What’s your trick/method to speed up deck development process when it’s a last minute request from client, requires new content and you have no templates or example decks to leverage?

Im a very thorough and detailed oriented person who has trouble delivering “just enough”. Client just informed me of urgent needs that require me to deliver detailed materials by tomorrow, no existing examples for me to leverage.

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There’s always an example- if you’ve been doing this more than 2 or 3 years you’ve gotta have something relevant. I never start from scratch.

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No content/strategy example available at my firm. And this is a new solution I don’t have experience with. Literally googling for answers

Cannot waste more time to the find the right formatted templates. Need to just build.

Coffee

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Don’t try to synthesize other peoples work or templates. Nine times out of 10, you’ll waste time. Open notepad and start outlining. Use your brain.

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Often times, I see junior consultants spin their wheels because they are trying to make the slide look pretty and build the content at the same time. You can't paint a house until it's actually built. Slide building is no different

Take a bunch of index cards or plain A4 sheets cut in half and sketch the slides by hand. Once done, flip through them to make sure your story makes sense and each slide has the right message. You don't have to input data etc.

Once you have this part nailed, you can drop it into slides and make it pretty. You can spend lesser time on this up front part as you become more experienced

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Important Caveat - I’ve never delivered this solution before and apparently no one in my practice area has either.

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There is no trick. This is the classic consulting "break down a problem and get up to speed on a new topic quickly" situation. Right now. It sounds like you are mixing up stages of the deck development process and you sound stressed because you view it as one big scary piece of work rather than a series if smaller steps.
You need 1. A clear understanding of what you're looking for the deck to do and why. If you don't get the scope/purpose, the deck will be a mess. 2. Make the deck storyline. 3. Do some initial, simple deck design based on the story. 4. Do the needed analysis/research, focused only on only what you need. 5. Put your findings in the deck's initial design, grab some easily accessible templates. 6. Double check story. 7. Focus on visual appeal as the last step. Here, slide templates from other work could be helpful if you have time to hunt and repurpose.

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Starting from scratch is extremely challenging to junior consultants especially when you don’t have the knowledge. I wouldn’t rely on google for template because anything that come up to you first would seem to be the right answer to you - this is a trap of your mind, because you are learning it, while working should involve constant criticizing and asking why it’s done this way - and google isn’t the best text book. I would ask your supervisor for help, and maybe ask if he or she can direct you to someone who has the knowledge if your supervisor don’t

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Hopefully you should have a few organizational frameworks either in mind or actually in a deck somewhere, even if it’s not previous work for this client.

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Does your firm not have any resources or CoE’s to utilize? Not joking, have you tried google?

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So you had three days to figure this out and you’re just reaching out for help now? Have you reached out to anyone at your firm who was done similar work? Why not ask them?

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Its just a grind, get some more coffee and good luck

Haha

Seriously tho stop procrastinating and get off fb

Best of luck man!

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Delegate to someone else.

It’s called storyboarding- every deck needs the problem, your understanding, your high level hypothesis, way to figure out the solution or the solution. Financials, staffing, timelines follow.

Whiteboard the sh!@7 Out of it.. I'm done doing decks just got really good at miro

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