The Story of E+M Creative

The story behind E+M Creative is one that goes way back.

Growing up, I was surrounded by entrepreneurs. My parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles all ran their own businesses. Like, all of them. What I didn’t know at the time was that I was absorbing all this good knowledge from them about business economics and operation.

This knowledge served me well in college when I decided to study public health out of a desire to help people on a large scale. If public health is new to you, I’ll break it down. Basically it revolves around promoting population-level change through education, resources and trainings. Sounding familiar yet? Stay with me.

After graduation, I found myself in a corporate healthcare position where I helped create a lot of presentations for company leaders. Like a lot of presentations.

Creating the slides that were asked for, I quickly noticed that people weren’t proud of their slides even though so much of their time and planning had gone into them.

While they refused to settle in their lives and careers, they were settling for less-than-mediocre slides. The result of this was seen in a couple of really impactful ways:

1. They didn’t like them so they ignored their slides as much as they could, sometimes even skipping over entire sections mid-presentation. The audience would see them as unprepared or disorganized so they would tune out, turning to their phones or laptops to wait for the session to be over.

2. With this audience disconnect, no one was hearing what they were saying. They were experts in their fields and their message was falling on deaf ears. Their slides were creating a barrier that their message couldn’t get across. Their value was trapped behind bad presentations.

So I started experimenting with different layouts, structures, and animations to try to change that. I worked to better match the slides to the speakers. The result was incredible.

Speaker confidence improved.

Audiences absolutely loved it.

Suddenly, their ideas were getting out.

And the ideas were getting traction.

After trying my hand with this in other industries, I realized that the same struggles were happening all over. Company size didn’t matter. Industry didn’t matter. It was a wide-spread problem.

We end up wasting so much time and energy on visuals that are actually creating a barrier for our ideas to get out.

The problem isn’t that people can’t create slides, the problem is that we’re taught to create slides one specific way.

There is no one idea or one company that is the same. The one-size-fits-all “slide-bullet-bullet” format just doesn’t work for most ideas. It doesn’t blend into the rest of a company’s branding so they end up settling for bad slides.

Knowing the wide-reaching impact of resources and education, the “public health” part of me kicked in and Whitespace Presentation Co. was born.

I created E+M Creative to teach, train, and inspire everyday slide-makers to break out of the presentation cycle of “title-bullet-bullet” that we’ve been trapped in all these years.

It’s time to believe we can do better and show up in our slides with strategy and intention the same we show up in other areas of our careers.

It’s time to stop settling and create slides we’re proud of.