Back in 2014 activist Hedge Fund Starboard Value made a successful bid to oust the
board at Darden Restaurants, a company that owns multiple restaurant chains in
the US including a beloved Italian restaurant called Olive Garden.
If you live outside of the US you might not be familiar with this cultural treasure. It's a
great place to get all-you-can-eat breadsticks and mediocre pasta at reasonable prices.
As part of it's takeover bid Starboard put together a now famous
300 hundred slide presentation that, among other things, provided recommendations for
how many breadsticks should be delivered to a customers table at one time.
In this video I'm going take one of the slides from this presentation and show you exactly
how to take boring, unprofessional slides, and turn them into slides that are clear,
insightful, and engaging. I'll walk through each step of the redesign explaining the logic behind
each choice and why it matters for your audience. Plus I'll provide you with some great PowerPoint
tips along the way to help you build your slides a whole lot faster. All that and more, coming up.
Hi everyone, Paul here from The Analyst Academy where we teach people Advanced PowerPoint and
presentation building skills like what you might find at a top consulting firm. You can learn
more about the courses we have for individuals and for teams over at TheAnalystAcademy.com.
We're also on YouTube, Instagram and LinkedIn, so make sure you stay connected.
The slide we'll be using today is from page 104 of the presentation
"Transforming Darden Restaurants", which I'll link to below. Alright here we go...
As you can tell the slide is all about breadsticks, and how Olive Garden's lack of
training and discipline are leading to reduced profitability and a poorer guest experience.
The first thing that strikes me about this slide is just how much text there is.
Now that's not inherently bad… a common feature of slides in consulting, strategy, or finance is that
they contain a lot of information that needs to be digested by the audience all at once.
What's difficult about these types of slides is that they can overwhelm the audience.
Especially if it's delivered live where the audience has to read all the information
on the slide, listen to the speaker, and potentially think of a response.
Even for a smart person, it's a lot to ask. So your job as slide creator is to make it as
easy as possible for the audience to understand your message by limiting distractions,
drawing attention to the important parts of the slide, and guiding your audience visually.
When you look at this slide, which parts of the slide are distracting, and are they important to
the slide's message?... For me it was these dark blue boxes: the one down at the bottom here but
then also the labels for this table. The box at the bottom says, "Olive Garden is famous for its
unlimited breadsticks, but poor execution around this signature item we believe both increased
costs and hurt the guest experience." To me this is a pretty important takeaway from the slide,
so I'll leave that one there for now. But then how about these boxes right here?
Do they need to stick out so much? I need them to support the information in the table,
but I don't think they should command so much attention. So the first thing I'm going to do
is remove this attention grabbing blue color. I'll do that by holding the control key as I
select all the objects, or CMD key if you're using a Mac, then using my ribbon shortcuts
to change the shape fill and the font. So I'll hit Alt to access the commands in the ribbon,
then H for home, then SF for shape fill, and then N for no fill. (And then obviously
this text can't be white so I'll follow the same process to get to the Home tab,
then hit FC for font color, and choose this blue color down here.
Another thing on this slide that I think is unnecessarily distracting is the picture of
breadsticks down here. The rule with pictures on a slide is you want to make sure it's contributing
to the message in some way, and not just there for good looks. This one could probably go either
way because on the one hand I think it's good to be able to visualize the topic, but on the other
hand we all know what a breadstick looks like and this isn't providing any new information.
Not to mention, I don't think it fits in cleanly on the slide - it just sort of
sits down at the bottom here and isn't aligned with anything. So I'm just going to delete it.
Let's talk about this background for a little bit. The general rule for backgrounds is if
you notice it, you need to change it. And this one I noticed right away. Maybe it's
just me but it's incredibly distracting and almost looks a little unprofessional,
especially when the text is also blue. Plus there's also a contrast effect where the text
on the top right gets more attention because there is a stronger contrast with the white background,
wheres the text on the bottom left blends in just slightly more against the similar blue background.
It's minor, but it's noticeable. So to delete this unsightly background I'm
just going to right click on the slide and go to format background,
select solid fill, then choose white down here.
Now I know what you might be thinking here, this slide is starting to look a little plain.
But remember, the first step here is to remove distractions that aren't important
to the slide's message, so that's what we've done. Now, we're going to put more emphasis
on the important parts. And this is where it starts to get a little more interesting.
Generally speaking, the most important part of any slide is the title. People like to
look there first, so you want to make sure your title attracts attention and provides valuable
information. On this slide however, this box down here is a little more attention grabbing, so
the path for the audience isn't quite as clear. Should they look at the title first?
Or this box? Or this subtitle? We want to remove that complexity and make it as easy
as possible for the audience to know where to look first, then second, then third.
The title of the slide says, "Breadsticks: just one example of food waste", which is short,
but provides a good idea for what the slide is all about. Then here we have this subtitle,
"As just one example, we believe lapsed discipline around Darden's renowned unlimited
salad and breadsticks offering has led to both high food waste and a worse experience".
You might have noticed that this sounds very similar to what we already have in this box
down here, and I don't think we need both. Of the two I like this bottom one better so I'm
going to select the text by hitting control A, the control C for copy, and go up here and then
right click and go to paste, then over to this option that says paste as text. That
way I don't have to worry about formatting. Then I can just delete this box down here.
Now, I mentioned earlier that you want to guide your audience visually, and part of this includes
directing their attention to the highest level ideas first, and then to the details. The idea
behind this is the Pyramid Principle, which I've explained in more detail in other videos, but
basically it's a method of communication that involves starting with your main point, then
working your way through the supporting details of that main point. The advantage to this approach is
that it helps you communicate a lot of information in a way that's easy to understand and digest.
The way we do that on a slide is by making sure the title captures the slide's primary takeaway,
and that it's the most attention grabbing part of the slide so the audience looks there first.
Take a look at this slide from BCG for example... notice how the title sticks out from the rest of
the slide. It's bold, it's got a large font, and it has a dark green line underneath it.
By reading the title first the audience will understand the main takeaway for the slide,
so when they get to the details in this chart and in these bullet points , they'll
have some guidance and some context. So to maximize the clarity of our slide
I'm going to do the same thing here. We want the main idea at the top, and then the supporting
points beneath it. It looks like they've kind of done that by putting a short title on the top,
then a more detailed subtitle just below it. Now, this is something I see quite a bit,
and I think it accomplishes the goal of providing a summary of the slide. But the issue is this
subtitle is really where the main takeaway is, and that doesn't grab that much attention. So
what I'm going to do instead is move that text to the title, and just delete the subtitle.
And obviously this is a bit too long so I'm going to cut out some unnecessary words...
Then lastly Ill drag this up to get rid of some of this white space, and there we go.
Now we have a nice clear title that summarizes the slide really well.
Alright now that we've got the main message of the slide clearly in place,
we can worry about the rest of the content on the slide,
and this is where things can get tricky. There's a lot of text on the slide so we need to find a way
to naturally separate the different sections so they're easy to distinguish visually.
The first thing I'm going to do is to separate out these takeaways down at the bottom. They're
obviously very important in helping to show the difference between 10 years ago and today,
so I want to make sure they don't blend in too much with the rest of the text.
Easiest way to do this is by holding the control key and selecting each of these boxes,
dragging the bottom part of the box up, and then I'm just going to duplicate them by
holding down the control and shift keys and dragging them in a straight line down here.
Then I'll just change the text to say what I want,
and increase the font by hitting Control Shift and the greater than sign,
then bolding it by hitting Control B. I can get rid of this text right here,
and I'll move these icons to the side in case I want to use them later.
Now on to the text... Notice how right now the text is all the same color and at first glance
it sort of blends together. So to make it a little easier to process I'm going to first
change this main text to black. I'm also going to make sure these bullet points are black as well,
and I can change these things both pretty quickly just by using my ribbon shortcuts.
By the way if ribbon shortcuts like this are new to you, or if your PowerPoint skills could
use an upgrade, make sure you check some of our other resources on PowerPoint. We've got
some free videos here on YouTube, a very popular PowerPoint shortcuts cheat sheet,
and full courses that provide advanced PowerPoint training for consulting, strategy, and finance
professionals. So if you're interested, check out some of the links in the description.
Another thing I'm going to do is separate these titles a little better
by increasing the text size, and adding lines underneath these top two.
A neat trick to know here is when you're adding a new line, hold the shift key and
the line will be perfectly straight every single time. Then I'll make it black,
and copy it over using the same shortcuts from earlier. And I'm also going to delete this line
because I think it's a little distracting. And for good measure I'm going to increase
the font size for some of the other text as well, just to make it a little more readable.
The takeaways down at the bottom feel separated from the main text but I think we can do a bit
better. First of all I want to align them better and i can do that by selecting each of these and
going up to the align text menu in the ribbon and selecting middle. I'm also going to try and use
these icons because I think they do a good job of providing a visual cue for which approach is
better, so first I'll adjust the margins of this text box and move the text over, and I can do that
by again using the ribbon shortcut to get into the format shape menu, and changing this left margin.
Then I'll just drag these over and make them a little bigger.
Then I think we can take it just one step further by putting a shaded box behind
the text to make it pop just a tiny bit more. So I'll put the box where I want it,
use my ribbon shortcuts to change the color, and then send it to the back.
Another critical part of formatting is you want to continue to draw attention to what matters.
We've already done that with the title at the top, and these key takeaways down here, but you
can also bold the keywords on the slide to making skimming the content just a little bit easier.
Not everyone likes to do this, but I think it adds a nice touch.
So I'm just going to read through this and bold what I think is most important...
And it's going to be hard to notice much of a difference because we've already been looking
at this slide for so long, but for someone looking at this slide for the very first time,
bolding keywords like this can make a big difference.
Now just a few more finishing touches to help with the spacing on the slide
and the overall look and feel. Alright there we go.
So as we compare the slide with the original, you can see that it looks quite a bit different.
The slide might not be the best looking slide out there, but anyone who looks at this slide is going
to have a significantly easier time processing the details and understanding the main takeaway.
And ultimately, that's your main goal. We didn't really change any
of the content on the slide or remove any of the information, we just reformatted it in a
way that's more natural for a first time viewer. Alright that's going to do it for today's video,
I hope you found it helpful. If you're interested in learning how to design and
structure slides for executive audiences, make sure you check out our courses for individuals
and for teams over at TheAnalystAcademy.com. Or, if you're looking for courses on how to
significantly improve your PowerPoint speed and efficiency, we've got that as well.
Thanks again for watching, and hope to see you soon.
Mmm. Forgot how good these are.