Pitch It!: Conversation with Jan Schultink

After a career of 10 years as management consultant with McKinsey & Company in Amsterdam and London, Jan Schultink now is the Founder and CEO of Idea Transplant, a presentation design firm that creates sales, conference, and investor presentations. He is based in Tel Aviv but serves clients all over the globe.

In this conversation, Jan discusses his new e-book, Pitch It!

Geetesh: Tell us about what motivated you to write Pitch It! – also how would a book like this one have helped you 10 years ago?

Jan: As a professional presentation designer I have been writing short daily blog posts with suggestions how to design better presentations. The blog is not very structured: whatever comes to mind in the morning becomes that day's post. As a result, it is not that easy to search the archive with 4 years worth of posts. The idea for the book was to take all that content and put it in a logical and consistent flow.

Personally, I went through this transition from a management consultant at McKinsey (still hand-scribbling exhibits that had to be produced by graphics designers) to a professional presentation designer. If I had a book like this in my hands 10 years ago, that transition would have taken place much faster!

Geetesh: What sets Pitch It! apart from other books that discuss presentation design skills?

Jan: Presentation design books usually start from the design/story writing angle: why bullet point slides are bad, how to structure a story, the basics of graphics design. I started from the end product: a sales or investor presentation, the most common type of high-stake presentations in business and worked my way backwards. The result is a highly practical book that assumes that you already are convinced that bullets points are bad, you just want very specific suggestions on how to design better presentations. When I design presentations for my clients, I pretty much follow the exact approach that is highlighted in the book.

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