In business school, it gradually became evident that becoming a management consultant was my dream job.
The world of management consulting was mystical; part secretive, part Excel models and slide decks. People would talk about McKinsey, BCG, and Bain with a sense of awe and wonder. Words like “toolbox”, “frameworks” and “problem solving” would be uttered with the greatest respect.
So when I joined Bain, I had a clear idea about what I was going to learn.
Having now left Bain, a common question I often get is: “What did you learn?”
Since I can't possibly sum everything up in a single post, I'll start by passing on 9 slide-making tactics that I use every day and that have made me 10x faster at creating stellar presentations.
Different audiences require distinct slide decks. For instance, a deck for a CEO meeting should be very different in both form and content from one for a design workshop. In Bain, most decks were created for senior management stakeholders and would typically be longer, data-heavy slide decks serving as the foundation for complex decisions.
See more on this in our post on insider tips from BCG on creating slide decks.
What do you aim for your audience to understand, feel, and act upon after your presentation or meeting? Novices primarily focus on the knowledge aspect, while intermediates consider knowledge and action. However, experts lay emphasis on the emotional response they want to elicit (fear of inaction, excitement, etc.).
If you google ‘best practice tips for designing presentations’, you will see the conventional rules repeated again and again: Use large fonts, big images, and minimal text.
These rules are not wrong, but they rarely apply to consultation presentations. Most often, consulting slide decks fall into one of two buckets – presentations to read or presentations to be delivered in person.
The long presentation to be read often serves as the starting point when creating the trimmed-down presentation deck. It's essential to know your objective before you start building your presentation.
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Start on paper and draft a clear narrative using the following three steps:
(a) Pick an overarching framework for your storyline
Your entire deck should narrate an engaging story.
Many consulting decks follow the SCQA framework: Situation > Complication > Question > Answer Other successful frameworks might be Past → Present → Future or Problem → Solution → Evidence.
(b) Draft slide titles
Divide each A4 page into four sections, each representing a slide. Craft a concise action title of less than 15 words for each slide which becomes the slide's title. This can also be done as a text document or similar. The goal is to be able to read the titles and from that alone understand the gist of the deck. See more tips on creating action titles here.
(c) Outline supporting data for each slide
Would a graph or a table be helpful? Or perhaps a few bullet points in large font? Sketch out your first best guess of what type of data (numbers, text, images etc.) that you think is needed to support the slide title and that is plausible to get. This is likely to change during your project, but it provides you with a solid starting point to understand which data and analyses you should prioritize.
Talk through the overall storyline and supporting data with a colleague. It's easier to make amendments while still drafting on paper rather than adjusting words on a slide.
Consultants often reuse the same slide formats repeatedly. You can save a lot of time by reusing and adjusting previous slides instead of creating them from scratch. Additionally, different types of projects (e.g., creating a business strategy or a business case) often follow the exact same storyline and framework, allowing you to copy-paste whole sections if you have the right slide template. Or dig into AI slide generators to help you speed up the drafting.
This step is mostly about execution. Keep it concise and eliminate unnecessary words.
Ensure elements are properly aligned, the spacing looks balanced, and add a bit of vibrancy with some color and icons. With the right knowledge, it's easy to make slides look attractive (See this post: 'How McKinsey Consultants Make Presentations' for a detailed list of formatting tips).
So there you have it! I hope you take away at least one or two things to make your slide-making process and little less painful and a bit more engaging and memorable to your audience.
See our blog post on Getting to the So What to learn how to turn observations into insights.
Read about how you create and use Action Titles for effective and compelling presentations.
Explore the mutually-exclusive-collectively-exhaustive (MECE) framework to help you structure your arguments.
...or take a look at the full list of posts on our blog site.
Consultants build decks quickly by separating thinking from production: the storyline is drafted on paper first, every slide gets an action title before any design work begins, and existing templates and past slides are reused rather than built from scratch. The deck is only created digitally once the argument is settled, which is what prevents the endless rework that makes deck creation slow.
This does not change even when using AI slide generators. Thinking needs to come first, before any prompt or deck is started. AI decks without the thinking end up as expensive AI slop.
SCQA stands for Situation, Complication, Question, Answer and is a storylining framework used by top consulting firms to structure presentations. The Situation establishes shared context, the Complication introduces what changed or went wrong, the Question makes the resulting problem explicit, and the Answer delivers the recommendation. Alternatives include Past-Present-Future, Situation-Complication-Resolution, and Problem-Solution-Evidence.
Presentation slides are built to be projected and talked over: visual, minimal text, one clear message. Detail slides are built to be read and worked through in a meeting or sent as a document: denser, more detailed, able to stand alone without a presenter. Deciding which type you are making and for whom, before you build anything, is one of the fastest ways to avoid rework.
Storylining is drafting the complete narrative of a presentation - the sequence of action titles and the argument they carry - before creating any slides. Consultants typically do this on paper, sketching four slides per page, so the logic can be tested and rearranged cheaply.
An action title should be one full sentence of no more than roughly 15 words (without filler words like "the" or "an"), stating the slide's conclusion. If the takeaway does not fit in one sentence, the slide is carrying more than one message and should be split.
With the consulting method (storyline on paper, action titles first, template reuse, then production and a final polish pass) a deck that would otherwise take days can be built in hours. The time saving comes almost entirely from the front of the process: decisions made on paper are easy to change in the broad while decisions made in PowerPoint are more difficult.
Do a single structured polish pass at the end: align every element, balance white space, restrict the palette to one or two colors, and apply consistent fonts and icon styles. And most importantly: delete any and all data and information that is not absolutely necessary to make your point.
