As the owner of a start-up or small business, you wear a lot of hats. You’re a motivator, organiser, hiring manager, marketer, salesperson, and so much more. One of the roles that slips its way in but is crucial to master is that of a presenter.
Whether it’s pitching for investment, launching a new initiative to your employees, or introducing yourself and your business to the local community, public speaking and presenting are essential skills. The stakes are often very high for these moments, yet most business owners aren’t experienced, confident presenters.
This article aims to share with you two ideas of what you can do as a small-business owner to turbocharge your presentation skills.
1. Define a singular objective
Our reliance on using slides has created problems that lead to failed presentations: a lack of a clear objective, and a lack of structure and flow.
Over time, we’ve been tricked by the neat order of templates, 16:9 slides, footers, agendas and a final ‘thank you’. There’s an outward appearance of everything being ‘in place’ and following order. If the slide deck is neatly formatted, it follows that the ideas must be too, right? The majority aren’t. Underneath the formatting, there’s just a content dump of slides, a real mess. Take away the slides and the thinking behind it is jumbled.
Far too often we miss the key central idea – the single belief we want clients to embrace. It gets lost in a sea of content, as we haven’t made enough effort or given it enough attention to really make it stand out.
If we don’t start with an objective and keep things clear, even a perfectly designed presentation can’t save things. Without a clear objective, there’s no North Star to move towards, no way of clearly articulating a benefit to an audience and no way of knowing what’s necessary and what’s not.
Get very clear what you want your audience to think, feel, believe, understand or change because of your presentation. Then make sure everything you include from there in developing your presentation aligns with this.
2. Make it interesting
Developing a presentation is usually a solo task, thinking, sitting behind a screen assembling slides. It’s easy to become inward-focused and forget the needs of your audience.
There’s a tendency to feel we must cover absolutely everything in case we’re caught out. We may start off well, but then the anxiety of missing something comes into our heads and there’s a tendency to jam in a new slide ‘just in case’. Rather than gracefully arriving at our objective at the end of a well-defined route, we blast excessive content at our audience and hope for the best. This shotgun approach overwhelms our audience so much that they stop taking things in – they shut down. The war of attention is lost to too much content and it’s boring.
So, rather than just adding content, look to bring your presentation to life with case studies, use cases, origin stories, testimonials, share your vision of how your business can provide a positive impact on clients? Try to think about what works in conversations that you have with customers and staff face to face, what are the sparks that people pay attention to. Is there some sort of demonstration you can share? Are there questions that you can ask that create a feeling of interaction and engagement with your audience?
Don’t let the interesting part of what you have to say get stuck behind bullet points and tables.
Presenting can be a challenge but start incorporating these two ideas into your practice and enjoy a more confident, impactful presentation that will have your audience talking.
