Yesterday I gave a talk at Birmingham City University’s Business School on the induction day for a new course - the MSc in Business Creation and Development. It was a really inspiring couple of hours and I got some good feedback, so I thought I’d just blog about the process I go through on putting together a 1 hour presentation on short notice. I had about a week to prepare, but I’ll be honest, I started putting it together at about 11am on the day, and the talk was at 2.30pm!
How do you put a decent presentation together in about an hour and a half?
It’s all about questions. I sit down and ask myself some basic questions and the talk almost writes itself.
Why have I been invited?
First up - it’s important to know why you’ve been invited to talk at an event. I was invited along because I’m one of those awful ‘young entrepreneurs’ (still dislike the term - not sure why - connotations of being an idiot?). You have to be self-aware at this point - whoever was thinking about inviting someone obviously puts you into some kind of bracket and it’s important to understand what bracket they think you fit in and to use that to your advantage.
Who are the audience?
Doing a bad presentation is pretty easy - and I’ve seen a few! The worst ones are boring, too long, irrelevant, pitched too low or too high and make too much or too little use of visual aids, gags and so on.
A good way of avoiding that is to find out in advance what kind of audience you can expect on the day. Ask the organiser well in advance:
What age / background / ethnicity / experience / agenda do the audience have? In fact anything relevant that might have a bearing on your subject matter.
What are they expecting on the day? If they’re expecting one thing, and you deliver another, no-one’s going to be happy.
How does your talk fit into other things they will have experienced that day? You don’t want them to be tired or for you to repeat things.
I made the mistake of making some assumptions about my audience after surfing the website about the course. It said that they would primarily be fresh graduates looking to convert into an MSc course with no experience in business, so I prepared my presentation with that in mind.
I turned up, and whilst chatting to the organiser just double-checked my assumptions, and it turned out that actually I was looking at speaking to more of a mature audience, many of whom were older than me and were taking the course as professional development to help them grow their businesses and careers.
Quite different! Luckily, I’d left a lot of margin for change in my talk and I was able to adapt.
What is the core thing that I should be talking about?
If you know why you’ve been invited, and you know who your audience are, combining that knowledge with the (often very loose) brief from the organiser you should try to crystallise the basic idea that you’re being asked to get across to that audience.
In this case, these were people who were starting out on a 1 year course on how to run a business, so my role was pretty clear - tell my story of what I’ve done, give them some insights into things I’ve learnt along the way and hopefully help them in their plans for running or setting up their own companies.
Quite often it helps just to bounce that with someone else. “I’ve been asked to do this talk where I’m telling people about things I’ve learnt along the way whilst running a small business.”
And that gave me the core issue: “If only I’d known then what I know now”, and the title for my presentation.
What’s the story?
A good story is the basis of any presentation, and to be basic about it, you need to do the whole “beginning, middle, end” thing with it.
I have a conversational style whenever I do a talk - I don’t use notes that often, but instead just try to have a few ‘big points’ in mind that I want to make.
So, starting at the beginning, I open up a text file on my computer, or get out a sheet of paper. Whatever you do, _don’t_ open up Powerpoint or Keynote or whatever presentation package you use at this point - you’ll kill your ideas and end up staring at a blank screen getting stressed out!
“It’s a sketch, so be messy!” is the rule and I’m going to be honest now. Here is the actual text I wrote for my presentation (these are all of my notes before starting on the visuals and there is no further text):
Hi What I've learnt along the way Why start a business? Be Your Own Boss Sit by the swimming pool counting money Fast cars Reality Hard work Creativity every day Challenges Why now? Bubbles If I knew then what I know now. Why start a business? Some rules
Pretty messy I’m sure you’ll agree. But what I was doing here was sketching out a very rough structure for the talk.
I always start with a “Hi, I’m Stef” and a bit of background about why I’m standing in front of whoever I’m talking to. Then a title of the talk, where I’d roughly tell them what I was going to talk about.
Then a block where I’d maybe talk about why people might want to go into running their own business - fast cars, money, being your own boss, etc. The thing is is that the reality is often very different from the inside and I have a few anecdotes I can tell about that.
Then it gets a bit cryptic - Bubbles is because I talk about how economic changes can be a factor in when you start a company - I started 3form just after the dot-com bubble burst. I didn’t use this idea in the end.
And then a few lines reminding the audience about the subject of the talk followed by the all encompassing ’some rules’ line which actually formed most of the talk. This turned out to be the basis for the talk - three things that I’ve learnt along the way and how they apply to other people.
At this point, I realised I didn’t need to go any further. I had the ’story’. It was:
- Beginning - My background: how/why I set up a company and what it was like
- Middle - Three things I learnt along the way that I’d like to share
- End - How that relates to the audience and what they should do next
Simple!
What’s the format?
The next question to ask, is what is the actual format that the talk is going to be in? Is it a monologue? Is it more of a seminar with some discussion? Are you up on a podium? Is there a projector? Are you supposed to bring a laptop? Who’s handling the technical side? Is there an internet connection? And so on - it’s worth asking all of this up-front.
They told me that I’d have a projector and computer set up with Powerpoint on the day and I should bring it on a memory stick or CD, so I started putting together a few slides to illustrate my story.
The dreaded Powerpoint
Okay. I’m not a big fan of the usual slide-bulletpoint-bulletpoint-slide-bulletpoint ‘PowerPoint’ presentation, so over the last few years I’ve developed my own style that works a lot better for me and the way I like to do things.
I make an assumption based on the expression “A picture tells a thousand words”.
I’ve sat in many presentations with perfectly able speakers who seem to inhibit themselves by almost reading out their text-heavy slides word for word as each animated bullet-point floats in from one side. In the process they lose their connection with the audience, boring themselves and anyone else in the room with them. It’s an easy way of making even the most dynamic person become nothing more than a text-to-speech enabled robot.
No text (well, almost none)
So my approach is this. Once I have my rough text document together and I know what it is I am trying to talk about I set about making a ‘picture book’ version of my story.
I try to think about each point in the talk, and think at which moments I would be introducing a new idea.
I like to make my presentations using images from other people around the world where possible, so I start searching on a relevant (and legal) site for images that are relevant to my talk.
For each of those ‘big paragraph breaks’ in my story, I try to find an image. It helps that I’m a photographer so I often use my own images, but one resource always proves invaluable for this - Flickr.
I’m a big fan of Flickr. If you’re not familiar, it’s a big photo-sharing website where some fantastic photographers display their work.
At this point, I make a decision. Am I:
A. …getting paid for my time? or
B. …doing this as a freebie?
If I am getting paid, then I look within my own photos, or search on Stock Exchange or other commercial sites for my images.
If it’s the latter, and I’m donating my time for a good cause or for something I’m passionate about that has no direct financial reward for me then I start searching on Flickr’s excellent Creative Commons image search.
This means that I am specifically searching for images that photographers have applied a Creative Commons licence to meaning they are happy for them to be reused in a non-commercial way, often with a credit back to the photographer.
Putting the picture book together
So, in the one hour or so I had left to put the presentation together, I grabbed relevant photos to highlight my points. A man thinking for a slide about ‘how it all starts with an idea’, a picture of three people talking for a bit about how word of mouth is really important to small businesses, another about ‘networking’ events and how you shouldn’t be a ‘lemon’ and stand around not talking to anyone, and so on.
It’s important to spread them out so that they cover your intended flow in the talk, and I put together about 15 slides including a “Hello I’m Stef” and a “Thanks” slide top and bottom. For a one hour talk that should be plenty.
The important thing here is to pick arresting images - things that might be a little leftfield and unexpected - to illustrate your point.
That means for the whole of the time you are talking about something, there is an image next to you that kind of explains what you are talking about, but doesn’t mean that you have to spend hours putting together a word for word script. You can connect with your audience a lot better if they are paying attention to you talking and not trying to listen to you and read the screen at the same time.
People don’t read an image, but they can look at one and still take in what you are saying. I guess it’s the speaking equivalent of an album cover?
A few pages from the finished presentation
Always start with a black slide so you can flip the presentation on when you are ready.
Have an intro screen, with the title of your talk, your name, your logo and your web address. People write this stuff down. Oh and keep it simple - forget all the silly colours and lines, and blocks and things! Don’t have any animations unless they are tasteful.
Then start with something unexpected. They’re probably thinking - “Oh no, another boring presentation, I’ll just check that text message”. Confuse them.
This image is by a pretty great photographer called Corey (a.k.a Ten0fNine) and I found it gave just the right inspiring/dangerous/risky/great/future-looking feel that I wanted to describe what it’s like walking in to your boss’s office and saying “I quit” and then going and starting your company off the back of a credit card! It’s licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution No Derivative Works license so I put his username at the bottom of the slide (which I did for all of the images).
And then an image of a pub table - confuse them a bit more. “This isn’t going to be a boring presentation, I’ll put the phone down” is what you want them to be thinking. Because the best ideas happen when you’re at the pub - it’s following them up that matters! Again, it’s under a Creative Commons licence so I put a credit on the slide.
Then an image of mine for a slide about ‘planning’ - a business is all about taking an idea and putting a plan in place to make it a reality.
Then a few other images (I’m not including them all here - it’d be a bit long-winded!) each covering an area of my talk about things that I wish I’d done along the way, and things that I’d learnt.
Ending up with an a kind of amusing slide about my ending message - “Don’t miss the bus - running a business starts right now with the people you already know and the ideas you may already have.” It often pays well not to take yourself too seriously in these kinds of things.
And always end with a big “Thank You” - these people have given you their time to listen to you! And remember to include your web address / phone number / email - whichever is most relevant to you as well as your name and logo. Again - no silly graphics!
Save it and get in the car
So I quite literally saved the document as a PowerPoint document, put it on a CD (most reliable), grabbed my laptop (backup) and headed out the door. I don’t recommend doing things in such a rush. In this situation, you don’t need hard copy print-outs. If the projector fails, the projector fails, no big problem - just do it without the photos. You’ve got your story in your head, you know what you’re talking about, maybe put the laptop in front of you as a reminder.
So I arrived there and hooked up with the organiser, had a chat with the organiser, checked everything was working half an hour before I was due ‘on’. Again - if it all screws up you can always just make a quick slide with just your name on to be projected behind you.
Going ‘off piste’
No talk I have ever done has gone exactly to plan and this one wasn’t any different!
There are relevant interruptions, conversations that happen, tangents to go off on. Interesting points that suddenly pop into your brain. It’s important to give yourself a very loose structure in which those quick ideas and changes can actually look natural to an audience.
With a traditional ’slide, bullet’ presentation it can look like you’ve ‘gone off piste’ when you start talking about an issue which isn’t included on the slide on the screen. This makes the audience a bit confused sometimes and can make your presentation look a little rambling.
The good thing with this method is that it lets me ‘go off piste’ whenever I want without it looking like I’m screwing up - if’s something’s relevant it should be included.
Going blank
We’ve all done it. Got up in front of an audience and completely lost the train of thought and gone blank. The cool thing with just using images is that it can actually act as something of a memory aid. You can use the images to help you remember the kinds of things you were supposed to talk about. A bit like how family snaps can help you remember a particular time and place, you can associate an image with a theme or something you want to cover. Handy for skipping those blank moments. And you can always just move one without it looking like something went wrong.
Don’t look at the screen
A big fault with many people doing presentations is that they often stand in such a way that they are looking at their own powerpoint and reading off it instead of looking at the audience. This method forces you to maybe point to or refer to the image once or twice, but there’s nothing for you to ‘read’, so you’ll always be facing the audience. They get to look at a nice image and you facing them and engaging with them. People like that.
The end result
As far as this presentation went, it didn’t go at all the way I thought it would have - but planning for randomness is possibly one of the best ideas with this kind of format.
The audience were great, really engaged in what I was talking about and I learnt a lot from them as well as (hopefully) the other way around. I ran out of business cards at the end so I guess that’s a good sign. The simple point being is that I tried not to bore the hell out of them, and make sure that if they were spending an hour and a bit listening to me talk that it should be interesting and that they should feel inspired about making their business idea happen.
I don’t recommend this style of presenting to everyone, but it certainly works for me - I hope me writing this up is useful.
Good luck with the presentation!
10 Comments
Stef, a very useful summary of how to put together a presentation. I have to use a few bullet slides in my line of work but I have a rule, never put one after the other. I use maps and other graphics rather than photos simply because geology is a science that revels in the “picture tells a story” concept but most of my pictures are conjured up in the mind, hence the use of graphics.
I hate Powerpoint! But I have to use it because it is an “industry standard”. Keynote is so much better but few people I work with have a Mac. I often use Keynote to open an impossible 450MB Powerpoint file, then save it as a .ppt and hey presto the dam things will then open in Powerpoint! And how often does a Powerpoint file offer you a red cross in place of a graphic? Well, there is a valuable resource, the PowerPoint FAQ List and it’s one of the longest web pages on the ‘net. Take a look, it’s very useful in solving all those nagging problems.
I am often amused by the way in which some of the early abuses of PowerPoint and presentations in general are perpetuated in, for want of a better word, the Third World. Man, do some people still love transitions!
Hi Stef, excellent guide. Could have done it when I was touring around doing similar presentations to academics and students.
I always found that preparing a presentation closer to the date, having done all the necessary research first, focussed my mind. Bizzarely also found having a bad nights sleep the night before helped too; had to present to 200 people at a national conference and the bad nights sleep must have focussed the mind - that and a lectern to cling to to hide my nerves.
@Paul - I’m with you there. I much prefer Keynote, in fact I much prefer the entire Apple package when it comes to standard office software. Simpler, more intuitive, easier to drag and drop things together.
But how often do you turn up and there’s an opportunity to swap for your own laptop or to do something non-standard. Rarely. In the past I’ve made presentations in Flash and turned them into EXEs which works but Flash isn’t much fun for complicated tasks.
I’m sure that list will be useful!
@Simon - You know, I’m similar. For some reason my body always decides to wake me up far too early of the morning I’m doing anything the least bit stressful so that I’m not rested in any way for them - perhaps that fight or flight instinct making us sharper? Oddly, the more people I present to the more abandon I seem to show about what they think about it… not sure how that works!
Hi Stef - interesting post. One idea that flew right out of the web into my brain at some point was 20:20 Lighting Talks (or various similar names) - a presentational style where you’re only allowed 20 slides and you set them to auto-advance after 20 seconds.
I’ve seen this done in events with a whole bunch of speakers to get through and it’s very effective at forcing people to get to their various points!
I think combining that with your approach of slides comprised almost entirely of images would be a delightfully-respectful way to be presented to
Stef
This is a great right up of how to do a presentation. All feedback from students was very positive and all found you very engaging - so thank you again. I will take the liberty of passing on this posting to them as I think it will prove a really useful tool when they come to present their ideas. Actually I have to mark 120 presentations from another set of students and I think this may prove a useful resource, if they’re not going to all be endless bullet points!
I think from the sounds of things you took the absoulute right approach. In my research (entrepreneurship in the creative industries) I always use a narrative methodology and there is much evidence to suggest that stories help folks make sense of and understand the ‘real-lived’ experience of the entrepreneur.
Thanks again
Charlotte
did I really say ‘right up’? obviously meant write up - must be a little brain dead today
I used to work as a presentation trainer and whole-heartedly endorse your attitude to Powerpoint which, far from being an aid, is often a barrier to communication.
I notice you used a linear approach to planning your presentation, which makes me think that unconsciously or otherwise you had a pretty good idea of what you wanted to say before you started. As an alternative to writing a linear set of headings first, many people find mind maps useful to distill their thoughts at this stage:
http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newISS_01.htm
(I have nothing to do with the company)
Once you’ve got the big picture down on paper, it’s very easy then to mark it up in sections and number them in the order in which you’re going to cover them.
In fact, if you’re really up against time, you can use the mind map as your notes for the talk.
Yes, I love the use of photographs. Chances are that creative people will think visually, in pictures, rather than via words anyway. Thanks, Stef.
When I first started doing presentations with any regularity, most of the things I went to tended to be characterised by a series of presentations that are fantastically boring. People still insist on putting an essay on a powerpoint slide and then reading it to you.
For god’s sake - just email it to me. I’ll read it myself.
So I’ve long been aware of the need to keep people awake and engaged when presenting. Academic conferences, Musicians Union Seminars, music industry events, guest lectures at other universities… These days, I’m averaging a public talk somewhere other than my classes at BCU about once a week - and the places I’m being invited to do those presentations are getting more and more interesting.
This week, Wrexham. Next week, Leeuwarden. Then Oslo followed by Shanghai.
I’ve been more your Lessig/Kawasaki method presenter for some time (essentially large white text on a black background, no more than 3 words per slide) for quite some time now. I tend to use fewer words, and more slides than most people.
But my theory is that the slides are not the presentation. I’d prefer to make eye contact with the audience - and images, like long sections of text, are hard to compete with. Usually what goes on the screen is the subheading of ‘what I’m talking about now’.
It serves as a memory aid for me (oh, that’s right, now I’m going to talk about Distributed Identity - I have some things to say about that…), it keeps the topic within sight while I improvise, and it reminds the audience of what I’m talking about, should they happen to drift off.
But sometimes I mix it up.
What were probably my two most well-received presentations were quite different from each other. One had 250-odd slides in 15 minutes, pulling out keywords from a completely scripted speech and - for fun - occasionally using a different word than the one I spoke (eg. ‘liars’ when I said the word ‘lawyers’ - or ‘charlatans’ when I said the word ‘experts’). There’s little room for error with this method and it’s not for the faint-hearted. You need a wireless clicker too.
The other one was for a dead serious academic conference I presented at in Amsterdam. Rather than create my slides in Powerpoint, I had them all drawn on paper in crayon, then scanned. I was, at least, notable as contrast.
But as you point out, Stef, the keys are good narrative structure, engaging the audience where they’re at, and remembering that Powerpoint is specially designed to help you give bad presentations. You have to avoid all of the things it’s trying to encourage you to do.
Thanks for the great article - I might try an all-image presentation at the next one in tribute.
Great article (although a few typos here and there!)… I’ve used photos to “break things up” a bit (read “wake the audience up) but going the whole hog and just using images sounds like a good idea. My only reservation is that it’s surely hard to think of (and find) relevant images. I’d be a bit worried that the audience would find my tenuous links painful. That said, probably not as painful as the average PowerPoint presentation!
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