Customer story
How Engage Technique Cut Presentation Time by 75% Without Compromising Its Brand
- Engage Technique
- Professional Services
- Leadership & Organisational Development
- United Kingdom
“It’s the best money I spent last year on a subscription.”
Mark Whybrow
Founder and Director · Engage Technique · United Kingdom
TL;DR: Mark switched to Slidely because it was the first AI deck tool that didn’t force him into someone else’s templates. His typical deck creation time dropped by 75%, and one client has since grown from one licence to ten.
- 75%
- Less time to build a typical 15-slide training deck
- 10
- Licences at one client, grown from a single introduction
- Zero
- Template rebuilds—every deck stays in Engage Technique’s branding
Mark Whybrow has 25 years of senior commercial experience, primarily at Philips Electronics and Shell, where he contributed to strategy work and developed key presentations. A decade ago, he founded Engage Technique, a UK consultancy that helps leadership teams make informed decisions. As a senior-only practice without an in-house design team, every client deliverable still needs to reflect the firm’s brand and credibility.
The challenge
For years, Mark designed every deck himself from scratch using his business template. The way a presentation looks matters deeply in a business built on personal credibility.
He tried freelance services such as Fiverr, but still had to handle the revisions himself. The leading AI presentation tools created the same problem: they imposed their own design systems and broke his fonts, colours, and layouts when he moved the content back into his corporate template.
“All the leading tools I looked at were using in-house design templates. As soon as I transposed what I’d created into my own template, all the fonts and colours went wrong—I had to redo it all. I wasn’t really that much better off.”
His work also involves rapid iteration—from organisational design assignments to fast-moving board sessions. With tight deadlines, handing a deck to a designer often meant sacrificing either speed or design quality.
The solution
The one requirement that decided everything
“If you stopped being able to use my corporate template, I’d stop using Slidely.”
Every AI deck tool Mark tried before Slidely forced his content into someone else’s design system. Slidely was the first that didn’t.
That single capability made him choose Slidely from the start—and it remains essential to the way he works.
A workflow built for how decks actually get made
Mark starts with content developed through earlier meetings. He uses Otter AI to transcribe conversations with clients and boards, then combines those transcripts with his own insights in ChatGPT to create a concise brief. That brief flows into Slidely, which turns it into an on-brand presentation.
He uses the workflow across organisational design and leadership-training projects. When training decks risk becoming too dense, Slidely’s project-level style controls help him steer the output toward a clearer, more visual result.
Buying back time for the work that matters
“The fact that it fits my workflow well means it’s easy to use—but the real outcome is that my productivity is better, and I look better, because the output looks better. I’m quite good at PowerPoint myself, but I can’t make it look as polished as Slidely can.”
For an annual European leadership programme, Mark previously prepared the entire presentation by hand. This year, Slidely will handle the repetitive presentation work while preserving consistency, leaving him more time for the parts of the engagement that require his expertise.
The impact
Reduced deck build time by 75%
A typical one-day training programme requires around 15 slides. Mark previously spent half a day creating that deck manually. With Slidely, he now completes the initial build in about an hour, makes a few final adjustments, and invests the remaining time in work that cannot be automated.
From one introduction to ten users
“I showed a client my slides, and they asked how mine looked so good. I told them about Slidely—they got one licence, and now ten people across that business use it. It still keeps growing, because it uses their own template too. That’s the real game-changer.”
There was no formal sales process. A client saw Mark’s slides, asked how they looked so polished, and started using Slidely. The account grew from one licence to ten because the same advantage applied to their team: Slidely worked inside their own template too.
Consistent, polished output without a design team
Engage Technique does not have an internal design team to check every presentation. Slidely now provides that consistency, ensuring each deck uses Mark’s corporate template regardless of how old or complex it is.
Create presentations without leaving your brand behind
See Slidely in action
Discover how Slidely turns your content into polished, editable PowerPoint slides using your own company template.