Commerce CRG Mid-Year - Qtr2 2006 Market Review Utah County Office

Office Market – Utah County Overall

Type	Total SF	Available	Vacancy
Class A	3,417,565	337,385	9.72%
Class B	2,6633,061	245,725	9.23%
Condo	1,171,2 62	58,959	5.01%
Totals	7 ,312,803	642,071	8.75%

Office Market – Provo

Type	Total SF	Available	Vacancy
Class A	1,290,800	175,175	13.57%
Class B	1,240,111	142,242	11.47%
Condo	364,144	14,16 7	3.89%
Totals	2,895,055	331 ,584	11.45%

Office Market – Orem

Type	Total SF	Available	Vacancy
Class A	1,294,985	138,045	10.66%
Class B	670,931	83,139	12. 39%
Condo	618,941	36,05 9	5.83%
Totals	2,584,857	257 ,243	9.95%

Office Market – Utah County North

Type	Total SF	Available	Vacancy
Class A	885,780	24,165	2.7 3%
Class B	518,254	15,700	3.0 3%
Condo	127,220	6,733	5.29%
Totals	1,531,254	46, 598	3.04%

Office Market – Utah County South

Type	Total SF	Available	Vacancy
Class A	-	-	-
Class B	234,377	4,646	1.98 %
Condo	67,260	2,000	2.97%
Totals	301,637	6,646	2.20%

Founder of McKinsey's values

Companies that place emphasis on an ethical culture often owe this commitment to the vision of a forceful founder. That is true of McKinsey, the consultancy led for many years by the late Marvin Bower, who believed it was the job of a leader to shape a set of common values that would help an organisation grow.

Executives in well-run companies, he observed, often referred to "our philosophy" or "the way we do things round here". Such a philosophy evolves as a set of guidelines or rules that gradually become established, through trial and error or through leadership, as expected patterns of behaviour.

McKinsey's stated values today still substantially reflect Bower's philosophy. High ethical standards, he argued, contributed to three main competitive advantages:

• A business of high principle generates greater drive and effectiveness because people know they can do the right thing decisively and with confidence. They know that any action that is even slightly unprincipled will be generally condemned.
• It attracts high-calibre people, thereby gaining a basic competitive edge.
• It develops better and more profitable relations with customers, competitors and the public because it can be counted on to do the right thing at all times.

Under Bower integrity at McKinsey was paramount. "If you are not willing to take the pain to live by your principles," he once remarked, "there is no point in having principles." When one of McKinsey's most talented and prolific generators of fees became involved in a serious conflict of interest that violated the firm's values, Bower gave him 30 minutes to clear out.

Source: The Financial Times, Qtr2 2006

The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint

As a venture capitalist, I have to listen to hundreds of entrepreneurs pitch their companies. Most of these pitches are crap: sixty slides about a “patent pending,” “first mover advantage,” “all we have to do is get 1% of the people in China to buy our product” startup. These pitches are so lousy that I’m losing my hearing, there’s a constant ringing in my ear, and every once in while the world starts spinning.

I am trying to evangelize the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. While I’m in the venture capital business, this rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc.

Ten is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting—and venture capitalists are very normal. (The only difference between you and venture capitalist is that he is getting paid to gamble with someone else’s money). If you must use more than ten slides to explain your business, you probably don’t have a business. The ten topics that a venture capitalist cares about are:

• Problem
• Your solution
• Business model
• Underlying magic/technology
• Marketing and sales
• Competition
• Team
• Projections and milestones
• Status and timeline
• Summary and call to action

You should give your ten slides in twenty minutes. Sure, you have an hour time slot, but you’re using a Windows laptop, so it will take forty minutes to make it work with the projector. Even if setup goes perfectly, people will arrive late and have to leave early. In a perfect world, you give your pitch in twenty minutes, and you have forty minutes left for discussion.

The majority of the presentations that I see have text in a ten point font. As much text as possible is jammed into the slide, and then the presenter reads it. However, as soon as the audience figures out that you’re reading the text, it reads ahead of you because it can read faster than you can speak. The result is that you and the audience are out of synch.

The reason people use a small font is twofold: first, that they don’t know their material well enough; second, they think that more text is more convincing. Total bozosity. Force yourself to use no font smaller than thirty points. I guarantee it will make your presentations better because it requires you to find the most salient points and to know how to explain them well. If “thirty points,” is too dogmatic, the I offer you an algorithm: find out the age of the oldest person in your audience and divide it by two. That’s your optimal font size.

So please observe the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. If nothing else, the next time someone in your audience complains of hearing loss, ringing, or vertigo, you’ll know what caused the problem. One last thing: to learn more about the zen of great presentations, check out a site called Presentation Zen by my buddy Garr Reynolds.

Source: Compass Point, 2006