Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to the Unscripted podcast. I'm Daniel Hill, and today on the show we have Orit Kaufman. Orit, welcome, welcome.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Daniel.
[00:00:09] Speaker A: Orit, for people who might not be familiar with you, can you tell us who you are and what it is that you do?
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Yep. I'm Orit Kaufman. I'm out of Chicago, and I'm a freelance PowerPoint designer. So I think we've all seen presentations that you just fall asleep at or you're just overwhelmed at. Right when the. The speaker starts, you know that first slide comes up and you're like, oh, no, this is going to be a long presentation. So I help companies take complex information and drill it down to real simple messaging, and I pair it with great visuals to tell that story in a visual format. So I make those amazing presentations. You see that audience members are just like, wow, I get it. I know what you want to say and I know what I need to do at the end.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: I love that. Can you tell us the name of your company and how you chose that name?
[00:00:59] Speaker B: Sure. So the company is called OC Presentation Design. So my initials are okay. And I was very conscious of not naming it okay Presentation Design, because really, who would hire someone that just does okay design.
So I was very conscious that, you know, when I got married, my mother reminded me to make sure people knew that was my initials. And I wasn't authorizing things as okay, even with my kids homework.
So I just chose C as my middle name. So as my middle initial. So it's OC Presentation Designs.
[00:01:32] Speaker A: And how did you get into creating presentations for other people?
[00:01:36] Speaker B: So I've spent 20 years in corporate doing training and development. And one way or another, especially the last six years, I worked primarily in PowerPoint. We did creating training. It was a sales organization. So when you're creating training for sellers, it's got to be engaging. The information's got to be short and quick and straight to the point.
So I designed a lot of training in PowerPoint, and my skill set of being able to cut down on the clutter came from the approach of what is the least amount of information that sellers need to know before they go in and have that conversation with a customer? So I used to call it parking lot training that at the very least, if they're sitting in a parking lot, what do they need to know? So that really helped me kind of shape the communication piece to make it simple and understandable and, you know, they can absorb it and get what they need to know to have that conversation.
And I just always enjoyed the design piece. And when I left that company, I didn't even know this was an industry till about two, three years ago.
And I remember saying to my husband, I would just love to make PowerPoints all day.
And my niece Googled it and found a whole community of designers that are out there. And I set up a company and I started pursuing this. And I'm not a graphic designer or website designer or any type of marketing. I solely do PowerPoint presentations because it's the most universal and it's the most adaptable. And everybody uses PowerPoint one way or another.
And that way, by specializing, I've become an expert in that field. I don't stretch myself too thin. I've become an expert and I've seen all the problems that we hate with PowerPoint. I've sat through the same boring presentations. And so my experience has allowed me to kind of shape and create that vision and how to fix those problems. And that's what I do for companies.
[00:03:27] Speaker A: I love all of this. I have a few questions. Some of them are, I'll say, pet peeves about people who make specific PowerPoint presentations that I don't like. Is there an ideal number of slides that you use to tell a story? Because my thought is less is always going to be better. When I see someone open up their deck and it's 50 slides inside, I start cringing. But I've seen where people roll in with one slide, and I think, wow, did you prepare this or what? So what's kind of the sweet spot that you see for a number of slides?
[00:04:01] Speaker B: So it obviously depends on the topic and the audience.
You know, you can have a keynote that is five slides. You can have a sales call that is 140 slides, but that's appropriate for that medium.
I agree with you that when someone opens up a PowerPoint, my eyes immediately go to the lower left corner where you can see how many slides there are. And that will determine my attention span or not?
[00:04:21] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:04:22] Speaker B: For pitch decks, it typically is about 10 to 15 slides. For a pitch deck, you know, you're talking to investors and they also don't want to. They just want to know the basics. What is the problem? What is the solution? How are you fixing it? What's your market? You know, So I would limit that to 10 to 15 slides.
Less is always tends to be better, as you said, but it really depends on the audience and how you decide to tell that story. You could at the same time have 30 slides, and it's the Most amazing, compelling presentation because of what you chose to put on those slides.
So that is my initial reaction when I open it up. But I also give benefit of the doubt to people to say, let's see how they did it.
[00:05:03] Speaker A: That makes sense. Where are you on text animations? Where the text slides in or slides up. I feel like that was so cool back in the day and now it just looks a little bit dated. What are your thoughts?
[00:05:14] Speaker B: Yeah, it's kind of when you buy a new car, you want to get in. I do this and I press all the buttons and I want to see what everything does. So I think a lot of people sometimes still do that with PowerPoint is you have to do it selectively. I tend personally not to do text animation, but any type of animation really has to be done well and professional and effectively. So it's to help enhance your story. It's not the story itself. It's not a show and tell of all the different functions and features that PowerPoint can do. Now, I would say the same thing with transitions. You have to transition minimally and effectively.
You know, the days of using the curtain transition, where the text disappears like a show. Save that for the high school presentations, you know.
[00:05:59] Speaker A: Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. It's got a place, and sparingly, it sounds like it's going to be the way to go.
[00:06:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:06:06] Speaker A: One of the things that I know you mentioned is that you work with a variety of different kinds of companies and verticals. Can you talk a little bit about that?
[00:06:15] Speaker B: Yeah. When I first started, I thought, well, I'm going to pick an industry that I'm going to stick well with. And I came from industrial manufacturing. I thought, well, that's where I'll start. But really it's become through my outreach and clients that come to me across all different verticals. So I've done some manufacturing, I've done food and beverage, I've done healthcare, I've done startup.
The messaging, the way you craft a message, really, unless it's like a specific niche, the design and the storytelling that you bring, the presentation, really the principles of that are the same, no matter the industry.
So, yes, you need to know your audience and how they process information. So if you're speaking to engineers, that's a very different audience than if you're speaking to investors.
So my ability to customize that message. But the principles of storytelling essentially are the same, no matter the industry.
[00:07:06] Speaker A: Can you tell us a little bit more about those principles of storytelling?
[00:07:10] Speaker B: So I always think about it as, you know, it's an arc. So even if you're telling an oral story or a visual story, it's how you set the stage, how you prepare like a background and a context and how you present challenges or the peak of a story and overcoming those challenges or the solutions that you bring and then ending it with really kind of pulling it all together to say, you know, here's how we solve those problems, here's how we present as a company, here's how we can help you, and here's what you're going to get out of it.
I always start with clients and say to them, what is your desired outcome at the end of this presentation? What behavior do you want to change? What do you want your audience to know or do? And then we work backwards from there. So depending on what those outcomes are, it's setting the stage, reaching that peak of the problem solving piece, and the call to action is at the end.
So they really understand from a flow perspective where you started and where you need them to go. And that's what I help clients do. I transform their messaging from. I ask them, where's your audience now and where do you want them to be with those desired outcomes? And then I take them through that journey to get them to the end.
[00:08:21] Speaker A: That's actually kind of the opposite way I would have thought about it. And I think that's just because my brain works with. When I'm reading a book, you start at the beginning, the hero is by themselves, or something happens, and now they're in a bad situation. How are they going to get out of it and what happens next and what happens next? But you're starting with the end and saying, okay, where do we want to arrive at now? How are we going to get there? And I think that's really smart because it shows that you have to have the outcome in mind. You have to know where this is going. You don't just figure it out on slide number 18. And then we hit them with the link to the website where they could buy.
Have we been building to that all along? And if so, how did we ensure that that's the. What we actually want them to do in a way that makes sense for the person watching or listening or whatever. So I actually really like that approach.
[00:09:08] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you. And my, my background in training and development really crystallized that for me. So when you're creating a training curriculum, you want to know, what are the objectives? What are we trying to accomplish with this training? So, same philosophy when it comes to presentations. What are the desired outcomes at the end and how do we help you get there through those.
[00:09:27] Speaker A: Interesting. Now what if someone says, oh, we would love to work with you, but we've already got a marketing company. We've already got a branding company. Do you mind sharing what kind of brings your unique approach to specifically doing this that other agencies might not specifically have?
[00:09:45] Speaker B: Yeah, I find a lot of times I reach out to marketing companies and part of my pitch is if it's not already part of your marketing workspace. So marketing is a great department, obviously when it comes to branding and getting ads and the websites. But you'd be surprised at how often this specific skill set most marketing departments don't have. I've worked with VPs of marketing where they're, like I said, the other aspects of marketing are phenomenal. But then I looked at their PowerPoint and it was from the 90s. So it's just not a skill set that every marketing department has and I can come in and fill that kind of crack in that marketing space.
[00:10:22] Speaker A: That makes complete sense. If you haven't had tons of experience doing this or you're a company that says, okay, well we're going to invest in the conference, we're going to get a really good booth and a really good banner and all that. But skimping on the presentation part, that's actually going to draw people who want to know what you do and meet you personally. That makes a lot of sense.
[00:10:41] Speaker B: Yeah. And you'd be surprised how many company overviews that I do with marketing departments. It's just something that either they don't think about, they don't get to. You know, a lot of clients hire me because for several reasons. Either they've got somebody that does this, but they just don't have the time and they need to save their resources to do other things.
Or it could be, you know, deadline panic, or it's just not a skill set that they have, or they just know it's okay, but needs to be better and they need to. Wow. So again, it's more often than not not a skill set in most marketing departments.
[00:11:17] Speaker A: I'm curious how you see AI impacting both your role and presentations and sales in the future. Can you talk a little bit about that?
[00:11:26] Speaker B: Yeah. It's a hot topic as we all are experiencing. So there's a lot of sites out there and I think AI might be a good starting tool for small local internal projects. But I think you need a presentation expert when it comes to large scale projects and more complex ones. Because what AI can't do, at least for now, is that you always need that human critical thinking aspect for decision making and to understand your audience and understand how your message will land with an audience. As we talked about earlier, the principles of storytelling might be the same, but your audience has different needs.
So that ability to make decisions, change decisions, adapt it to your audience. That human critical thinking element, I think right now will not be replaced by AI and certainly if somebody. I mean, I'd be surprised if somebody wants to spend time on AI creating 100 slide deck. At that point, after 2, 3 hours, they might just say, forget this.
You know, those large projects.
So I think for small ones, it's a good start. You know, if you're just dabbling your fingers in presentation and you certainly don't have time or the resources to pay an expert, you know, I think it's a good start. But once you start getting to more complex ideas and company presentations, I find that most people turn to an expert and want that human, that human element into it.
[00:12:43] Speaker A: I understand that. Do you mind talking about some success stories that you've had from clients or presentations that you've worked on that you're very proud of?
[00:12:52] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So last Thanksgiving, I usually source a lot of my clients through LinkedIn and I have a services page. And around Thanksgiving, somebody reached out to me that five days later, who's going to be a keynote speaker at a. At a conference in California, and she didn't have a deck. Now, as a presentation designer, what got me excited was that I had free creative reins with colors design.
Her only instructions were, it's about AI and I want it bold and I want it great. I want it like big and bold, and it's got to be better than the other person's keynote speaker. So obviously I didn't see the other person's, but I know she was one wanted to make it better, and I got really excited. Yeah. Now let me ask you, Daniel, if you were going to be speaking on stage in five days, how far in advance would you prepare for?
[00:13:40] Speaker A: I would say I would prepare two months so that I could really give myself six weeks. I'd prepare it in two to three weeks, and then I'd spend the next two to three weeks practicing it. So I knew it cold, backward, forward. My family would be tired of hearing me practice it. That's just my personal approach.
[00:13:56] Speaker B: Right. If you had a deck. But it was one of those old 90s decks, and she was a wonderful person to work with. And I said, okay, if you're speaking in Five days.
That means you need at least a day to practice it. So that gives me four days. And it was. I think it was the weekend. And so I wanted to get it to her, obviously, as soon as possible.
So it was AI, which is a fun topic to kind of find photos about. And I had free range with colors, like I said.
And within 48 hours, I delivered a deck to her with maybe one or two comments.
And she had the confidence to get up there and speak and make herself look good in the organization that she was speaking for. Look good. And it was a great success story and a quick turnaround time.
And there's an aspect of doing keynotes on a large stage that are different than webinars. You need to think about how the imagery and the colors, how they portray in a large screen. If it's a light room, if it's a dark room, there's different considerations when it's on that size of a string.
But it was fun. It was great, and she was happy, and it just came to me totally random.
And so she did a great job.
[00:15:00] Speaker A: That's a really great story. And I think it speaks to your ability to quickly focus down. Right. Like, you didn't take three months to come up with an idea or anything like that. Like, you literally just, okay, what do we have to do? What's the deadline? Let's work toward it.
[00:15:13] Speaker B: So I love that. Well, thank you. He also had about 30. 30 slides and only 30 minutes to talk. So now we typically say one slide per two minutes per slide. But then she wanted to do activities also. And I was like, from a keynote perspective, this is not a time for activities. A lot of her slides were very complex, like something they would go in an appendix. So I was able to make recommendations as well, from my experience and training to say no activities, no interaction with the audience. Right now, in 30 minutes, if you want to focus on your message and, you know, these other slides really should go in appendix for the audience later. Here are your most effective 15 to 16 slides with two minutes each that will fit within 30 minutes that will give your message a wow and a bang. So I was able to help her with my, you know, to understand what's the critical messaging that you can deliver in 30 minutes. Not to overload it, because the worst thing is keynote speaker gets up there and she doesn't get to finish her message. She runs out of time.
[00:16:11] Speaker A: Right, Right.
[00:16:12] Speaker B: So I'm helping her prepare to give her best presentation possible.
[00:16:16] Speaker A: Do you find that people, when they have you prepare their Presentations, they want to read the slides. They want to be able to reference those in case of panic. And how do you kind of handle that?
[00:16:25] Speaker B: So there's always speaker notes. Love speaker notes.
I've recommended to people in large calls with an audience, you know, have a teleprompter that you can see your speaker notes and speak along with, but nobody should be reading off the slide.
You know, I think we've all been there and said, you know what, just send it to me in an email. If you're going to read it off the slide, just send it to me.
[00:16:48] Speaker A: I've been on webinars where you can see the person is sharing their screen and the notes and you can see what they're reading. And it's. Yeah, it's a really bad experience. Just like you said. This could have been an email. Just send me the email. I'll take a quick look.
[00:16:59] Speaker B: You're wasting everybody's time. You're wasting everybody's time. You know, and talking about wasting people's time, I always say that, you know, your audience has three to five seconds to focus to read one slide.
What is your message in three to five seconds? So, you know, I've said before, like, if you have numbers or charts on your screen, don't. And it's like two thirds, don't make me do math. Just say 66%. Because now you, you've taken up brain space in those three to five seconds that I have to convert that number to a percentage to resonate. And that's now all I'm thinking about in three to five seconds instead of your message.
So, you know, I love to say don't. Don't make me do math.
[00:17:38] Speaker A: Yes, yes, I love that. Do you have any pet peeves of PowerPoints presentations in general?
[00:17:47] Speaker B: I think they're probably what everybody's pet peeves with. Although as a perfectionist, it's probably more. But, you know, I think bullets, Bullets, bullets. There should be no bullets.
[00:17:59] Speaker A: Okay, as someone who has been using bullets, what should we be using instead of.
[00:18:04] Speaker B: So first of all, you need to, with my word dieting approach, really look at, to see what are the keywords and pull out those keywords from the bullet.
Listen, sometimes you're going to end up with bullets. That's just a reality. But what are the keywords? Can you represent those as icons? Can you represent them in a different visual way?
Whether it's different spacing, whether it's animation? But as soon as we've all been conditioned to kind of zone out, as soon as we see bullets. And I think the common pet peeves of just too much information, whether it's carts and tables on the same page, whether it's carts with a lot of irrelevant information where you just are like, just tell me the key data. Is it. One third of people hate reading PowerPoints. Just say that, you know.
So it's just too much information. Everybody loading everything because they don't want to have more slides because they're more concerned with kind of what we said earlier is that, oh, I don't want people to think as soon as they open the deck that it's 45 slides. Slides. Yeah. But I'd rather 45 slides of well made presentation than 10 slides of jam packed three to five seconds. I don't know what you're talking about or where my eyes could go. And now you've lost me from slide one.
So it's just people thinking, throw the kitchen sink on there.
Outdated photos. Also pet peeve. No more photos from the 80s or 90s. There's certain photos we all use that we've all seen. Just be smart about the photos.
And that's kind of why you hire a professional to really understand what's current, what's relevant, what's at a good balance, good balance of information storytelling and how to really tell that story well.
[00:19:41] Speaker A: I love all of that. Areit. This has been great having you on. Can you tell us where we can find you online and what we can look forward to you creating in the near future?
[00:19:49] Speaker B: So my website's ocdesigns.info and you can see my portfolio and some client success stories.
And there's a page there also called Word dieting that I've been talking about a little bit about. And there's a downloadable PDF with some best practices of how you can start to word diet your own work with some examples and really it helps communications all over. I look forward in the future to. I'd like to host a masterclass on Word dieting and take audience members through some examples and how to do that in your own work. So that is currently in the works.
[00:20:21] Speaker A: We will link to your website in the show notes so that people can get there directly and find the PDF that you mentioned about the word dieting.
[00:20:28] Speaker B: Great.
[00:20:29] Speaker A: Ori, this has been fantastic having you all. Thank you so much for your time.
[00:20:32] Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me, Daniel. It was a pleasure.
