Picture this: you have an important board presentation coming up in a few days, so you start looking for inspiration online. You read through a few guides, watch some YouTube videos. The same advice keeps coming up everywhere - minimal text, no charts, just big visuals and visual metaphors. It sounds reasonable, so you follow it. You drop the tables, replace a chart with one big number.
And then the slides look great, but the presentation doesn't do what it should.
The problem isn't that the advice is bad. It's that it was designed for a completely different context than yours.
Where the mismatch comes from
The vast majority of presentation advice online is about conference-style talks - TED-style, big stage, hundreds of people, impact, emotion, sometimes entertainment. These presentations are the most visible ones. They end up on YouTube, get written up in articles, and become the benchmark for the whole industry.
In practice, though - at least based on the hundreds of workshops I've run - most presentations don't happen on big stages. They happen in small conference rooms: in front of your manager, your colleagues, a board that wants to see numbers and concrete takeaways, not a visual metaphor from Unsplash.
A conference presentation and a business presentation are two different genres, governed by different rules. With one, you want to inspire and captivate. With the other, you want to persuade and make it easier for people to make a decision. When you mix the rules of one genre with the other, you end up with a board staring at a slide with one big number and asking: "Okay, but what does that actually mean?"
Where the real problem lies
This isn't about loading business presentations with data. It's about finding the right balance between the big picture and the detail - and that's one of the hardest things to get right, because the balance looks different for every organisation, every audience and every meeting objective.
A manager who reviews full P&L reports every week will be confused by a slide with a single number and no context. A client at an early sales meeting doesn't need five tabs in Excel - they need to see that you understand their problem and have a way to solve it.
The answer to "how much detail?" always comes from the audience, not from generic advice you found online.
How to approach it
Before you start working on any presentation, it's worth checking what already works in that environment. If you work in a large organisation, there's usually some kind of standard in place - maybe not a perfect one, probably not, but it's a signal of what that culture expects. Don't make a revolution. Make a better version of what people are used to.
The same applies to presentations for external clients. A good starting point is asking: what do materials typically look like in this industry, in this company? What has the client been seeing, and what are they used to?
And finally - most importantly - before you even start designing slides, answer this question: what does this specific audience expect from this specific meeting? What do they need to take away from it to consider it worthwhile? People come to my workshops with rules they've read online and try to apply them without stopping to think whether they actually fit their situation. That's the most common mistake I see - looking for one universal recipe, when the recipes are as varied as the contexts we present in.
Treat online advice as source material, not as an instruction manual. Take what fits your context and leave the rest - even if it sounds convincing.
Conference presentations and business presentations are two separate worlds. The sooner you understand that, the less time you'll waste fitting other people's templates to your own needs.
In SlideFormation, business presentations are exactly what we do. We create presentations for companies every day and regularly train teams from a wide range of industries - from finance to manufacturing, in Poland and internationally. Over 15 years of working with corporate clients - including NBCUniversal, JTI and Leroy Merlin - we've learned one thing: there's no such thing as two identical contexts, because every organisation, every team and every meeting comes with its own expectations. That's why instead of teaching ready-made templates, we teach people to think about what a specific audience needs in a specific situation.
If you want to see what that looks like in practice, take a look at our presentation skills trainings HERE>.
Piotr Garlej
