applicants for the opportunity to spend the summer together at the DreamIt incubator in West Philadelphia, receive mentoring from a long list of experts, and then pitch to the venture community. They got some seed funding too as part of the deal. All the companies were developing a web-based product or service. All the entrepreneurs were either young 20-somethings, or young at heart.
I saw 10 exciting companies who stretched my idea of what is possible to do on the web. I saw the usually staid Philadelphia venture crowd eat it up. I heard about at least one exit from this batch of 10, and buzz about impending funding for some others. A remarkable track record already.
But what really floored me was the presentations. I saw the future. And the future is visually stunning!
10 things to know before you pitch a VC for Money
David Rose is a serial entrepreneur and serial investor, a leader in the New York City angel network, and the founder of AngelSoft, the de facto standard software system for angel groups all across the country. In this 18-minute talk at TED in 2008 David lays down the law for how to pitch to investors.
David is not a shy person, and he talks real fast (this is only a little faster than his normal speaking voice). But he knows what he’s talking about. This is a high-powered version of the things I hear investors say all the time. I agree with (almost) everything he says.
The only problem is that in 18 minutes he can outline only the high principles, the big-concept do’s and don’t’s. He says very little about the nuts and bolts of how to build a presentation that would meet his high standards. It all sounds good but, you ask, “now what do I do?” Well, that’s what BizClarity is here for. In my coaching, workshops, and writings, I turn investor imperatives, like those David lists here, into practical advice.
But I’m no match for his authority and intensity. Take a look:
(If you have trouble viewing this here, you can go directly to the YouTube page by clicking here.)
It happens alot. I’m working with a new client, seeing their presentation for the first time. And it’s terrible. I see one ridiculously crammed slide after another, small fonts, tiny images. When I point out the problem and launch into my spiel about the advantages of putting less on each slide, the entrepreneur exclaims, “But how else can I get everything on 10 slides! You know, the ten-slide rule!”
The ten-slide rule strikes again!
The ten-slide rule causes more agony, pain, and awful presentations then almost any other single idea. To be fair, this little simple-minded rule is a part of a bigger wrong idea: that the number of slides has anything to do with the quality or cogency of a presentation.
The ten-slide rule is an old idea, originating in the ’80’s and more recently perpetuated by Guy Kawasaki in his best-selling book for entrepreneurs, The Art of the Start (which I recommend, mostly). I don’t disagree with Guy’s motivation–he’s fed up with long, cluttered, boring presentations. He laid down the law to coax CEO’s of start-up companies to cut their presentations down to size.
The problem is, any rule that limits the number of slides assumes that all slides are equally dense with content. It made sense ten years ago when all presentations were text slides in the title/bullet/sub-bullet format. When investors count slides what they’re really saying is: “Don’t show us more than ten slides dense with impossible to read, confusing crap so we can cut your presentation short and get on with the meeting.”
Here’s the truth: the number of slides in a presentation is irrelevant! It doesn’t matter one dit if you have 10, 20, 50 or 100 slides in your presentation. What does matter is how well the slides support your narrative. And the pace of your ideas. How long you speak and the level of detail.
Here’s something I hadn’t heard before: four handy metaphors for answering the questions, “why go to the trouble of getting a patent?” I found it in a compact and loaded two-page PDF offered by Morgan Lewis on their Entrepreneur Resources website called “Sieve or Safe–How Solid is Your IP?”. You’ll see it here. (There’s a lot packed into this PDF; I’ll be expanding on some of the more interesting ideas in future posts.) The full Morgan Lewis resource site is linked in the right column of this blog page, under Law Links.
From the section on patents:
“WHY SEEK A PATENT?
• “Sword”
− Sue anyone with same or equivalent invention
• “Shield”
− Helps to defend against a patent infringement suit
• “Trading Chip”
− Trade technology rights with other patent owners
• “Walk the Walk”
− Additional credibility for investors”
I’ve worked with a lot of tech companies who own patents (or are investing a lot of time and money to get some). But most are focused on only the first reason–the Sword. It’s true that being able to protect your technology from being copied and stolen is important. The “Shield” idea points up the other side of patent value–to prevent other companies from going after you to stop what you’re doing. “Trading chip” is even more exotic, but I have seen it happen, especially with complex technologies that have many dimensions. You might compare it to “seizing higher ground,” to use another battle analogy.