I had my first two presentations in May in Katowice and Gdańsk. I found out that I was supposed to make a presentation 3 days before the presentation for 90 people. I took up this challenge. I love preparing a presentation. Through the linkedin portal, I accosted Kamil Kozieł, who is an expert in public speaking. I asked him for some materials I could use to prepare myself. Kamil gave me a very nice cheat sheet, thanks to which I wrote the script and thought about the presentation plan. Only at the very end did I make slides. The first time I did slides at the very end and I was shocked at how bad I was doing it before. The best thing about all this is that I was doing a product presentation when I didn’t have a product yet. I didn’t know what and how exactly my clients were thinking.
I must have retrained the first presentation 100 times. Good thing I did. I was so stressed that when I left, it cut me. At some point I remembered that I had practiced this so many times that it was enough to start. Well, I did it on autopilot, but I don’t remember anything. I had another presentation for 50 people in Gdańsk, it was a bit better.
I had my last two presents in October. Over 100 people gathered in Wieliczka and around 80 in Warsaw. The last presentation went quite well. Because I had a more or less prepared product and I had hundreds of conversations with potential customers. I knew what and how my clients think, so I optimized my presentation in this respect. I had a short preparation for the last speech, because I practiced it only a few times. I didn’t give the presentation from memory, I just approached the topic loosely. At the last minute I decided not to wear a shirt and perform in a T-shirt. It was a good decision because my audience was also at ease and I felt at ease.
It was a very interesting experience in the form of learning how to create presentations for a speech while simultaneously researching the needs of clients and the presentation itself. The fifth time, in a smaller group, I made it almost on the go.
