Path to Prosek: Finding My Place, One Slide at a Time

I never knew what I wanted to do when I grew up.

I went to college as “undecided” and eventually chose Political Science, hoping that something would click afterward. During the summers, I took on some temp work to make some money, and I quickly learned that the roles that required PowerPoint skills paid more, because, as it turns out, nobody likes PowerPoint. So naturally, I taught myself how to use the program by pushing buttons just to see what they did until the decks broke, then starting over. It took off from there.

After college, I landed a full-time administrative role at GE Capital, mostly due to my proficiency in PowerPoint, which then became the focus of most of my days.

I eventually left GE Capital to follow my future wife to San Francisco. I remember telling my manager that they really needed to create PowerPoint designer positions across the company because the demand was there.

I saw the move to San Francisco as an opportunity to try something different. I figured there were only so many PowerPoint positions in the world, and it was probably time to start thinking seriously about what I wanted to do when I grew up.

During my job search, I took on temporary administrative positions that required PowerPoint skills, and a couple eventually became full time jobs. I started to accept my fate as the PowerPoint person and eventually went back to school for a 2-year design program. I figured that if I was going to keep landing these roles, I should get some formal training and build skills that would help set me apart.

After eight years in San Francisco, my wife and I decided to move back to Connecticut and I landed back at GE Capital, this time as a Presentation Designer. It was almost as if they were calling me back home. The role was in the Global FP&A group at GE Capital, where I became the PowerPoint person for GE Capital. We were responsible for reporting quarterly earnings and planning, board presentations, investor events, global leadership meetings, and rating agency meetings. After a decade, my little PowerPoint hobby had officially become a real job. The role could get intense due to the importance of the decks we were creating. There were many times when two or more people were standing behind me, watching and waiting for me to make changes for the next deck, and I found that I thrived under that pressure.

After a few years, I was given a heads-up that GE Capital was winding down. I decided to pursue my MBA in Marketing because it was something I always wanted to do to broaden my knowledge and to open more options for myself professionally. Of course, I ended up doing all the PowerPoint work for my teams in class. Pursuing the MBA turned out to be a great decision, because it gave me a stronger understanding of the actual content behind the decks, which in turn helped me create more thought-out layouts based on content, not just prettier visuals.

Now armed with a broader skill set and my third college degree, I went back out into the world looking for my next role. After a couple of months with little progress, I typed “PowerPoint Designer” into a job search. Prosek popped up. I sighed, applied, interviewed, and was turned down. I cannot say I was devastated because I thought my PowerPoint days were behind me, but it still stung. I continued my search with few positive results until, a couple of weeks later, Prosek reached out and asked whether I was still interested in the PowerPoint position. I took the weekend to think about it and ultimately said yes.

Admittedly, that first year was challenging for me. I had just turned 40, had a new degree that I thought would magically open doors, and now I found myself sitting in a small room with three very talented 20-somethings who knew what they wanted to be when they grew up.

Of course, I worked hard and did the best job I possibly could. I loved the team and having people to bounce ideas off of. In the past, it had always been just me and a gaggle of finance folks. I took the entire internal PowerPoint burden off the team; probably 500 decks a year, averaging 35 slides each. This kept me very busy, which I loved, but I still had some disbelief about where I had landed, and that the PowerPoint curse continued. That feeling, however, changed quickly.

I am now in my ninth year with the company, and the path that brought me to Prosek is much less important than the reason I have stayed. At the end of 2019, my wife was diagnosed with cancer, which was the beginning of an incredibly difficult period in my life, but everyone at Prosek rallied around me. The team was extraordinarily supportive and gave me the flexibility to take whatever time I needed and do whatever I had to do to support my wife. She eventually beat cancer, and the experience changed my perspective. I realized that my title did not matter and neither did the specific work I was doing. What mattered, was being part of a team that genuinely looked out for one another, which is something more special, and less common, than it should be. I also admitted to myself that cranking out PowerPoint decks was what I was meant to do, and I was lucky to find a niche that has kept me employed and that I had come to master.

Prosek has more than doubled in size since I joined. We brought in more people to help  with the PowerPoint demand, and we now see nearly 1,000 internal decks a year. My role has expanded to designing and/or producing templates and presentations for our clients, which has been a very welcome challenge filled with learning different personalities, working with different brands, creating templates that will be used by whole other companies, and knowing that every presentation they create will say “Authored by Bryan Fern” in the info tab.

It has been an incredible journey to watch my coworkers, and the company grow, especially the design team, which has become a formidable force. I have also grown and learned a lot from those around me which keeps me motivated.

People still tell me how much they hate PowerPoint. I get it. But it has been good to me, and I feel fortunate to continue deciphering slides from my quiet corner of Prosek’s Connecticut office.