The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint

The chief evangelist of Canva and author of 'The Art of Social Media', Guy Kawasaki has an unparalleled knowledge of innovation, entrepreneurship, social media and marketing. We have all seen our fair share of PowerPoints that don't hit the mark and Kawasaki has developed the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint to ensure your presentation is effective every time.

I came across Kawasaki, as like me, he also suffers from Ménière’s disease. I find his outlook on business with a chronic vestibular condition refreshing and inspiring.

As a venture capitalist, he sits through hundreds of entrepreneurs pitching their companies with presentations and has likened the experience of listening to poor pitches, with the symptoms of Ménière’s disease: a constant ringing in the ear, hearing loss and once in a while the world starts spinning.

To prevent an epidemic of Ménière’s in the venture capital community, Kawasaki has evangelised the 10/20/30 Rule of Powerpoint. Put simply, for any presentation to reach agreement, whether that be raising capital, making a sale or forming a partnership, it must have 10 slides, be no more than 20 minutes and contain no font smaller than 30 points.

The average human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting and thus 10 is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation. The 10 slides should be broken down into 10 topics, one on each slide.

20 minutes is the ideal amount of time to project a presentation. In a perfect world, you give your pitch in 20 minutes and have 40 minutes for discussion.

The vast majority of presentations have text in a ten point font, in order to include as much text as possible on each slide. This is because it is thought that more text is more convincing. Whilst it is imperative to have the most salient points included, as soon as an audience finds you are reading the text on the slide, they will read ahead, resulting in you and the audience being out of synch.

As a Virtual Assistant, I come across a multitude of PowerPoint presentations. A service I offer, is taking information and compiling it into effective and visually stimulating presentations for clients. Gone are the days of using preset PowerPoint templates and Calibri typefaces. Pointless animations, cheesy clip art, disjointed images and PPT action sounds will stand out for all the wrong reasons and should never be used in professional presentations. PowerPoint presentations should not be a crutch and should not be remembered. Instead, they should fall into the background and support you and the message you are trying to get across.

By using Virtually Assisted Ltd to save your presentation, your PowerPoint will be researched, planned and prepared professionally, so you can deliver the right message to your audience effectively.