They drop off boxes of material and e-mail huge amounts of data, hoping Nancy Duarte's Silicon Valley firm can turn their mishmash of ideas and facts into a presentation that can rally people behind a cause or product.
For corporate executives and nonprofit leaders who want their presentations to sing, Duarte Design has become the go-to place.
Most notably, her Mountain View, Calif., firm helped Al Gore organize his material and his thoughts on global warming into the presentation that inspired the Academy Award-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth."
The 63-employee company, which brought in $10 million in sales in 2007, has a client list that includes Hewlett-Packard Co., Google Inc., Apple Inc., Electronic Arts Inc., Cisco Systems Inc. and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It even works on the sermons of a Presbyterian pastor.
Duarte, 46, runs the firm, which she owns with her husband. She has never had a sales force, relying on word of mouth to bring in new business even in dry spells.
Duarte is trying to fight bad design, one presentation at a time. PowerPoint, the computer program developed in the late 1980s, made them easy -- perhaps too easy -- to create, and more and more employees are expected to give them.
The results are often flat, bullet-point-ridden affairs, with a presenter dutifully reading the words on the slides as if the audience were suddenly illiterate.
"When presentations are done poorly, we're hiding behind our slides," she said.
She wrote a book called "Slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations," which was published last month. With it, she wants to spark "a revolution of sorts" in visual communication.
Duarte Design does more than make slides. It researches the subject of the presentation, writes the script, adds effects such as sound, animation and video, and coaches the speaker on pacing.
One thing that hasn't changed is her belief that a presentation should tell a story. Like many entrepreneurs, the story of her life and her business are intertwined.
At age 17, Duarte (then named Nancy Childs) found herself the head of her household in Mississippi after her mother left the home and her father's work involved a lot of travel. A year later, she married Mark Duarte, an illustrator and aspiring preacher, and had her first child at 23. She sold parts for high-tech manufacturing to help put her husband through college.
