How consultants make slides (McKinsey, BCG, Deloitte)

The biggest deck I've built ran to about 300 slides. The largest audience for it read maybe six. That fact should shape everything about how you build one.

Start with two questions, before you open PowerPoint

Every expensive deck starts with two boring questions: who is the audience, and what is the purpose? Everything — the structure, the language, what goes on the page — changes depending on the answers.

On audience, ask how senior they are. The more senior someone is, the more they care about the so what and the less they care about how you got there. Content over process, key points over detail. Ask what they actually care about — what's frustrating them, what they're personally on the line for. And ask how they like to take in information: visual, or happy with text?

Culture matters more than people admit. Send lines and lines of dense text to a company like Apple, whose whole identity is design, and you've told them you don't understand them. They may not even read it.

On purpose, presentations generally do one of three things: build understanding, drive a decision or persuade, or inspire and motivate. Know which one you're doing. And know how the client will actually use the deck — read alone at a desk, or watched while you talk over it. Those are different documents.

Build a strawman before you build anything

Consultants storyboard. We call it a strawman — a rough outline of the whole deck, slide by slide, before a single slide is made properly. Some people write everything into a Word document first and then chop it into slides; do it straight onto the strawman and you'll save yourself hours.

This is where the thinking happens. Making it pretty comes much later, and takes far less time than anyone expects.

The two structures: horizontal and vertical

This is the part that separates a consulting deck from a normal one.

Horizontally: if you read only the slide titles, in order, they should tell the whole story. Title 1 + Title 2 + … + Title N = your argument. Partners and clients genuinely do this — they skim the titles and nothing else — so if the titles don't carry the story, your deck doesn't have one.

Vertically: each slide's title should be the key message of that slide. The so-what. Not the topic.

So instead of a title like "Highest revenue-making areas" — which tells the reader precisely nothing — you write "Chocolate, groceries and magazines contribute 80% of total sales." Some people call these action titles. I just call it a good title.

SCR: the structure everyone uses and nobody names

The famous McKinsey framework is Situation → Complication → Resolution. Situation gives context and shows you understand their world. Complication names the problem. Resolution solves it — and, ideally, solves what's actually keeping them awake.

The useful bit is that you can reorder it on purpose:

• Situation → Complication → Resolution — start gently, credentialise yourself, get them on side before the bad news.
• Resolution → Situation → Complication — for clients who have no time and just want the answer. I use this one a lot.
• Complication → Situation → Resolution — when you want impact and urgency, when something genuinely has to be fixed now.

And this isn't a McKinsey trick. Every firm does it and just renames it. PwC call the complication the Hook and the resolution the Fix — the Hook should make someone think "I can't believe this," the Fix should make them think "that's brilliant."

The four parts of a deck

• Title page and introduction — context, or a tagline that lands your recommendation in ten seconds.
• Executive summary — if they read one page and nothing else, this is it. Write it as though that's guaranteed, because it often is.
• The pack — the story: your recommendations and how you got to them.
• Appendix — the detail, the data, the calculations, the assumptions. The "if you're interested, here's the evidence."

Then structure the individual slide

The same logic applies one level down. Each slide needs an order — chronological, by ranking, by category, by geography. Something.

Barbara Minto — the first woman McKinsey hired as a professional — wrote The Pyramid Principle, and its core idea is that ideas should form a pyramid under a single thought. Your key takeaway sits at the top: that's your slide title. Underneath sit the main arguments — answering what, why and how — and underneath those, the sub-arguments and the data.

Ideally the arguments are MECE: mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive. In practice, getting every possible argument is hard. Don't be religious about it.

The craft bits nobody teaches you

Signpost. In a 300-slide deck the reader gets lost. If your contents page has sections A, B, C and D, show which one you're in — grey out the others, keep the current one in colour. Icons, text, shapes; whatever. Just do it.

Footnote your sources, in a consistent format, in the order they appear. It proves the data is real, and it quietly signals that you're careful.

Learn Align and Distribute. Put them in your Quick Access Toolbar. You'll use them more than you breathe, and the seconds compound into minutes on a deadline.

Use icons to break up text. They create whitespace and let the reader breathe. A wall of text and the same content with icons are the same information — but one of them gets read.

Be consistent. One colour set. If a colour means "revenue" on slide 4, it means revenue on slide 40. Consistent units, consistent grammar — if one bullet starts with a verb, they all do.

Make each graph say one thing, and make it legible in three seconds. If the client has to work at it, you've failed.

Use the client's language. If they say "tribes" instead of "business units", say tribes. It's a small thing that proves you've listened — and honestly, that's half the job. Ask for their brand template too. Working in their branding says you're working with them, not for them.

And spellcheck. Obviously spellcheck.

Why they hand you formatting first

Your first task will be making a slide look pretty, and it can feel demeaning. It isn't — it's an assessment. If you can't get the basics right, nobody's giving you the thinking work. Get very good at it quickly, and it stops being your job.

Where to start

Pick your next deck. Before you open PowerPoint, write down who's reading it and what you need them to do. Then write your slide titles — just the titles — and read them back in order. If they don't tell the story on their own, you haven't got a deck yet. You've got a folder of slides.

If you'd rather start from something that already works, the consulting toolkit has the templates and structures I use in live engagements — including the PowerPoint pack.