Bombed a client presentation yesterday because my laptop froze mid-demo

I was in their downtown Chicago office with the CFO watching when Teams locked up and I had to reboot in front of everyone, and now I'm scrambling to schedule a do-over but nobody's replied to my email yet, has anyone else had a tech failure completely ruin a pitch?

3 comments

3 Comments

amy_murphy851mo ago

Always keep a paper backup of your key slides printed out. I've had to hand a CFO a stack of papers and just talk through it while my IT guy fixed the laptop. They actually liked it better than the fancy animation stuff.

the_anthony1mo ago

@ben_nguyen had the right idea asking about this. There is something worth clarifying here though. Paper backups work fine for static slides, but you lose any embedded video clips or live data feeds. I watched a VP try to explain a chart that updated in real time during a quarterly review, and he just had to say "trust me, this number will change" over and over. That said, Amy is spot on about execs sometimes preferring the stripped down version without all the transitions and fly-ins. Just make sure your printed set includes timestamps and version numbers so nobody gets confused about which draft they are looking at.

ben_nguyen1mo ago

Does anyone else just carry a printed backup now after a similar tech meltdown in a boardroom?