How Much Money Will Your Organization Lose This Week on Poor Presentations, Long Meetings, Boring Speeches?

Do something different this week: Add up all the time your organization spends on presentations. Start with the preparation time.

Include the research hours. Count the emails, log the calls. How long to get background on the audience, how long to verify venue details? Add up the hours (days, maybe?) preparing PowerPoint.

Factor in all the time required to get approvals. Did HR have to sign off on the material? Did you have to run the speech past the legal department? How long did all this take?

Include the time needed for rewrites.

What about the rehearsals? (I certainly hope you rehearse more than once!) Renting the practice space? Hiring a teleprompter operator?

Look at onsite meeting expenses. Coffee, anyone? Fresh fruit platters?

Look at offsite meeting expenses. What’s the hourly fee for renting a hotel conference room? Exhibit space? The [often stunning] cost of catering at convention centers?

Look very carefully at travel time and travel expenses. How many people had to spend their time and money to get to each meeting?

Go ahead: Take a deep breath and add up the combined work hours lost by all the attendees.

Then add in your opportunity costs. What else could (should?) the attendees have been doing with their time?

More to the point: What else could (should?) you – the speaker – have been doing with your time?

Fix your presentations drain … and fix it as soon as possible.

If your presentations aren’t planned well, they will eat up huge amounts of time and cost your organization a lot of money . Think. Even a one hour coaching/consulting session could produce a ten-fold ROI.

Do the math.