Notes on Presentation Design

Most corporate templates are abandoned within a quarter. The reasons are consistent and mostly avoidable.

Both persuade, but they persuade different people of different things. Using one as the other is a common and expensive mistake.

There is no single perfect template, but there is an order that investors find easy to follow. Here is the structure, slide by slide, and when to break it.

Early traction rarely looks impressive in absolute terms. Presented well, it tells investors the one thing they need to know: this is starting to work.

Three concentric circles and a trillion-dollar number do not prove a market. A credible bottom-up calculation does.

“We have no competitors” is the fastest way to lose an investor’s confidence. Here is how to show the landscape honestly and still come out ahead.

Investors do not want your spreadsheet on a slide. They want to understand how the business makes money and whether your assumptions are sensible.

Board members are busy, sharp and short on patience for decks that report activity instead of asking for decisions. Here is a structure that respects their time.

Most bad charts are not ugly. They are the wrong chart for the point being made. Start with the message and the right format usually chooses itself.

Senior people often read one slide and decide whether to read the rest. Here is how to make that slide do its job.

Storytelling in business does not mean heroes and journeys. It means putting information in the order that makes a decision feel obvious.

Some decks need new clothes. Others need a new skeleton. Knowing which one you are dealing with saves weeks and a fair amount of money.

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

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.

The honest answer is between 12 and 20 — but slide count is the wrong thing to optimise for. Here is what actually determines the right length.