The other day, my boss and another well known developer gave presentations to an MSRE program. I created a PowerPoint for my boss. Had a few meetings with him before the presentation to prep and refine the visuals. After the presentation, my boss commented that we need step up our game in making power points. The other developers deck was much cleaner.
Generally use a white PowerPoint template with a lot of high quality images and PowerPoint smart art graphics. Curious to hear what everyone else does. Do you guys have customized templates for your company? Do you import other themes into PowerPoint? Any general tips? Trying to figure out how to make cleaner slides. Maybe this post is better suited for the IB forum lol.
I am at an institutional shop and we just have corporate templates with theme layouts. If the slides are used for investor pitches then we basically have slides made from our marketing teams and we fill out. Similar to my prior firm as well.
I never understood this “PowerPoint skill set” that some firms slam on their Analysts. Go fucking hire a graphic designer like the big brokerage shops due if you want them to really stand out or if smaller firm just hire someone to clean them up on a case by case basis.
This. Most shops have a marketing team that either creates the templates or creates decks from scratch. IMO the acquisitions team should only ever be responsible for drafting the verbiage and reviewing the deck.
Best thing to do is check out the Investment Banking forum. I hear that's 50% of their job.
I've worked with someone (girl) who is exceptional at making decks (don't mispell that could have a totally different meaning) look nice and clean. It's a skill that can't be taught. Sure you can take a nice looking deck and copy the style, but coming up with new themes isn't natural for everyone.
So tips for you. Find nice OMs/Pitchbooks and copy them. We hire a contractor to do our pitchbooks (costs about 10k retainer and additional hours charge when we need something edited), they look amazing - and then our analysts use that template and copy into our slides internally/externally.
General good habit tips I've gathered over the years for PPT (I did fund raising for a bit and making sure investor materials look nice was a big part of the job)
- less is more. don't overload page with words. white background are clean.
- fonts - don't underestimate the power of other Calibri-looking fonts can have your presentation. Don't pick weird fonts, but something slightly different yet still professional is a nice change
- font size! Don't just use 10/11 fonts for everything. Do 9 for the unimportant stuff and 16 to emphasize something.
- color schemes - be creative yet not picasso-crazy. eyedrop your firm's color and deviate 4-5 more similar theme colors to use for your deck. A general good practice is to create color boxes with the color codes on the side of every slide.
- consistency is key - make sure page numbers/headers/images/boxes don't "jump" around. Ie, they must be in the same position on every page so when someone scroll through the PDF/PPT, the images are consistent. Once you see it, you can never unsee it.
- go wild with boxes/charts/lines to seperate the page if you need to - usually this is for pages with lots of information/words. This is that one skill I had mention earlier that can't really be taught. Some people just have a knack for designing...But one can always try.
- last but may be most importantly - know the audience. What is the PPT for? Is it a pitchbook? If so make it 11x8.5 size so one can print or view on PDF. If it is a presentation and you're speaking to it, have it be 16:9 widescreen so it shows bigger on the screen. If you're presenting a slide, don't have too many words on there - the only words that should be shown on a deck you're presenting is a message you want the audience to take home with (and people can't remember that many things when they're seeing it on a screen) - just remember that.
Here's the bottom line. Most of us are finance/RE people and so when someone comes along with this designing skillset, it is VERY appreciated. It could really set you apart from your peers if you put in the effort and do this well. Good luck on becoming a PPT god.
This isn’t right—slide creation is a skill like attention to detail. People think it can’t be taught/is natural, but you actually get way better with practice. I would argue the key is building templates from Past decks—if you are making a slide from scratch, you’ve already lost. Use slides others have iterated on and seniors have signed off on.
I did a lot of PPT work where my boss was obsessed with putting an insane amount of detail and words into each slide. It was so annoying because our capital partner would skim everything and completely miss some nuance already spelled out. Anyways, it was overkill in my opinion and we spent too much time editing for perfection. I'm not Mr. PPT but it taught me to double/triple/quadruple check every single number to the most current model and check every word
I’ve never worked at a company that doesn’t have a clearly defined corporate template with set fonts and colour schemes.
All you then have to do is not fuck up alignments/formatting and take inspiration from past decks. Not really much to it.
It's good that you want to improve your PPT skills. When I moved into my role I was surprised at how much was done with decks and also felt the need to step up my game. Here's what I did:
1 - Someone at your company has access to Getty Images or the like, I'd be surprised if you didn't have a corporate account. Contact them and get access and be creative (but not overboard) with your use of images.
2 - Always follow your company's marketing style guide. Track that down and always use the fonts/color codes/gradients/etc that are approved by your company
3 - I know this one sounds hokey but I also bought a pack of those PPT templates that you see advertised on IG or whatever. It was like $100 for 500+ templates (its was a cheap & cheesy pack). You won't use most of them (they're trash) and you can't use any wholesale OOTB, but it will at least guide you and you can copy/paste the better ideas out of these and incorporate them into your own designs. Again, most were trash, but I more than got my $100 out of it and it helped me improve my decks in a very short amount of time for a reasonably small investment.
Good luck.
Lazard has the most j1zz worth decks out of every BB EB MM micro boutique
Do you have any?
Just wanted to opine on the topic
1. 10 inch margins are extremely important. This is a MUST. I can’t believe some banks (Rothschild cough cough) still puts bullets / images to the outer right of a slide.
2. Align everything - again another must if you don’t want your deck looking sloppy.
3. Consistency in spacing and sizing- this is applicable to anything ranging from text to charts. Keep it all consistent.
Download investor decks from the larger asset managers / REITs etc and take a look at how they structure their decks. You can then recreate something similar so that you’re always working from it as the default format. I like Bain Capital’s structure for example, small grey bar top and bottom of page to split title / footnotes area from content area, strap line summarising content into a 5 second summary where relevant, structure of slides pretty straight forward to follow etc. Example here: https://www.baincapitalbdc.com/sites/baincapitalbdc.com/files/EventPres…
Did your boss give any specific feedback on why the other decks were better? If they didn’t and it’s just that they looked better that’s not helpful. It’s like a client saying to a graphic designer they like the image but it needs more “pop”.
Once you’ve created slides your boss is happy with, save them down somewhere so you can quickly pull them in future. I can’t remember when I last made a new slide from scratch, I recycle everything now. Same goes for model outputs, have a sheet ready with the key tables / charts etc already formatted so you can drop it into a model and quickly link it up. I can pull together a good 8-10 slide intro deck which covers all the key points in less than an hour as a result of this.
I had some templates I always based my style off - over time you just get better and better at making it look crisp with less effort.
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