134: Jan Schultink: On Making Your Slides Magic

Hey everybody, and welcome to This Moved Me, a podcast about creating talks that move the world. With me, your host, Sally Koering Zimney. Together with some fabulous guests, we will have a casual conversation about the art of public speaking, because a good talk can move the world and it'll be fun. Yeah, I would think making alien cows meaningful. That's not a small task. I love your giggle. Wow. Oh my gosh, so waiting for everybody to figure out the alphabet. Hey Hoovers, it's Sally. Oh my gosh, it's been a few weeks. Uh, it's been a few weeks because I've been out doing my own speaking recently, which is always fun and exciting. And time-consuming. I did a talk with some women about how important story is and how it can help build community, not just be like a nice thing that we do with each other, but really strengthen ties and, and forge new ones. I did a training with some folks who are giving their own talk at my alma mater and helped them plan and prepare for their talks. That was really fun. And I've been doing a ton of work with my quick coaching program with some amazing people. Thank you to those of you who have offered me their talks and their feedback and their insight. I'm so grateful and I cannot wait to tell you more about what is coming. But today, today is all about Jan Schulting. Jan is a slide designer and expert with Slide Magic and Idea Transplant. And I am so excited to chat with Jan and share with you what we talked about because as you all know, I am a presentation maniac. I love all things presentation.

In.

I like absorb myself in it, and I, and I have a really strong preference about how my slides are created and my speaker slides. I'm, I'm no— not short on opinions on that stuff, but I am not by trade a designer. I've kind of had to learn some of the elements, of course, as we all have to, to some degree in this work, but I'm not a designer. So I wanted to bring you something really tangible and tactical for us as speakers because this is something that's important. We talk a lot about but it's amazing to me. It's an art form that we don't still have great consensus on even though we talk about it a lot, but I still see the majority of the slides I see I think need to be improved and can be changed. So Jan is the perfect guest to have on to really think about how we can do this better. He's a former McKinsey consultant who came by the need for better slides and presentation design really naturally because he saw so much bad stuff in in his work. And so, and we've all been there, right? So he started really doing something about it and now it is his business and he's been doing it for a long time and I have been following his work for a long time. His blog, Idea Transplant, and this new program that he's created a few years old, it's called Slide Magic, which magically makes your slides better. Woo! Okay, so there's lots of good stuff and I'm really excited for you to dive in with Jan. Here he is, Jan Scholting.

Started with the design. I come from the angle of design with a lot of your questions and the script is about speaking and speaker event. That's less me. I'm a designer of slides.

I know.

So a bit of a different animal than the people you are usually speaking to.

Which is why I'm so excited to have you on the show really. Good. Um, as a presentation coach, the slide part is— has become a big part of what I do, but it's not my expertise. Um, and I've had to learn it because I have strong opinions about it. Okay. But, you know, I think bringing in your, your expertise and not only having done this work for a long time, but now Building your own design software, I think, is really important to talk about because most people, I think, get it wrong.

Definitely. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Okay.

All right. Okay. So let's get— let's go for it. Good.

Wonderful. So, Jan, I'm, I'm so excited to have you on the show, and I've been following your work for a really long time. I get your emails and they are always Here's what I love about them. I'm just going to start off with a compliment. I love that they are direct, to the point, and they always have a little nugget of wisdom in them.

Right. You know, thank you very much. Yeah.

So where do those come from for you? Is it something that comes up in your work with clients? Or like, what feeds you in those emails?

Yeah, I think that that's the main source of inspiration that I take. Since I do this design work every day, I take one experience that I had with a client, strip it all its sort of recognizable content, context, and write a blog post or an email about that. Something which is so small, but useful. And that allows me to keep up my flow of ideas. I have one every day of the week. Exactly.

Cool. Well, let's start there. Jan, give us a sense of your story. How did you get into the world of slide design?

It goes a long way back. So originally I'm a computer science engineer. That's my background. And I spent these first 10 formative years of my career at a big consulting firm called McKinsey, where I was a strategy consultant, basically advising CEOs of big companies on strategy. And my career within McKinsey was a bit of an unusual one, since usually people stay very short at a firm like McKinsey, 2 years, and usually they sort of specialize in one in a particular field, one sector, one industry sector. I stayed a long time, 10 years in Amsterdam and London offices and specialized in a functional way in M&A. So basically I helped sell big companies to other big companies. And in that process I had to explain basically to CEOs of other companies why this particular company was such a good deal to buy, why there were strategic synergies. And why was this a great opportunity? So I did not know then that now fast forward 10, 15 years later, this skill would become very, very useful, just coming into a new sector every time and having to understand it and having to explain to someone else why this business opportunity is such a good thing. So I left McKinsey in 2002, 2003, moved from London to Israel. My wife is Israeli. And here I started off initially doing independent consulting projects in my own own firm, one-man firm, I got in touch with the high-tech sector here in Israel. It's very, very strong. It's one of the biggest high-tech centers in the world after Silicon Valley, Boston, New York, Tel Aviv. And these people looked at me and said, "Well, you're a really bright person, but we really don't need 6 months of a bright person. And by the way, we also can't pay for it. We don't have the budget for it. But your charts, they look very professional." And at this stage, this was just left McKinsey. These were your typical sort of consulting slides. Like incredibly analytical, organized, professional, but also incredibly boring. But the tech companies were impressed by them and said, "We need these type of presentations to help us raise money from investors. We need a serious story to pitch ourselves to investors." So this is how it started in Israel, 2003, 2004, that I started bit by bit to teach myself design. I'm taking these McKinsey slides, diluting them, taking content out, adding pictures, color pictures, adding color, use color in PowerPoint. This is like early 2000s. And bit by bit by bit, I focused on this type of work. So making investor presentations. So the consulting work dropped altogether. And from the Israeli startups came the Israeli venture capitalists themselves who needed to raise money themselves as well from big institutional investors. Started writing my blog, got some international reputation, and now fast-forwarding, my design work is mainly for clients in the US, not so much in Israel, and it covers startups, institutional investors, but also large Fortune 500 companies that need to present to the stock market as their quarterly results finance. So long story, to make it short, you sort of drop a McKinsey consultant who doesn't speak Hebrew in a place like Tel Aviv, you get a bit of an unusual career pattern. So 10-year McKinsey guy spending his time doing PowerPoint which is strange, but which allows me to create this very, very focused micro brand of someone with a very strong business background who taught himself design. It's an unusual combination of skills. It allows me to be useful in very specific type of presentations or heavy on business content on science, but with big stakes like raising money, communicating to the investor community, important ones with lots of information and data and complex technology. Inside them. And that's how I built my sort of reputation, so on the bespoke presentation design side. And as you mentioned, the other— in my spare time, I'm bootstrapping my own startup to make an alternative to PowerPoint as a sort of a presentation design tool in which I sort of embed all these things that I've learned along the way the past 20 years in presentation design, basically trying to automate myself away. In terms of experimenting and iterating that product. So that's the long background.

I love it.

Yeah.

Well, it's, it's a service industry, what you're doing. It's so important because I see time and time again, most people do their slides poorly. And especially when you're working with numbers and data. And I mean, in the world that you're in, I'm just like, "Oh my gosh, I have no idea what's important in this." And so, I really appreciate that you are trying to work yourself out of a gig and make it accessible for everybody because we have to change the approach. Even though we've been talking about slides and slide design, I feel like the conversation has shifted. For 10 years we've been talking about getting more visual and, you know, making, making your slides about your point and not, not having it be your notes and etc., etc. I feel like we've been talking about these things for a long time, but why, why isn't it catching on? Like, what are you seeing out in the world? What is the problem? Why, why is it so challenging? Yeah.

There's, I think, a difference between the documents people use in their day-to-day work internally. So people use PowerPoint or presentation tool both as a tool to just dump in their budget, their quick meeting that they have in an hour, their plans that are used for day-to-day management, or their conclusions of their projects to an audience that's in the know versus a presentation that's much more important that goes to the outside world, maybe with people in the audience that don't know the company that well, and they simply don't make take that step. So in McKinsey, like a project ends, the recommendations come out and people use that same sort of presentation to communicate to outside audiences. And it's actually another step that is required. You did the hard work, you structured the problem, you did the analysis, you solved the problem, you got to the answer. But now how do I communicate that answer and how do I motivate people to do something with it is another step that people simply don't take. So the financial results come out, they need to go out to the market in 2 days, so we just use the, let's say, the Excel slides of the accountant and present them to an audience that basically is not ready for them because they don't have the context that is required to understand them. Okay.

So walk us through, I mean, PowerPoint is still the design presentation of, for most people. Uh, and I work with a lot of clients who use PowerPoint and it's a powerful tool. I'm sure, as you know. But it can be overwhelming and hard to navigate sometimes. So what have you done, like walk me through what you've done with SlideMagic in order to take like the best of PowerPoint and make it easy and accessible for people.

Yeah, so I think PowerPoint is, is, is too powerful. Its origins actually go back, I think, in the 1980s when the first mouse-based drawing software started appearing on the market and It allows you to do too many things if you're not a designer. You're allowed to pick any color, any font, put objects of any size anywhere on the page.

Make things thin, make them sparkle.

Exactly.

Make it like—

That as well. Add effects as well. And so if you're not a designer, you can't handle this sugar rush of features and things you can do to your slide to make it prettier. And I think the case is to— so there's two reactions to that. You see incredibly ugly compositions by amateur designers, but most common reaction is that these features and this freedom is so frightening that people fall back to one methodology that they know, which is a list of bullets. So we don't even get into it. We write down the bullets, my speaker notes, put them on the slide, and we don't get further. So the program PowerPoint allows you, gives you too much choice, too much freedom to do things. And the thought behind SlideMatic was to cut all that freedom away, to put things in a very rigorous grid structure, limited colors, only one, fonts, basic, basic, basic. But on the flip side is that whatever you do in a Vizzaslide, more or less looks pretty okay. Probably not if you hired the bespoke presentation designer from Tel Aviv just for your projects, but maybe 60%, 70%, 80% of the way slides will look good since you're sort of bound by— you have to line things up, things have to spread out over the page, the color looks consistent. It gives a very good framework to make your slides. And the objective is to just save yourself a lot, a lot of time. So people are struggling, fighting with software in corporates, trying to make presentations, wasting a lot of time battling software rather than— it's actually much easier to communicate your idea in a very, very simple way in slides that look pretty decent and sort of get on with things rather than spend your time at a PowerPoint screen.

So what, based on what you've seen and your experience as you've worked with people, And we've kind of talked around this a little bit, but boil down for us, what are the biggest mistakes that you see people making in their slide design?

I think it's the overloading things with content, putting too much content on one slide to try and keep— people want to be brief. So I want to give a really short and to-the-point presentation. And the answer to that is to just take one slide and add all your points, all your content on it. So it's a very short presentation, just one page, but that page will take 10 minutes to present and looks visually very, very unappealing. I think that's the key mistake that people make. So that's very important, too much content on the slide. The other one is that people don't really think in terms of layout, and can be even very simple one of a slide. So people are stuck to the lists of points, but they don't translate their big thought they have in a very visual composition. So if you talk about a contrast, so a contrast is about something on the left and the right. If you talk about a trend, it goes an arrow from something that was to where you're heading. A comparison is a list of numbers or bars that shows that one is bigger than the other. So people use grammar, use words that show a certain action. But they don't translate that action into a good composition. They fail to pick the right composition that fits a certain concept that they're talking about. And if you add these two things together, you're pretty much set up for poor-looking slides.

Yeah, those two are the biggest, aren't they?

Yeah, exactly.

Information overload. Okay, and your expertise being pitches, I think is particularly interesting, investor pitches. Because they're a very specific kind of presentation. So can you talk a little bit about what makes them unique? As, you know, as somebody who, you know, if you're creating the slide deck and the design for these investor pitches, you're also thinking about content and flow. So what about them are specific and special and make them a particular challenge for people.

Yeah. So it's a bit different. You have this very busy and cynical and reasonably smart audience. So this is not a tech talk where people sit back and say, like, wow, excite me, surprise me. I want to be moved. I'm ready for it. I'm really like, wow, what a great person is there. People are busy and they're thinking in their minds, An investor goes through a number of stages. First of all, they need to figure out who you are and what is it actually that you want, what is your idea, the description. Many, many startups fail to explain very simply upfront what it basically is, what they're actually doing. They're starting spending a lot of time on trends in the market and online video will be big and social is amazing, and they keep on letting the audience guess that what What do these people want to do? So it's like something very simple upfront to just explain your idea. And then there's a certain hierarchy of obvious questions that an investor would have. So if you show up and you look like a person, you're 20, the big question the investor will have, well, this girl, she looks 20, she cannot run a company. So there's these elephants in the room or you pitch a product that's all about search in the internet, people are like, wait a minute, Google already did this 10 years ago. So there's a certain flow in the mind of the investor that they sort of tick off big questions and go on to smaller, to smaller, to smaller. And you need to anticipate that flow of questions that a seasoned investor might have when hearing your pitch. So the investor has no time, knows a bit about the industry, doesn't understand certain things, but how do you spoon-feed them the idea and how do you keep them excited? And that might, that story flow might be very different from the typical investor pitch presentation that you can Google. Like you say, what's the problem, what's the solution, what's the market, what's the competition? It's a very boring, rigid structure that might not fit your particular opportunity. So it's actually trying to— so my expertise in this, the strongest one is actually my McKinsey background. I've seen many, many businesses, many companies to actually start asking the stupid questions. Poking and trying to find out this particular case has some particular questions that people might not know about and to try and lay out that flow and keep it interesting and exciting and basically throw away that classical business school investor pitch structure but make it very specific and keep the momentum like you, oh, you answer the question, next one, next one, next one, next one, and you keep people excited. For 15 minutes, which will build up the momentum. And that's the key point of an investor presentation. An impatient audience that doesn't have to listen to you, it's not bound sitting in a TEDx audience, it can walk out, it can cut you off, it can close the meeting, but to keep them interested. And then realizing that every presentation, the investor pitch is not, the objective is not to land the investments, but is to get you one step further in a very long process. So you meet someone at a conference, you need to talk 30-second elevator pitch, it sounds a bit cliché, then maybe a 15-minute phone call, then maybe a half an hour coffee chat, then maybe a 1-hour investor partner group presentation. So there's different stages in this process that require a slight tweak of the content, and so every time you go to a next stage, to a next stage, to a next stage. To get a sense of where you are and what sort of slides you need, and the slides will change as you go through that process. So I do the opposite as an investor. An investor is trying to shoot an opportunity down. I try to build the opportunity up. But it's basically the same skill. My brain sort of works the same as an investor but with the opposite objective, I would say.

Hmm, interesting. Okay, cool. Do you ever watch Shark Tank?

No, I heard about the— I heard about the— it's not here on television here in Israel, but it's probably similar, like these television shows where like, yeah, exactly. You could probably to the extreme, but exactly. Yeah. Some, some side of process like that. Yeah.

Well, it's really interesting to me because I've worked with entrepreneurs and helped them sort of develop their story and their messages. But these pitches on the show are of a really particular type that can be kind of cheesy and, you know, it's for television. So, I just wanted to pick your brain about how similar or different they might be to an actual investor pitch.

So, the difference is I do work, for example, for investor pitch competitions where you have a big audience and the pitches are shorter. And there, to win over an audience in a pitch competition is a bit different than to land you the investment. So these things, you design them to the crowd. You get a sense of energy through the crowd. Well, this is an amazing opportunity. We found a cure for cancer. This can do great things for the world. This is amazing. The guy looks interesting, like he has this very bright red shirt on, this crazy story versus If you pitch that same cancer drug to a professional healthcare investor, he will dive straight into the clinical trial results and talk about the standard deviation of the result and whether the drug actually works or not. But that is not going to excite the television audience or the pitch competition audience. So you change the balance depending on the audience, also how much time you have. Pitch competition is very short, 6 minutes, 5 minutes, and you have an hour in terms of a very serious professional investor.

Mm, okay, interesting. Fun. All right, well, Jan, we have come to the part of the show where I— we both will share a "this moved me" moment. Something that has moved you recently that you would like to share with other people, because I think as people who are creating messages and whether you are behind the scenes like you are coaching and helping people develop their content content and design their slides, or you are out there speaking, we really have to be in touch with what is moving us so that we can really understand what impacts an audience. So I'll give you a second to think about what you want to share, and I'll start. I have been— I'm so late to this, but I've been so into the musical Hamilton. Have you heard about Hamilton?

Yeah, I heard about it. Yeah, exactly. My wife is at the moment in the States watching it for the second time.

Oh really?

Yeah.

Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, I, I live in Minnesota, so I think it just recently came to Chicago, is probably the closest it is right now. Um, but I, I'm not a history person necessarily, and I'm not even a musical and necessarily, but although I love music, there was something about this combination of how Lin-Manuel, the creator, pushed the art form in a new way, which I think is really powerful. And the story is so compelling. I like, all of a sudden, I'm super into the United States kind of revolution story in a way that I never have been before. Like, I went and watched the John Adams documentary on HBO— not the documentary, the series on HBO. Like, this is, this is not an area that I would necessarily have ever been drawn to. So the fact that I am, I think, speaks volumes about the power of art, especially art that is pushing itself And really intentionally trying to do something new, um, and like mashing up rap with this historical story, I think is, is fascinating and awesome.

Okay, okay, good, good. Yeah, how about you? Yeah, it's slightly different, a very personal one. Um, so it's a bit tragic My wife's brother passed away a couple of years ago and we have every year memorial services that we do here in Israel. And so the last one, which was number 5 or 6, we had the ceremony and all the procedures and everything everyone did, and the speeches, and all of a sudden my daughter stands up out of nothing and points up and raises her hand and says, "I want to say something." And without any preparation, nothing, She stood up there, framed the whole thing, gave a very personal note, and sat down. And it was like this whole ceremony took 30 minutes, but that 30 seconds of she stood up there confidently, sharing on the fly a very, very personal memory, and sitting down composed, and it just boom, you could hear it influenced the entire audience. Spontaneity, like having an idea and just standing up there. I was like in complete surprise hearing her presenting in that way, speaking from the heart without any fear, which impressed me a lot and moved me a lot, I must say. So it's something I did not expect at all to be able to do that, which was a special moment for me.

I think any time I have 3 kids and any time I watch them step out into the world in a way that they haven't before, I— it also moves me so much. I just think, oh my gosh, look at you.

Exactly.

Look what you're doing. And to be able to speak, I think, is an added layer of impressiveness because so many people find just think all these wonderful things, but to actually stand up and say something is a risk. And to do it— so it sounds like she was very eloquent.

And yeah, and then like, it almost feels like before the education system changes it, in a sense. Like when she's 12 now, when you go through school and people learn how to present and make speeches, I think some of that spontaneity goes away in a sense. Like we, we, you teach them how to speak, and I think in that process Uh, we lose a lot that when a child just stands up in front of a big audience and say what she thinks, uh, is, uh, I think you should try and preserve that. And often in my clients, I try to go back to that, um, that spontaneous first, um, pitch that people give me and try and, uh, preserve it. Yeah.

Mm. I love that.

Yeah.

You know, it's funny. A lot of the clients I've been working with recently have all been struggling with the idea of being able to speak on the fly and feel like their thoughts are put together and they can be concise in that moment. They don't trust themselves to do that, probably because they don't do it very often. Because I think you only get good at that by putting yourself in that situation again and again and again.

Don't you think? That's correct. Yeah, that's correct. So when it's a lower setting, in a sense, like in my work, so you meet the client for the first time, you throw the— or give me the pitch, run it by me. Yeah, it doesn't come out perfect, but it— the story in its raw form is there. And as soon as there's pressure, so people get nervous, they feel like they have to hold on to something, and they lose that ability to just say it as they should say it. And you're right, practice, practice, practice. The slides are a framework in which you can hang on to. If they're good slides, they work. And the best speakers don't need them after a while when they're sort of confident enough to just talk about it. You need to rehearse, rehearse, rehearse in order to be spontaneous. That's true.

Great. Well, Jan, this has been really fun, and it's so great to talk with you after having read your blog for years. So thanks so much for joining me. Good to meet you.

Exactly, exactly. It's a great time.

Thank you very much for inviting me. Yeah.

All right.

Thanks so much for joining me today on the show and listening in here with Jan. And I hope that you got some good stuff from that conversation. I know I did. Some great reminders. For all of us as we are out doing the work of creating talks that move the world, which brings me to what I want to talk with you about now. I mentioned at the beginning of the show I'm doing this, piloting this new program called Quick Coaching, and it's a few, gosh, I hope not that long from really being ready to be public, but I want to know if you're interested in doing this. Here's what I'm doing, the Quick Coaching. You send me your talk. In like video form, maybe you've got a link to something that's already out there, maybe you videotape yourself, and I spend an hour or two looking at it, writing up some notes, and I send you a short video of feedback for you. Really, I hope, it's just like chock-full of value for you because my belief is that we all need a coach. Everybody needs a coach. I don't care how experienced you are, this work, we can't always see ourselves well. Even when we get feedback from our audiences, wow, there's a lot of filtering that has to be done in that. And so you want to find somebody that you trust, that you know really gets you and sees you and sees what you can be doing and really sees how you can improve. And that is my gift, and I'm just gonna say that. I, it It's— I think part of the reason I'm on this earth is to help people really communicate more authentically and more courageously and more clearly. And so this is my way of trying to work with more people and be more helpful to more people because a lot of the times in my coaching I'm working with people for weeks or months on end and that's a real investment of time and money and space in our lives. And so that's not for everybody, and yet most of us who are out there doing the work just want like sometimes just a little redirect or a mirror, a clear mirror to help us shift and get better, because this process, as we all know, is iterative. It is never done. So we want somebody along the road with us who can help us in that process. So that's what I want to do. Um, there's gonna be— I'm gonna share more info as it comes out more clearly, but if this is something that you are interested in, let me know. I'm gonna have a limited number of spots a month because it's just me and there's only so much of me. But so I want to know if you're interested, and I— so I have a sense of what the demand might be and how much room I should be making in my calendar and my life for this. I'm super excited about it. More info coming, but if you're interested, send me a quick— shoot me a quick email, sally@thismovedme.com, or, you know, shout out on Twitter or Facebook or whatever. You can find me in all those places. I'm here, I'm listening. Can't wait. Okay, super pumped. Thanks so much to Jan, really loved that conversation, and all of you for coming along, and my best wishes to you as you are out there creating talks that move this world. Duh! Duh!

Du-duh!