Conference Leaders

"When I'm in the venture capital business, this rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc."  - Guy Kawasaki, Venture Capitalist

Let's face it -  it doesn't matter if you're presenting to an English major, Donald Trump, or even the U.S. President; everyone's attention span is getting shorter by the day. With this in mind, it's important to recognize and employ some general guidelines in order to make your next pitch using PowerPoint successful.

It's called the 10/20/30 rule. So how does it work? 

It's rather simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have TEN slides, go on for 20 MINUTES, and NOT contain FONTS smaller than 30 POINTS.

You must be wondering why you have to follow these new gosh-darn rules in order to be on your A-Game. Well, here's the deal...

Ten is the optimal number of slides in a Powerpoint presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting.

Next, you should give your ten slides over the span of about twenty minutes. You may have arranged an hour for this whole thing, but did you know about the 11 year-old projector which you have to learn how to use? How about time for late arrivers, early leavers, and of course, discussion? Twenty minutes is indeed the best.

Finally, let's talk about the big font. Are you clinching at the fact that 30-Point-Plus font might make your beautiful ten-slide creation look tacky? Let's read between the lines as to why you should follow this rule.

The majority of presentations out there have text in a ten point font. When a plethora of unnecessary text is jammed into a single slide, the presenter tends to read it word-for-word. Any successful presenter knows you don't read a PowerPoint word-for-word! What ends up happening with word-jambelayas is that the audience reads ahead of the presenter, and the presenter falls further and further behind the audience instead of leading them, as he should.

There's a two-fold reason people use small fonts. First, they dont' know their material well enough; second, they think that more text is more convincing. Using larger fonts is better because it causes you to put the spotlight on the more important points, allowing the audience to come to the more obvious points on their own.

If you want to be successful in your pitch (whatever it may me) I recommend you use the 10/20/30 rule, no matter how smart or spacey you think your audience may be.