- Courtney Allen is a 35-year-old freelancer who has made over $4 million designing PowerPoint presentations, alongside running an agency with a team of six staffers. It all started with her love for making slideshows for her family as a kid—and there are low barriers of entry to get into the overlooked profession.
PowerPoints go deeper than class projects in high school—there’s a multimillion-dollar industry out there that most people don’t even know about. One entrepreneur reignited her childhood passion for slideshows and turned it into a $4 million career.
“I’ve always loved PowerPoint, which is kind of strange. But when I was a kid I would design PowerPoints for my family when I was at my grandparents house,” Courtney Allen, a 35-year-old presentation design freelancer, tells Fortune. “So I went through school and in college got a degree in graphic design.”
Allen wasn’t entirely sure of what opportunities awaited her, but knew that PowerPoints had become a fixture of the corporate world; in 2019 alone, it’s estimated that 35 million presentations were given each day to 500 million users globally. She figured there was business to be made—and she was not wrong.
After graduating from Boise State University in Idaho, she landed a contract gig with Cisco on Craigslist and became a dedicated presentation designer for senior executives at the $191 billion technology giant.
As if making presentations for work wasn’t enough, she also opened up an account on Upwork to do the same in her free time on a freelance basis in 2013—it’s since raked in over 1,000 clients, a staggering $2.5 million and paved the way for her to build her own design empire.
A Yelp inquest turned the side hustle into a business
Allen was gradually chipping away at her freelance business and growing her clients list, until an inquest from Yelp in August 2016burst the door open. The $2.32 billion reviews company wanted 50 slideshow decks from Allen, which was a hefty task to undertake alone alongside her other customers.
That’s when she had the lightbulb moment to bring a dedicated team into the fold to juggle all her new clients, helping her scale the business and inspiring her to launch a dedicated presentation design firm 16X9.
“From there, I started bringing in contractors, most of them I worked with at Cisco. So I’ve been building this relationship with the same people for over a decade,” Allen says.
Then, Allen’s second big break came during the pandemic. Now that teams were remote, a surge in need for her PowerPoint services led the company’s revenue to double in 2021—and by 2022, 16X9 had hit seven figures.
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“The value of having a well-designed presentation is something that, especially when COVID hit, became more important. That’s really when I saw an uptick in work,” Allen says. “We saw that a lot of these in-person, offline conferences were taken fully virtually. They had extra budget to spend, and needed to keep people’s attention, particularly over the computer screen.”
Now, Allen’s company clientele list includes a few heavyweights: including P&G, Adobe, Johnson & Johnson, Micron, and Home Depot. She was also contracted as the art director for Microsoft—where she created over 1,000 new templates for Office—as well as a senior hybrid designer for Coca-Cola in April 2019. Across both her company and the $2.5 million she’s brought in from freelancing, Allen has raked in over $4 million designing presentations for industry heavyweights.
“[The industry is] definitely more competitive, as people hear more about presentation design. There are more people in the space, and even a few people that I’ve mentored myself,” she adds. “But I do think there is overall a lot of work to go around.”
Advice for Gen Z wanting to get in
Allen says her yearly salary—ranging between $200,000 and $300,000 annually—is four times higher than what she would’ve made at Cisco. That’s a pretty penny for a profession most people don’t know exists—for many, PowerPoint spurs middle-school nostalgia or is associated with McKinsey’s junior bankers. But there’s a whole market out there that more people are tapping into, especially with AI. And with millions of PowerPoints being made everyday, there’s a real appetite for maestros of the craft, Allen says.
Becoming a presentation designer is moderately accessible, too—Allen says there aren’t too many requirements to get started.
Those interested should get their skills certified, she recommends, and take up other online courses in design principles. But curiosity is really at the heart of this overlooked profession; job-seekers should look into presentation guilds, and get involved in presentation design communities on Slack and LinkedIn. They could become their own boss—and lead a $4 million career.
“Just dive into the community,” Allen says. “I don’t think college is required for this profession. I think getting Microsoft Office certified in PowerPoint is a good step as far as technical abilities. Then learn the whole marketing and business stuff as you go.”
