I recently had the pleasure of delivering a 3 hour seminar on presentation skills to a group of continuing education students at a local college.  They were studying web development and would be graduating in the following year.

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Watch Out When Using Excel Content!

I just read a blog post on Presentation Magazine where they asked several people for their best presentation tips.  There are 37 in total and number 25 is from Max McConnell, Division Director of Prompt Communications.   Max talks about embedding your excel spreadsheets into PowerPoint and the dangers of just cutting and pasting it.  Max suggests the following procedure.Edit->Paste Special and choose ‘Picture (Enhanced Metafile).  This places the excel data as a picture.  Failing to do this will transfer all the excel support files and you may be giving way too much information away.  It reminded me of a a true story. (more…)

What are the top three mistakes made when someone tries to raise venture capital?  I had a chance to sit in on a blog radio show hosted by Daisy Wright who is a career coach.  She had as her guest, Business Consultant & Venture Capital Expert Prerna Chandak of Lemonade Capital.

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This is an all-to-familiar scene in business today.  Mid level and upper management executives are being terminated.  Lets face it, it is not a pretty scenario out there.

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First things first.  In my opinion, never . . . .NEVER distribute your handout notes before you speak.  NEVER! (Was that clear enough?)  If you do that, you will lose a majority of your audience who will skim through the notes before you even start.  Then they will pull out their Blackberry’s and check their e-mail, play some silly game or tweet on twitter.  They will not be giving you their undivided attention, they will not be engaged.

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I was speaking to an old friend this week who works for an international industrial equipment supply company in another part Canada.  He has a new boss who started three weeks ago and next week his company is having their international sales meeting in the USA.  My friend’s boss being new obviously wants to get up to speed as quickly as possible especially since he came from another market sector.  He asked my friend along with the other two regional managers to conduct a   SWOT analysis for the sales region they manage.  The instructions stated to just outline the facts and he wanted nothing flashy, just the results from the SWOT analysis in point form so he could get up to speed as quickly as possible.

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