A few years ago, I served on the board of the US’s Presentation Guild.

I had 10 years in the industry by then, but serving on the PG board gave me a broader view of the industry than I had had before.

And you know what? I had noticed this issue before, but being on that board, I saw that it was a wider-spread issue than I had realized. Here’s the issue:

A lot of presentation designers and presentation trainers are really good at what they do, but they aren’t very good at articulating why the company hired them to do it.

Here’s what I mean by that: Companies don’t hire presentation designers and trainers (or the HR people who often play a part in hiring them) because they improve [insert whatever you think you’re helping]. They hire them because they can improve one or two of the lines on the company’s Profit and Loss statement.

So this advice is for presentation designers and trainers, but it’s for everyone else, too:

If you are presenting to your department manager, or the CEO, or the board, you need to tie what you do, and the project you are discussing in your presentation, to one, or at most, two (if it’s a ratio), lines on the P&L.

You don’t need to make your whole presentation, or your whole life, about the P&L. It’s perfectly fine to know, in your heart of hearts, that what you do is qualitatively valuable, difficult, special, etc.

But you do need to insert into your presentation one or two slides about how your project impacts the P&L, and you do need to be fairly articulate when speaking about it.

So you need to know how to read P&Ls in general, and in particular, you need to know how to read your company’s P&L. If you don’t have a copy of your company’s P&L, ask your department manager, or the CXO in your reporting line, for it. Some companies are more secretive than others. If yours is one of them, and you cannot get a copy of its P&L, read a lot of them from other companies (publicly-traded companies are almost always required by law to issue them), and you’ll start to see patterns, and you’ll be able to estimate what your company’s P&L probably looks like.