Stop Making Silly Mistakes in Your Slides
Silly mistakes hurt your reputation. You can avoid them by having a solid quality control process. In this post, I share a Zero-Defect guide, a 15-point checklist, and an AI skill to check your slides
Do you know what silently kills your productivity and reputation?
It’s making silly mistakes in your slides.
It feels like death by a thousand cuts.
Let me give you an example.
In this post, I share a full guide on how to stop silly mistakes in your slides. Also, it goes together with a 15-point checklist and an AI skill you can use in your daily work.
The link is at the end of this post…
I was an EM on a strategy project. I staffed a second-year consultant.
Initially, I liked how she worked. She seemed smart, capable, and motivated.
But one thing slowly eroded my trust in her.
She would always send me slides with silly mistakes: typos, formatting mistakes, and inconsistencies.
But the worst part was that her pages did not improve over time. Even after a few iterations, I kept spotting the same mistakes.
I gave her feedback multiple times, but the situation didn’t improve materially. She would just shrug it off as unimportant.
At some point, I gave up and started editing her slides myself before sending them to partners and clients. Because her work represented mine. It was my responsibility to uphold the quality standards of the team.
It hurt my productivity as an EM, but I didn’t want to keep bugging her.
Eventually, I branded her as uncoachable.
Believe me, you don’t want this to happen to you as a consultant. That’s the moment when your leaders give up on you. You won’t even know what happened.
Then you wonder why you can’t get any traction with your managers and partners. Why does staffing become so difficult? Why don’t they support you in performance reviews?
Her performance wasn’t bad enough for me to flag her to staffing. But I just decided not to work with her again.
And of course, when the evaluator called, I shared the honest feedback. At two years of tenure, that feedback must have been quite damaging.
Here’s the truth:
Every silly mistake and unnecessary iteration slowly erodes your reputation.
This job is already hard enough. You don’t need to make it harder by making unforced mistakes that can be avoided.
Remember, you work in MBB consulting. You are an elite operator in a highly competitive environment. Partners and clients expect impeccable outputs from you.
Don’t hurt yourself. Don’t make partners see you as a consultant who always produces crappy outputs.
Be meticulous. Always polish your outputs. Every iteration counts.
But if you are an MBB consultant, most likely you have this question in mind:
How do you eliminate silly mistakes for good?
You must create a working process that catches these mistakes before your seniors see them. You must implement robust quality control checks.
In my new Zero-Defect Guide, I discuss in detail how to do that.
If you are an MBB consultant and want to stop making careless mistakes, download a set of tools I created:
+ Zero-Defect Guide to improve your process
+ 15-point checklist of the most common mistakes
+ AI Skill for OpenAI Codex or Claude Cowork/Code
>> Get Zero-Defect Guide + Checklist + AI Skill
If you are an MBB consultant and want to improve your performance through personalized coaching support:
BOOK A FREE 1-1 CONSULTATION CALL
We will discuss your pain points, challenges, and aspirations. It’s a no-commitment call, just straight answers to your biggest questions.
If you want to learn more about my coaching program, read this post:
The coaching program for MBB consultants.