Save Money by doing your own slides?

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

I heard this comment today by a employee of a large company. He said the comment came from a fellow employee who was disturbed by the amount of the cost to use outside companies to do PowerPoint and thought money  could be saved by doing it yourself or using internal resources.

I agree. Yes you could save money by doing it yourself or using an administrative person to assist in creating PowerPoint. In fact if you want I will give you the cell phone number of my 12 year old daughter and she can do PowerPoint for you at her babysitting rate of $5.00/hr. Yes, anyone who can use a computer today can probably create some PowerPoint slides.

But few people these days have the talent or skill to create PowerPoint slides that can communicate a message the way a professional presentation graphic artist can. And they can probably create the slides in a quarter of the time it would take to do yourself – saving you plenty of time to do the job you were being paid the big bucks to do.

Just like anyone can throw a meal together that is editable, but few people can cook like a master chef or make cooking look so easy and taste so good. Anyone can throw paint on a canvas and call it art, but few can do it and get paid for it, and even fewer can get paid to make a living from it.

Maybe the next big company blog post will be a suggestion that the company should stop using outside companies for their advertising needs. They can create their own videos with their cell phone camera’s and post them on youtube.com or maybe get them into commercial time for the 6pm news?

Maybe they do spend too much money on outside resources for slides . . . because they are not using the right company for the task. Are they hiring their PR firm or Advertising firm to do PowerPoint? Again, anyone can use Powerpoint, any graphic artist can surely come up with some decent looking slides, maybe even some pretty slides. But why hire an expensive general contractor when the job can be better accomplished by a specialist? A specialist that has honed their skills designing and developing visual images for PowerPoint for years.

 What is the cost savings to the company when a highly compensated executive take times away from his “real job” to spend hours figuring out how to make effective slides communicating important messages? What is the cost savings when the executive does not successfully communicate the important message to the group he’s presenting to? A lost sale, a lost business objective, a lost opportunity to inspire a group to innovate and drive the company forward to growth and success?

Everyone loves to hate meetings and loves even more to hate PowerPoint. They don’t really hate PowerPoint, they really hate BAD PowerPoint because it is bad PowerPoint that causes bad meetings.

The real irony of their post about not using outside slide vendors is that if they used a professional presentation graphic artist studio to help them produce some effective visuals to communicate their cost saving message, they might actually succeed in implementing their suggestion. . . but
I don’t have to worry about that.