One slide, one message

Slides in consulting are for reading, not presenting.

The client will read your deck, forward it internally, and pull it up again nine months later. Nobody will be in the room to explain it. Every page has to stand on its own. Which puts an enormous amount of weight on one line.

The tagline carries the page

The tagline, sometimes called the action title, is the “so what.” One sentence, clear, specific, ideally not wrapping onto a second line. If the reader reads nothing else on the page, they should still get the insight.

A topic header is not a tagline. “Market overview” tells the reader where they are. “The European window cleaning robot market reached $420M in 2025, driven by commercial adoption” tells them what to think.

Five taglines, before and after.

•  “Revenue development 2021–2025” becomes “Revenue grew 6% annually, entirely driven by price increases.”

•  “Customer segmentation” becomes “Three customer segments drive 80% of profit.”

•  “Competitor benchmarking” becomes “We price 12% above the market on the top 20 SKUs, with no service premium to justify it.”

•  “Cost analysis” becomes “Costs sit 15% above benchmark, driven almost entirely by operations headcount.”

•  “Survey results” becomes “Willingness to pay is 15% below our assumption in the mid-segment, breaking the current pricing case.”

Check your tagline:

1.  Does it state a finding rather than a subject?

2.  Could someone disagree with it? If not, it is a description.

3.  Does it fit on one line? If the tagline needs two sentences, you have two slides.

4.  If you read only the taglines through the whole deck, do they tell the story on their own?

Pull every tagline into a document and read them in sequence. If they form an argument, you have a storyline. If they read as a list of topics, the deck has no storyline yet.

Bullets add necessary context; they do not describe

Bullets should add value beyond what is already visible in the chart. Do not write “revenue grew by 12%” next to a chart showing revenue growing by 12%. Interpret it, contextualise it, or draw out the implication: what drove the growth, what explains the one segment that went the other way, what nuance the CEO added in the discussion.

Three rules. Each bullet must be understandable on its own without the others. Keep bullets to three lines maximum, because readability drops sharply beyond that. And bold two or three words rather than half the sentence, because if everything is bold, nothing is.

One more, on sub-bullets: they only exist in pairs. A single sub-bullet is a continuation of the line above, so fold it in.

Charts: pick the type from the message

•  Comparison → bar chart

•  Trend over time → line chart

•  Composition → stacked bar or waterfall

•  Distribution → histogram

Then get out of the reader’s way. Highlight the message with colour, either a coloured box or colour on the relevant bars, and fade everything else into shades of grey. The eye should land where you want it within a second, without instructions.

If you need to show two things, use two charts. In rare cases, a clear call-out can carry a secondary message, and treat that as the exception. Never make the reader decode a complex visualisation when a simple one would have done the job.

And please, no pie charts. There is no situation in which a pie chart tells you more than a stacked bar chart. It uses more space, it makes comparison harder, and it signals that nobody asked what the reader was supposed to conclude.

How to actually get good at this

One habit will teach you faster than any rule I can write down. When you send slides to your supervisor in the evening, and they edit them, go back into the live document the next morning and look at what changed.

“They won’t always tell you ‘hey, you did well, but I changed this.’ Often they’ll just quietly fix things. That’s one of the easiest learning opportunities for people of all tenures. You see exactly how a more experienced person would have done it, and you didn’t even have to ask.” Engagement Manager, McKinsey & Company, Zürich

Ten minutes each morning. It is the cheapest feedback loop available to you, and almost nobody uses it.

The second habit is to stop inventing layouts. Most consulting slides fall into five or six patterns, and your firm’s knowledge base is full of examples from similar cases. Start from the proven template and adjust. Creativity in slide structure is almost always a cost.

A partner in Buenos Aires put the whole thing in one line:

“Insights come with 1. The analysis you do and 2. The way you present your data. Never underestimate No. 2, it is as important as No. 1.”

START THIS WEEK

1.  Challenge yourself. Can you make the point on your next slide without breaking the line?

2.  Check every slide on youe project - replace each descriptive tagline in your part.

3.  Take the last deck you built. Copy every tagline into a blank document and read them in order. If they do not tell a story, rewrite them until they do.

If the tagline needs two sentences, split the slide.