Want a great deck? Close your PowerPoint

Close the deck now. Thank me later.

‍

You’ve been staring at Slide 7 for three hours. By now, you’re convinced it’s the problem.

It’s not.

The average investor spends 2.5 minutes on your entire deck. Not per section. Not per slide. The whole thing.

And that’s probably the best case.

We spent the last two issues talking about how to make the most of this attention span with a great hook: how to open a loop and make people desperately want to close it.

Here’s the thing no one tells you, though: If you haven’t done the thinking before you open the deck and start making slides, no hook is going to save you.

Because in that small window, they aren’t evaluating your design choices or your font size.

They just want the answer to one question: Is this story worth caring about?

Too many decks miss that. The business might be great, but the story is buried because the founder never did the deep work to uncover it.

The hard truth is you’re often too close to your own company to see it clearly. You know every detail, every nuance, every caveat. Your brain fills in gaps you don’t even realize you’re leaving.

You think you’re being clear.

You’re not.

The other day I talked to a founder whose deck morphed into an incoherent 30 page monster. They bemoaned that every time they asked an advisor for feedback, they ended up adding a new page.

This happens when the story isn’t clear and people want to help you fix it but they don’t know how. So it becomes a bloated mess.

So before you touch the deck again, try this.

The blank page test.

Close the deck.

Open a blank document.

Now write 10 to 12 single sentence headlines for your pitch – one per slide, roughly.

Each one should be a single sentence with the “so what” already built in. Don’t think of them as labels or categories. They’re points of view.

Here’s what that looks like:

“There are 800,000 unfilled nursing positions in the U.S. -- and the average hospital spends $7M a year on agency staff to cover the gap.”

“The average restaurant loses 30% of its revenue to food waste, and most owners don’t find out until the end of the quarter.”

Each of those tells you something before you’ve had to ask. They make you feel the problem without explaining it to death.

The real test is: Can you write 10 of those sentences? And do they flow logically from one to the next?

If yes, you have a story. Then slides become the easy part. They almost write themselves from there.

If no, then you have your real problem. Stop obsessing over Slide 7 and craft a story.

Turn off the PowerPoint. Turn on your brain.

Build your story then build your slides.

You’ll thank me later.

-Carl