Presentations have been an essential business tool since Microsoft first bundled PowerPoint into its MS Office Suite in 1990. (Fun fact – PowerPoint was originally Apple Macintosh only.) So why is it that over 30 years later companies and IR teams still struggle with creating attractive and informative “decks”?

Part of the problem is the ease with which team members can create and edit presentations. Presentations are passed around for “input” from the technologists, geologists, IR professionals, compliance officers, and then the C-suite, with everyone tweaking content and making helpful suggestions. Everyone has different priorities and concepts of what information is important to convey, and the result can be a horse built by committee.

Presentations have layers built up over time through edits and additions, adding pages and new bullet points instead of being rethought and rewritten. Eventually they get bogged down with too much or old data, or lose focus. Deciding what to leave out of a presentation is as important as what to put in. Keep it to 20 slides or less. For everything new you put in, take something old out.

Planning a presentation begins with the message. Too few companies ask the two basic questions: “Who is our audience and what is our message?” The audience is very different in a technical briefing than an investor road show. A geologist or technologist may happily sit through 40 pages of data, but a high net worth prospect is already thinking about the next person waiting in the lobby looking for funding.

A useful and simple trick almost no one uses is to watch a real person flip through your deck. Anyone who has sat down for a pitch meeting with a new prospect knows that the first thing they do is flip quickly through your printed presentation. Next time, watch carefully what slides they look for first and which ones they linger on as you talk. That is the content most important to them. Let that guide your next edit. It doesn’t matter what you think is the most important part of your message. Be guided by what your audience cares about. Move up and beef up those pages.

Your message should start with a summary or “call to action” page at the front. Too many companies put it at the end. It’s your elevator pitch to grab the attention of a jaded investor looking for a reason to fund or reject. Everything that follows supports the summary. It’s the hook, so remember to put your best foot forward. Order your slides to lead with your strengths, whether it is the team, the project, recent discoveries, sales, or the market opportunity. Follow up with more detailed slides to drill down or provide background.

There are literally thousands of websites that tell you the technical rules for creating better presentations. Here are some of the most obvious but often ignored mistakes that separate good from bad presentations:

1. Don’t use dark backgrounds with white text. People still print presentations – whether to read offline or to circulate at trade shows or meetings (remember those?). Dark pages are hard to read and no one will thank you for using up all their ink.
2. Keep fonts simple and only two sizes – title and text. Turn off PowerPoint’s “automatically resize font to fit text box” feature. It is evil. It will make your slides look like ransom notes. Don’t make margins and text boxes jump around from slide to slide.
3. White space is your friend. Don’t feel the need to fill the space on a slide. Not only is it easier on the eye, fewer words mean greater focus and impact and the likelihood they will be read. You’ll hear about the 5/5 rule for presentations – only 5 words per bullet point and only bullets per slide.
4. Graphics – whether charts, maps or images – should be clean, legible and sharp. Strip away irrelevant data or layers so readers can focus on what’s important. If labels are too fuzzy or small to read, re-do them.
5. Proofread, and then proofread again. Check not only for spelling but consistent and accurate punctuation. Accuracy and attention to details says a lot about your professionalism.
6. De-jargon text and labels. Not everyone is an industry expert and no one likes to stumble over acronyms or abbreviations. Don’t make your reader feel stupid.
7. Keep it short – 20 slides maximum. A short deck keeps it interesting and forces you to think about your core message and selling points. Create a second optional deck of technical or background data for those who are really interested.
8. PowerPoint has a ton of fun animations and slide transitions. Don’t use them. They are distracting and don’t translate to the printed page.
9. Keep it up to date. A presentation on a website that is six months old gives the impression that you haven’t done anything lately or are too lazy to update. Updating also should make you rethink the presentation and make adjustments based on feedback and new developments.
10. Have your base presentation template designed by a graphics professional. You only need to do it once and you can use the template for years. It’s a small amount of money well spent.

With a little bit of work, no one ever has to read (or write) a long, confusing, or ugly presentation again.

“As a start-up CEO, I slept like a baby. I woke up every 2 hours and cried.” — Ben Horowitz

The concept is simple (or so it is advertised) — if your company performs, your stock will too.

This a fantasy and is not how it works.

Over the years, I have seen many companies have newsworthy events hit the newswire, and the results have been nothing short of a “flatline”, in that absolutely nothing happens. The silence is deafening – the company concludes no one cares.

They are wrong.

The fact is, there are endless oases of wealth seeking opportunity every second of the day. And what is even more exciting is that more often than not the investment dollars, the perfect Board member, or even the right client that would jettison the company into an infinitesimal successful stratosphere, is often sitting right in front of them thanks in part to the marvels of our online universe.

Having been seated front and center for too many dramatic failures over the years, it is my mission to identify #whatworks, share it with our audience and continue to cheer for more successes for all of the dedicated, hardworking professionals invested in building a stronger capital market.

We need you to succeed.

On that note, allow me to share with you some general tips on how to get started down the right road and be the best you can be. These tips work and will help you grow your audience and build your business. Note the following tips for #whatworks are for companies in the public markets but generally work for any business…

“There are no shortcuts to building a team each season. You build the foundation brick by brick.” — Bill Belichick

1. Ask for Help. Stop, review what you deem to be your company’s alleged challenges in securing shareholder interest and then ask a professional you know with a track record of success about what they think is really slowing you down
2. Then Listen. Now this is a tricky one. You can fill your day with people who can waste your time extending nonsensical advice. Before you ask someone for assistance, ask yourself why this person is qualified to give you feedback. I mean you wouldn’t ask your friend what’s wrong with your car if they are not a mechanic? So why ask anyone what speed bumps are in your business model that are slowing you down will only – do just that: slow you down, and worse, waste your time.
3. Act. Did you take notes from the expert you sought advice from? No one wants their time wasted. If you have sought advice from an expert, and then ignored their advice – they will not invest in helping you in the future, nor will they introduce you to anyone ever again. Smarten up. Again, do NOT ask advice from someone you neither care for, nor respect or it will bite you in the ***.
4. Assess your Marketing Tools. Most companies, never ever — ever ask anyone: what do you think of my marketing deck? 99 out of 100 decks that I review are below average and many are damn near repellant. Lesson 101, if you don’t like your marketing deck, no one else does. This is the #1 reason your may be dropping investor interest. Does your deck introduce your business properly or identify what you are selling clearly? Do you know who you are selling to as so many decks I must endure seem to be missing this critical element. If you are a publicly listed company, you are marketing to investors…so ask yourself, what would you want to see?
5. Get your Elevator Pitch On. Can you describe your company in one sentence? What about your elevator pitch? Are you able in 90-seconds to reel out the 3 most competitive reasons why an investor, a potential investor – should get you on their radar? And practice it…. as nothing pains me more than to hear companies during one of our InvestorTalk.com’s in the morning sound like they need to start all over.

And so, everyone out there calling me and saying “Oh no, it’s a bear market!” need to lose my number. If your wasting time investing in communicating excuses, your not investing in developing your business and building an audience. You know it. There are no shortcuts but there are formulas with proven success and having an audience matters. So those of you who believe your investment audience will magically appear when you announce your corporate milestones, often disclosed through poorly written news releases — well, it doesn’t happen that way. Focus your energy and direct it into the positives that you can accomplish in your day towards getting your business boat to the other side….

This has been your Tracy Talk for Friday, May 27^th.

In a recent InvestorIntel interview Peter Clausi speaks with Brendon Grunewald, Co-Founder and CEO of Moovly Media Inc. (TSXV: MVY) about recent advances in Moovly’s video content publishing platform.

“One silver lining to the pandemic is people having to discover new ways of learning and working, and video is becoming an essential part of that,” Brendon said. “I believe that’s not just related to Covid, but that is part of a long-term trend.”

Moovly has also taken advantage of the lockdown by adding new features to their already robust and feature-rich online video content creation platform. “Many of these new features are client-driven,” Brendon said, “particularly clients in the corporate enterprise space and education.”

The ability of users to create templates and upload and publish videos instantly “is a feature particularly appreciated by bigger organizations because they may have graphics specialists in their headquarters, but not everyone is a graphics specialist,” he continued. This allows a company to create a template “and then anyone in the field who can drive a mouse and a keyboard can actually adapt and customize it and make themselves look like content geniuses.”

One of the new features is the ability to transform PowerPoint presentations into video, adding music and other video elements from Moovly’s extensive royalty-free library. “A lot of companies have amassed a sizeable number of PowerPoint presentations,” Brendon said, “and what they are looking to do is make them more engaging, particularly to the younger generation.” Brendon explains how the Moovly tool takes all the elements of each PowerPoint slide, including graphics and transitions, and automatically converts them to video. It automates the process and “saves a lot of time, which is its primary value.”

Last month Moovly also announced that it had integrated Google Translate into its platform, allowing for instant sub-titles for videos into more than 100 languages. Brendon told Peter that this is particularly valuable to multinational companies that need to have content translated and localized for multiple markets.

With over 3 million users, Brendon said that “our key value proposition is that we are trying to democratize the ability for everyone to really make high-end content.” And whether you are a big or small business, an individual, or an educator, Moovly, he continued, “really gives the tools to people to really make content with the click of a button.”

To watch the full interview, click here.

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Disclaimer: Moovly Media Inc., Inc. is an advertorial member of InvestorIntel Corp.