A man standing on a stage in front of a large audience, with a blank screen behind him

Presentations

Slides designed to maximize attention. On you.

A Unique Artform

Pitch presentations are an unusual form of performance art, blending multiple elements into one cohesive & invigorating experience. Plan it correctly and you’ll engage your audience, compel them to action, and propel your company forward.

Performance

Inspiring others and commanding the stage.

Juggling

Masterfully managing many elements at once.

Storytelling

A carefully crafted and compelling tale.

Business

Presenting data with passion & ease.

A silhouette of Beyoncé
You are Beyonce - Your slides are your backup singers

Just like Beyoncé, YOU are the star of your presentation. Much like backup singers, the purpose of your slides is to enhance the performance, but never at the risk of distracting attention away from you.

There are many lessons to be learned from the example of Queen B’s squad. A good backup singer doesn’t sing every single word along with the headliner. Beyoncé is not and has never been a choir. Backup singers are there to highlight certain keywords, to make a catchy chorus more memorable.

So too should your slides only reinforce keywords you want to stick in your audience’s minds, to visualize vital data that helps drive your point home. After all, slides shouldn’t simply be a print out of your speech! Where would the ebb & flow, groove & beat be in that?

At Perfectly Pitched, we do everything we can to make slides worthy of the star that you are.

Just like Beyoncé, YOU are the star of your presentation. Much like backup singers, the purpose of your slides is to enhance the performance, but never at the risk of distracting attention away from you.

There are many lessons to be learned from the example of Queen B’s squad. A good backup singer doesn’t sing every single word along with the headliner. Beyoncé is not and has never been a choir. Backup singers are there to highlight certain keywords, to make a catchy chorus more memorable.

So too should your slides only reinforce keywords you want to stick in your audience’s minds, to visualize vital data that helps drive your point home. After all, slides shouldn’t simply be a print out of your speech! Where would the ebb & flow, groove & beat be in that?

At Perfectly Pitched, we do everything we can to make slides worthy of the star that you are.

An icon of a person, juggling 7 rainbow-colored balls

The Art of Juggling Attention

Planning the perfect presentation is much like a juggling act. Except instead of juggling many brightly colored balls, you will be juggling your audience’s attention. 

  • Where should the audience’s attention be focused?
  • What do you want them to remember most of all?
  • What are they seeing?
  • What are they hearing?
  • How will sight & sound come together, to make your message all the more impactful & memorable?
  • How can attention be harnessed to create unforgettable moments?

Attention can be your presentation’s greatest ally, or its biggest weakness. Your slides are your main tool to capture, harness, and direct your audience’s attention. Plan your slides carefully and your message will resonate, your words will carry more weight, and you will be remembered.

Luckily for you, we’re expert jugglers, ready to teach you how to harness your audience’s attention for maximum impact.

Storytelling

Uplifting Your Audience & Building Engagement

Storytelling

Uplifting Your Audience & Building Engagement

A woman being lifted up into the air by a red umbrella, in front of an yellow wooden slat wall.

At its heart, pitch presentations are another form of storytelling, rich in the tradition of oral histories & moving speeches. To ensure a connection with your audience, your presentation should be built on a firm foundation of excellent writing & engaging story structure. After all, your company’s future depends on your ability to convey a gripping yarn!

All pitches share the same basic segments, which can be organized in a variety of ways depending upon who you are, your own personal story, and your company. Generally speaking, though, these are the topics you should cover:

  • You & Your Company
  • A Compelling Problem
  • Your Unique Solution
  • Market & Financials
  • Why Now, Why You, Why Your Team
  • Your Ask for Your Future
  • Conclude with Gratitude

Throughout these “chapters”, you should develop a natural rise & fall as you contrast What Is versus What Could Be. What is the world like now, how is it affected by your pain point, and who is suffering because of it? With each low, it gives you an opportunity to rise & uplift your audience as you contrast against the beautiful future where your company has solved this problem and we’re all flourishing. This natural rise & fall echoes beautiful music, beloved stories, and the natural rhythms of life.

All great speeches in history have used this formula of compare & contrast; our current reality versus a glorious future. It hooks people into your story, simultaneously grounding them in the present, while generating engagement in your idea and building excitement for the future.

Our personal background as entrepreneurs grounds us in a deep understanding of business, while our abiding passion for storytelling allows us to harness and convey that entrepreneurial experience to others.

When it comes to storytelling, we’re the bee’s knees. Perfectly Pitched’s foremost expertise is in creative writing. Our Founder, Heather Lawver, began her career at the age of 13 by creating a non-profit through which she personally tutored over 400 children in English & Creative Writing. Storytelling is her forte, her passion, her bread & butter. In fact, there’s an entire chapter in a collegiate textbook from MIT that bears her name: “Why Heather Can Write”.

Let us use that expertise to craft the perfect narrative around your own founder’s journey, engaging your audience & paving a yellow brick road straight to your company’s future.

A Tale of Two Presentations

GATES vs JOBS

Visually conveying all of your company’s facts & figures can be a daunting task. Many of the world’s leading businessmen have attempted to tackle complex business slides, only to crash and burn spectacularly.  This crucible of charts – this gauntlet of graphs – has left plenty of failed businesses in its wake.

Yet others have succeeded, going on to build lasting reputations as master communicators based predominantly on their ability to convey complex information in simple, easy to understand formats.

Your business plan is the doorway to your company’s future. How that business plan is presented determines whether that door to your future will ever be unlocked. 

When it comes to organizing even the most complex of business plans, we delight in obsessing over the smallest of details. We thrill at perfectly placed pie charts and geek out over the works of Edward Tufte. A color-coordinated graph is like an ice cream sundae; a beautifully laid out series of statistics is all we hope to find under our Christmas tree. Let our obsession be the key to your company’s future.

We’ve put together a simple primer to illustrate the difference between impending slide deck disaster versus pitch deck nirvana. Without further ado, we humbly present, A Tale of Two Presentations.

Bill Gates presenting The Microsoft Live Platform, using a very messy slide
The Inventor of PowerPoint

How could the inventor of PowerPoint get slide design so wrong? Click the titles to explore more details & learn how you can avoid these mistakes. 

Busy, Cluttered & Confusing

When you first look at that slide, do you have any idea which point is most important? Do you know what one item Bill wants you to remember more than anything else? Right now, too many things are competing for your attention. Which means no one’s focusing on the same thing, and Bill has no control over what you’ll remember. That’s partly because there’s just too much on the slide at once! But it’s also a matter of visual emphasis. When you design a slide, one of your biggest jobs is to design your slide in a way so that the audience subconsciously knows where to look first.

The Audience Can't Help But Read Ahead

This slide is so busy that as soon as it appears, the audience is going to read ahead. It’s simply human nature! One quarter of the audience will be wondering what “Other Experiences from Microsoft & Others” is all about, while another quarter is distracted by that sweet iMac in the corner! What’s the remaining half looking at? Who knows! Bill certainly has no clue! When everything is up on the slide, nothing has impact.

Confusion & Distraction Prevents Active Listening

Think of a presentation as an entire audio/visual experience. The audience needs to simultaneously listen to Bill speak, while also taking in visually what’s on the slide. Imagine trying to listen to a podcast while reading a novel at the same time. That’s essentially what Bill is asking his audience to do with this busy slide! When our eyes are overwhelmed with input, our brain focuses more of its energy on our eyes & shuts off our ears. That’s the last thing you want, because you need to remain the star of the show!

Spoilers Distract From What's Said & Ruin What's Next

Think of a presentation as an entire audio/visual experience. The audience needs to simultaneously listen to Bill speak, while also taking in visually what’s on the slide. Imagine trying to listen to a podcast while reading a novel at the same time. That’s essentially what Bill is asking his audience to do with this busy slide! When our eyes are overwhelmed with input, our brain focuses more of its energy on our eyes & shuts off our ears. That’s the last thing you want, because you need to remain the star of the show!

Complex Slides Pull Attention Away from Presenter

It’s going to take Bill at least 10 minutes to get through this super complex slide. Those 10 minutes are going to be a constant struggle, because the audience isn’t actively listening to him. They’re getting distracted & reading ahead. All together, Bill would have been far better off spending 1 minute each on 10 simpler slides. Same amount of time spent in total, but 10 times as many slides! The only difference? His audience will be able to better follow his message, focusing on precisely what he wants them to focus on at any given moment, and thus increase the chances that Bill’s message will be remembered.

The Harder It Is to Learn, The Less They'll Remember

Think about someone asking you to remember ten things of a list. You could repeat them time & time again, write them over & over, but chances are, remembering all ten is going to be quite difficult. Instead, try to remember only three things. I bet that’s a lot easier. In fact, I know it is. The human brain is excellent at remembering precisely 3 things in its working memory at any given time. Any more than that, and not only will each subsequent item likely be forgotten, but the first three items will get washed away as well. That’s the inherent problem with Bill’s super busy slide. He’s guaranteeing that his audience won’t remember what he has to say. So keep it simple & you’ll keep it memorable! Keep each slide to a maximum of only 3 key points and you’ll increase your odds of your audience remembering what you have to say.

Gates Has NO Control Over Audience's Attention

At the end of the day, the main problem with Bill’s slides is that he simply has no control over where the audience is focusing at any given moment. He’s lost control of his presentation the minute that slide turns up. Don’t let that happen to you!

Steve Jobs presenting the introduction of the original iPhone
The Master Communicator

Steve Jobs didn’t invent PowerPoint, but he perfected it! Let’s compare so we can unlock precisely what made Steve such a master communicator.

Clean, Uncluttered & Precise

Steve Jobs’ decks easily had 10 times as many slides in total as Bill’s deck. Yet because he kept his slides simple, Steve has guaranteed that his audience always knows precisely what to focus on at any given moment. His slides aren’t distracting attention away from him! But rather, they serve as a visual scaffolding around whatever Steve is currently saying. Try to design your slide deck the same way. Don’t think of your script & your slide as separate; they need to be created in tandem, each one reinforcing the other, making the entire presentation a complete audio/visual experience.

Your Eye Knows Immediately Where to Go

When you design your deck, think carefully about the main goal of each slide. Decide what ONE thing is most important for your audience to remember. Make sure that one thing has the most visual pop in the slide design! Then make sure you don’t have too many pops of visual emphasis competing for your audience’s attention! Use design to create a kind of visual hierarchy in a natural reading flow, so your audience knows what’s most important, what’s next, and what comes after that.

Vital Facts are Clearly Highlighted

When Steve had something extra important to say, he made sure it appeared front & center, no distractions. He always masterfully guided his audience’s attention right where he wanted it. That ease & simplicity is precisely why Steve’s presentations were always so impactful. You can absolutely do the same! If you have an extra important statement to make, put it front & center. If you have an emotional climax, find a way to visualize it to give your spoken word more impact. You don’t always have to design slides in full complete sentences; use keywords to make certain moments pack more punch. Get more creative by thinking how you can reinforce what you’re saying by translating your spoken word into immediately connected visuals.

Slides Perfectly Match What's Spoken

Think of reading a story to a child. When you’re reading aloud, you always make sure to show the illustrations from the same part of the book you’re currently reading. If you were reading page 10, but showing an illustration from page 50, that’s not exactly going to help the story, is it? Keep that in mind as you design your slides. Use transitions or subtle animations to build items in one at a time. Be mindful of how the script pairs with what’s presented on the screen, to ensure what the audience sees and hears always perfectly blends together, ensuring your message is as impactful & memorable as possible.

Visuals Emphasize -- Rather Than Distract From -- Presenter

There’s a classic thought experiment every philosophy & neuroscience student hears in college. The professor will say, “Think of an elephant”, while showing you a picture of an elephant. But then later, they’ll repeat, “Think of an elephant”, but show you an apple. When that happens, audiences inevitably experience a kind of mental short circuit that pulls you out of the experience, makes you do a kind of mental double take, and momentarily distracts you. This principle is at the heart of most slide deck design mistakes! You want to always make sure that your slides perfectly match whatever it is you are currently talking about, to ensure you don’t cause that same kind of distracting short circuit in your audience’s minds!

All Info Is Easily Absorbed & Retained

Words are stored in our short term memory & quickly dumped. Images bypass that & go straight into our long term memory, increasing the chances that we’ll remember. On top of that, images are processed by the human brain 60,000 times faster than text. When you pair spoken word with immediately connected visuals, memory retention increased by a whopping 400%. When planning your presentation, write your script first. Decide what statements are most important. Then, if possible, find ways to illustrate them visually through imagery that pops up as you’re speaking. Corresponding images will help your audience understand concepts faster and increase the odds that they’ll remember what you have to say.

Jobs Has Full Control of Audience's Attention

With the way Steve Jobs conveys information clearly, simply, and visually, he’s always in full & complete control over the audience’s experience at any given moment. He’s leading them through his story on a kind of mental leash, ensuring that they follow precisely the logical, narrative path as he’s laid it out for them. That’s your job as a presenter. To plan your pitch so that at any given moment, you are carefully orchestrating everything the audience sees & hears, ensuring they experience your pitch free from distraction, confusion, and frustration. Keep it simple & you’ll be far more effective!

A Winning Record

Many of our clients have gone on to great success, rocking our perfectly polished decks on their way to winning pitch competitions, as well as securing places in leading incubators & accelerators. Here's a taste of a few competitions won & great things accomplished by the companies we've been thrilled to help!

SXSW
CES Innovation Awards 2020 Honoree
Tech Crunch
MIT Solve
Girls in Tech
UN Women
Pitch Your Startup
Booz Allen Foundation Innovation Fund
BioLOGIC
She Loves Tech
Verizon 5G Lab
AARP Innovation Labs

A Winning Record

A woman celebrating amongst falling confetti

Many of our clients have gone on to great success, rocking our perfectly polished decks on their way to winning pitch competitions, as well as securing places in leading incubators & accelerators. Here's a taste of a few competitions won & great things accomplished by the companies we've been thrilled to help!

SXSW
CES Innovation Awards 2020 Honoree
Verizon 5G Lab
Tech Crunch
MIT Solve
UN Women
Girls in Tech
Booz Allen Foundation Innovation Fund
AARP Innovation Labs

Perfectly Pitched

Transitioning from Consultancy to Scale

We’ve been so grateful to provide consulting services to literally hundreds of talented social entrepreneurs since founding our company in 2021. As we embark on a new chapter, we unfortunately have to put a pause on our individualized services as we seek to automate our proprietary methodologies. As much as we have loved working with individual founders, we feel compelled to serve even more dreamers & doers at scale.

Once we get further along in the build, we may have more time available. Thus, if you’re looking for help with your startup, make sure you sign up for our wait list to be the first to know as soon as our capacity increases.

Thank you for your patience & understanding! We can’t wait to show you what we have in store.

An illustration of a woman sitting atop a calendar, with a week opened up, holding a megaphone and announcing that she finally has time available!

Thank you!