“Don’t Make Me Do Math” — Oreet Kaufman on Word Dieting, the Five-Second Slide and a Keynote Deck in 48 Hours

Host Daniel Hill talked with Oreet Kaufman, a freelance PowerPoint designer based in Chicago and the founder of OC Presentation Designs. That’s OC, not OK — she was deliberate about it, because who would hire someone whose designs are, in her words, just okay. (Her initials are actually O.K., which her mother warned her about at her wedding: make sure people know that’s your initials and not you approving things.)

The business is narrow on purpose. She’s not a graphic designer, not a web designer, not a marketer. She does PowerPoint.

“It’s the most universal and it’s the most adaptable and everybody uses PowerPoint one way or another. And that way by specializing, I’ve become an expert in that field. I don’t stretch myself too thin.”
— Oreet Kaufman

Parking Lot Training

Oreet spent 20 years in corporate training and development, the last six of them mostly inside PowerPoint, building sales enablement material. That job produced the discipline that now defines her work.

“My skill set of being able to cut down on the clutter came from the approach of what is the least amount of information that sellers need to know before they go in and have that conversation with a customer. So I used to call it parking lot training — that at the very least, if they’re sitting in a parking lot, what do they need to know?”
— Oreet Kaufman

She didn’t know presentation design was an industry until two or three years before this interview. She told her husband she’d love to make PowerPoints all day; her niece googled it, found an entire community of designers, and she set up the company.

Start at the End

The single most transferable idea in the episode is her intake question, and it’s the reverse of how most people build a deck.

“I always start with clients and say to them, what is your desired outcome at the end of this presentation? What behavior do you want to change? What do you want your audience to know or do? And then we work backwards from there.”
— Oreet Kaufman

From there the arc is conventional and dependable: set the stage and context, build to the challenge, present the solution, and close with the call to action. But because the destination was fixed first, every slide is doing work toward it rather than arriving at a link on slide 18 that nobody was prepared for.

She traces that instinct straight back to instructional design — when you build a training curriculum, you start with the objectives.

Her point about industry is worth noting for anyone who thinks they need a vertical specialist: the principles of storytelling are the same regardless of the industry. What changes is the audience — engineers process information differently than investors — and that’s a customization problem, not a different craft.

How Many Slides?

Daniel asked the question everyone has an opinion about. Oreet’s answer is refreshingly unideological: it depends on the topic and the audience. A keynote can be five slides. A sales call can legitimately be 140. A pitch deck is usually 10 to 15, because investors want the basics — what’s the problem, what’s the solution, how are you fixing it, what’s the market.

She admits her own eyes go straight to the slide counter in the bottom-left corner, and it sets her attention span — but she gives the benefit of the doubt, because 30 well-built slides can be a compelling presentation.

What she won’t defend is cramming:

“I’d rather 45 slides of well-made presentation than 10 slides of jam-packed. Three to five seconds — I don’t know what you’re talking about or where my eyes should go, and now you’ve lost me from slide one.”
— Oreet Kaufman

Animations, Transitions and Bullets

On animation, her analogy is buying a new car and pressing every button to see what it does. Some people never stop doing that with PowerPoint.

“Any type of animation really has to be done well and professional and effectively. So it’s to help enhance your story. It’s not the story itself. It’s not a show and tell of all the different functions and features that PowerPoint can do.”
— Oreet Kaufman

Same for transitions — minimal and effective. The curtain transition where text disappears like a stage show? “Save that for the high school presentations.”

Bullets are her top pet peeve, and her replacement is a process rather than a rule. Apply the word diet: find the actual keywords buried in the bullet, then ask whether those can become icons, spacing, or a different visual treatment. Sometimes you still end up with bullets — that’s reality — but the audience has been conditioned to zone out the moment they appear.

Her other standing complaints: charts and tables on the same page, charts carrying data nobody needs, and stock photography that visibly belongs to a previous decade.

The Gap in Most Marketing Departments

Daniel asked the obvious objection — we already have a marketing agency, why would we hire you? Oreet’s answer is that this specific skill is missing more often than anyone expects.

“I’ve worked with VPs of marketing where the other aspects of marketing are phenomenal. But then I looked at their PowerPoint and it was from the 90s. It’s just not a skill set that every marketing department has.”
— Oreet Kaufman

The clients who hire her fall into four buckets: someone in-house can do it but doesn’t have the time, deadline panic, the skill genuinely isn’t there, or the deck is okay and needs to be better. That’s a useful segmentation for any specialist selling a service the buyer technically could do themselves.

It’s also worth noting where companies do spend — the conference booth, the banner — while skimping on the presentation that’s supposed to make people want to come talk to them.

Where AI Fits (and Doesn’t)

“AI might be a good starting tool for small, local, internal projects. But I think you need a presentation expert when it comes to large scale projects and more complex ones. Because what AI can’t do, at least for now, is that you always need that human critical thinking aspect for decision making and to understand your audience and understand how your message will land.”
— Oreet Kaufman

Her practical skepticism is even simpler: she’d be surprised if anyone wants to spend two or three hours steering a generator through a hundred-slide deck before giving up on it.

The 48-Hour Keynote

The best story in the episode arrived on Thanksgiving. A prospect found Oreet through her LinkedIn services page and explained that she was giving a conference keynote in California in five days — with a deck from the 1990s. The brief: it’s about AI, make it bold, make it big, and make it better than the other keynote speaker’s.

Oreet worked the math backwards. One day is needed for the speaker to practice, which left four, over a weekend. She delivered inside 48 hours, with only one or two comments coming back.

But the design wasn’t the real value. The client had 30 slides and 30 minutes, and wanted to run audience activities on top of that. Oreet’s recommendations, drawn from her training background: no activities, no audience interaction in a 30-minute keynote, several of the more complex slides belong in an appendix the audience can read afterward — and here are your most effective 15 to 16 slides at two minutes each.

“The worst thing is a keynote speaker gets up there and she doesn’t get to finish her message. She runs out of time.”
— Oreet Kaufman

She also flagged the format-specific considerations most people never think about: how imagery and color read on a large screen versus a webinar, and whether the room is lit or dark.

And Please Stop Reading the Slides

Oreet loves speaker notes — she’ll even recommend a teleprompter for big calls — but nobody should be reading off the slide itself. Both she and Daniel have sat through the webinar where the presenter’s shared screen shows the notes they’re visibly reading from.

“I think we’ve all been there and said, you know what, just send it to me in an email. If you’re gonna read it off the slide, just send it to me.”
— Oreet Kaufman

Connect with Oreet Kaufman

Oreet Kaufman runs OC Presentation Designs. Her portfolio and client success stories are at ocdesigns.info, along with a Word Dieting page and a downloadable PDF of best practices with examples you can apply to your own decks — and to your writing generally. She’s also developing a Word Dieting master class that walks attendees through the process on their own material.

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