Insights

A slide with three charts, seven bullets and a footnote is not thorough. It is unfinished. Four decisions turn it into one an investor gets at a glance.

You find out which one you paid for the first time someone on your team tries to edit it. Five things inside a properly built PowerPoint or Google Slides file.

If a slide does not answer one of them, it is taking up space an investor would rather spend deciding. The five questions, strong answers, and the most common misses.

Text-heavy slides are not a discipline problem. They are usually a symptom of using the deck as two documents at once.

Why the prettiest version of a weak deck is still a weak deck. The three parts of an argument, the five-minute title test, and why editing comes before design.

What actually happens between the notes a client sends and the slide they present. Design did not fix the slide. The argument did.

How to cut dense text down to its core message without losing the original meaning: isolate the core, condense and structure, then visualise.

The projects that go smoothly almost always start the same way. Here is the short list that saves a week of back-and-forth.

Anywhere from $200 to $20,000, which is a useless answer on its own. Here is what actually drives the number, and what you get at each level.

I build in both, most weeks. The right choice depends less on features than on who needs to edit the deck after you send it.