The true costs of bad presentations
Too often, people don’t realise that a poor presentation will cost you a significant amount of money. In a sales presentation, the top-line cost is obvious: the potential loss in revenue and the likely damage in relationship and professional image. Can you afford this?
Poorly done internal presentations, which represent the bulk of the use of presentations, have a bottom-line cost factor as well. They represent a significant amount of investment in your and your colleague’s time, which gets wasted if you do not succeed to bring your arguments across due to a poor presentation. These hours are sunk and lost forever, as people could have been doing other, more productive things when they were watching your presentation in stead. On average, it takes up to an hour to produce a single slide in a final presentation. So, if you entertain nine colleagues with your 30 slides (easily achieved) during an hour, you have wasted 30 + 10 = 40 hours. Do you know how much 40 hours is worth to your company? And it gets worse, as you will most likely have to sink yet additional time (yours and others) into the project, explaining what the poorly done presentation did not do in the first place (through additional meetings, discussions, or, yet another presentation…). Just follow this guesstimated example:
200 workable days a year
5 bad presentations a day (not difficult for a company with say 1,000 people)
5 people as an audience (4 colleagues + you as a presenter)
12 slides per presentation (the number of slides in an average presentation are even higher)
1 hour of preparation time per slide
1 hour of presentation duration
That’s [200 days * 5 presentations/day * ((12 slides * 1 hour of preparation/slide) + 5 hours of presenting)] = 17,000 hours. Now, imagine that 50% of these presentations will take another 8-hour day of additional time spent on the topic (a –very- conservative estimate), you must add [200 days * 5 presentations/day * 50% * 8 hours] = 4,000 hours, totaling at 21,000 hours annually.
At 2,000 hours/employee, 21,000 hours represents over 10 man-years of your company’s time! Imagine what you could have achieved when you would have put those 10 man-years to a more productive use. At an average of €30 internal hourly rate (also very conservative), this represents over €600,000 in costs per year. –Any- executive should be concerned about this!