Speaking of Disasters…

How to screw up a presentation.

Stuck to a stained, gray padded seat in the speaking hall at yet another retail investment conference, the guy in front of you is falling asleep as the presentation on the main stage goes totally off the rails. It goes so badly wrong, dragging on for minute after endless tooth-achey minute, that you’re praying for lightning to strike and end the speaker’s misery. The irony is, the speaker kicked off by telling you that they’re going to present a very brief overview of what their company is up to -you know, just the highlights…the steaky sizzle…

Bad corporate presentations are a missed opportunity for companies. The weird thing is, having paid thousands of bucks for a brief 15 minutes to pump their Tier 1 project, the way some companies present you wouldn’t think they gave a damn. Apparently, Mr CEO is doing the audience a favour by mumbling incoherently for 25 minutes, 10 minutes over their allotted time, eyes cast down at the monitor screen as their complex technical slides bludgeon the audience to a slow death. There are usually dozens of companies presenting each day, so you’d think they’d maybe want to make an effort to stand out, right?

Cretins

At best, bad talks are a complete waste of time and money that spark the opposite effect to the intended positive buy-buy-buy investor response. At worst, a key shareholder might be watching from the peanut gallery and realises by slide 20 that they invested in a badly run shit-show managed by cretins.

Our business is replete with stories about talks going off the rails. One of the best/worst examples I’ve come across was when a well known, über-rich mining magnate decided to tell the audience at a conference just how-much cash their latest overseas mega mine was going to spin off: scads of the stuff apparently. “Now you can see how these trucks are just going to come in here and pull money out of the bank.” said the magnate. In the process, he indirectly insulted the government of the host country, essentially painting them as ignorant bumpkins who were going to be fleeced. When word of the presentation got back to the local population, they went full Guy Fawkes on our man and burned a life-sized effigy of him in the capital city in protest. A year or two later the terms of the investment agreement were.. er.. renegotiated less favourably for the mine. A costly 20 minutes.

Attack of the Red Blobs

I think the worst I ever saw was about 15 years back. The company billed itself as having “the next Voisey’s Bay” – another sexy version of the giant nickel deposit in eastern Canadian but BIGGER OH YES. Their chief geologist took to the podium and presented 20 full colour slices through a 3D geophysical model of their “deposit”. Slowly. No drilling, just geophysics. Each slice was 25m away from the last one on the map, and they all showed a lovely mix of red and blue blobs swimming in a sea of other bright colours which, apparently, meant it was Voisey’s Bay 2.0. The trickle of audience members leaving the room quickly became a flood as slice 13 gave way to slice 14 which gave way to slice 15, each described in painful fucking detail.

“And this red blob is bigger than the last red blob which means more er.. nickel..when we drill it.”

The Talk Fairies eventually shut off his microphone at 10 minutes over time and he was yanked off, exit stage right, pursued by nobody. He hadn’t come remotely close to saying why the company was a good investment. When he realised he’d been disconnected (literally and figuratively) from the audience, it was a moment of real pathos. He looked up sadly at a nearly empty room echoing with the deafening sound of crickets, the opportunity to showcase a potentially great project lost in 25 minutes of stupefying dullness.

You have 15 Minutes

Like me, my mate Matt has been there far too many times. Back in the day he endured a torture session in the Fairmont Hotel in Vancouver. He’d followed the company for years and he liked them and really wanted to hear about their latest deal. Matt hadn’t seen them present before but figured that as the CEO was an old hand, he’d probably have a strong, coherent story to tell the audience in his 15 minutes.

The CEO hooked up his laptop and as he opened PowerPoint, an image of his desktop flashed briefly on the main screen. In that fleeting instant Matt saw that the slide sorter held over 100 slides for a 15-minute pitch. That was 6 slides a minute, or one slide every 10 seconds. Mr. CEO couldn’t be simple-minded enough to try to present that many, could he? Matt figured that he’d present the first 10 or 12 and the rest were back up.

Alas no. He launched into the presentation and took his sweet time about it, talking over a slide of management…a slide of the board…a slide of the company’s shareholders… his dog… his kids; information that anyone could get off the company website. It was obvious he’d never actually thought about what he’d say to weave a coherent 15-minute narrative string through the presentation. Matt shifted nervously in his chair, hoping he’d get back on track.

Tick Tock

The clock ticked relentlessly down, and the CEO began to jump over a dozen slides at a time mumbling “We don’t really need to see that…”. When he did talk about a slide, there was no thread keeping the ideas together; a 20-minute blast of non-sequiturs. As the clock hit time, he was telling another pointless good-old-mining-boys anecdote and still hadn’t discussed the projects. He ploughed gamely on, reluctant to choose a favourite project “because they had so many great deals on the go yes indeedy“.

The CEO of the next company to present appeared at the side of the stage, mentally drumming his fingers on an invisible desk, his time already evaporating. The audience was bored; ready for anyone who could speak coherently, rather than listen to more of the same drivel. Finally, he trailed aimlessly off, ending his “talk” with a defeated “Come see me at booth…”.

Coffee Anyone?

My most recent talk wasn’t exactly a roaring success, not because I fucked up thankfully, but it was definitely a fuck up.

I was at the 121 Conference in New York in the spring. We’d been offered a quick 10-minute corporate pitch at the last moment, which we took. On the day, I rocked up for my 9.50am slot and quietly sat down on one side so as not to disturb the speaker. The speaking room was next door to the kitchen which was a little disturbing. They were preparing lunch for the conference and the sound of pots banging and the kitchen staff talking drifted in every time the door opened.

Then someone dropped something in the kitchen, something big and metallic which hit the floor with a massive clang and was followed by the sound of someone screaming briefly; the metallic thing had either hit them or was full of something hot, sticky and painful that splashed on them. Everyone in the room looked up including the speaker, who was thrown off by the Gordon Ramsey carnage next door. Eventually the screaming stopped, and the speaker managed to get back on track.

Don’t Die

With a few minutes left until I was due to speak, I was gathering my thoughts and trying to ignore the kitchen bloodbath. I was mentally going over the pros and cons of investing in southern Peru when an alarming noise from right behind me wrenched me back to reality. It was a wheezing-gasping kind of noise; the noise a very obese animal with chest issues might make.

Profoundly disturbed, I looked over my right shoulder. A very old man was stumbling along in the row behind me clutching a cup of coffee. With a bulbous belly pushing through an ill-fitting jacket, he was sweating and listing at an unhealthy angle, puffing and wheezing in a way that healthy people shouldn’t.

And then he tripped on my chair leg and went down, dropping a full cup of milky coffee on the seat next to me. It splashed everywhere – my pants, my shirt- but I didn’t have time to worry about that because he was clearly not well and needed help fast. The venue staff rushed over and stood him up, supporting him on either side as they led him out of the hall.

You’re Up!

The previous speaker had pretty much given up by this point, laid low by a freak combination of unavoidable disasters. As he wrapped up, I tried to introduce my self from the podium while the staff milled about mopping up the coffee, swapping out the wet, stained chairs and generally making lots of furniture-moving noises. My nice shirt was spotted with latte and my brain -which had checked out when the old boy had gone over- refused to re-engage leaving my mouth to fly solo. It wasn’t my best 10 minutes.

If you’ve got a good story about a particularly egregious speech that should never have happened, let me know and I’ll add it in…

Readers’ Stories (Unlike Playboy, these are all true.)

121 conference founder (sorry about the mention..) & good mate Pablo chipped in with “I think my favourite would be back in our MMHK days, a former evangelical priest of some sort turned exploration Co CEO from the US of A, who proceeded to attempt to cover circa 150 different projects in ten minutes, rattling them off like some sort of auctioneer. Never saw him again!“

Brandon responded on Twitter with a cartels-meet-mining gem which must’ve been soooo reassuring to investors: “I saw one where the CEO explained how they had no problem with the Mexican cartels because they would book a “special taxi” a day in advance and the driver would give the heads up to the cartel that the geologists were coming. Cooperation, not problems!“

And from Brent, who’s seen a few steaming-mounds-of-manure disguised as presentations in his time: “Man have I seen too many awful presentations. Did you by chance catch where the company CEO described the locals as cannibals that had recently found god?” To which I’d say no, I wasn’t at the presentation but I was at the conference and remember the look of abject horror as Brent and a few other industry folk left the speaker hall after that particular talk.

And remember..

if you don’t take this opportunity to subscribe to my blog via the painfully-hard-to-find subscription box, I’ll haunt every retail conference you go to and will actively hunt you down and tell you my corporate pitch over and over for hours, days, weeks on end until your only recourse is to retreat to a silent monastery run by reclusive Jesuit hermit monks who’ve never used Powerpoint. Yes, someone somewhere has never used Powerpoint.