A pitch deck, or company presentation, is typically a short presentation with the aim of persuasively sharing your company’s overview and business overview with prospective investors, clients, and stakeholders.
Competition for capital is fierce. The average venture capital investor looks at more than 100 opportunities for every one they invest in. Given the odds of getting an investment, a winning company presentation is no longer a “nice to have” but an imperative for every company serious about attracting investors.
For a winning pitch deck, the 10/20/30 rule applies- that is about ten slides, twenty words per slide and no smaller than a font size of thirty. Given these parameters, each slide needs to be relevant, stand out, and the overall deck needs to be highly compelling to prompt investors to want to dig deeper and learn more about the company.
So what information needs to be included for a great company presentation?
Beyond the title page and relevant disclaimers which need to be included, we break it down into seven key questions:
- What is the opportunity?
This is also known as the problem definition slide. This is arguably the most critical slide as it gives legitimacy to the existence of your business. This slide should be clear and concise as any good elevator pitch. Think about if you were trying to explain the opportunity instead of writing it, you’d have about 11 seconds to get your point across. This slide is the written version of that pitch.
- What has been accomplished thus far?
It is important to keep this slide focused on the opportunity and the steps that have been taken towards realising this opportunity. If you were a mining company, perhaps you would have already optioned the property and taken some initial samples. A biotech company might have already identified the problem, gone through the discovery phase and received FDA approval.
- What still needs to be done?
This slide looks at what the company has already accomplished and what still needs to be done to realise the opportunity. This is an important slide in the sense that this explains why the company needs money, and what management intends to do with the money.
- How much is this going to cost and what’s the timeline?
Now in some instances, one cannot speak to costs until certain studies have been completed. Similarly, the timelines are often unclear. However, management should be able to come up with a sensible reason as to why they are raising a particular amount of capital and have at least some broad sense of when they will intend to deploy that capital.
Understanding this point also provides a sense of the type of capital required. If your stage one is only going to last six months and cost $1million, then how is management justifying asking for $5 million to be raised immediately. While having a buffer is great, no investor wants their cash sitting around idle.
- Who is responsible for executing this plan?
This slide is all about management. Who are the people running the company? Is there a panel of experts backing them? Have they done this before? Have they successfully raised money from investors previously and managed to make money for investors. Are they honest? Will they do what they say they are going to do with investor’s money?
Often companies fail, not through lack of funding or poor ideas, but because of poor execution. Having an experienced team gives investors confidence that the team has done it once, and can do it over and over again.
- What is the next milestone?
Another way of phrasing this question is how does an investor objectively know whether the company is achieving its goal of realising the opportunity presented in slide 1. Businesses do not go from zero to a million in a day, rather it is made of several small wins and meeting set milestones. It is important to let investors understand what those milestones are, i.e. what is management doing with the investment and how do they know whether management is achieving their goal?
- Upside potential?
This is what we call blue sky potential. It is what occurs when the business not only goes right, but very right. In a mining company, perhaps the idea is to explore what is believed to be the main vein and one realises that the mineralised ore seam is much thicker than initially thought.
In a company like Zoom – who could have predicted COVID-19 and everyone working from home and widespread adoption rates? Instead of membership uptake following a gradual trajectory, membership skyrocketed almost overnight. This is the slide that allows investors to dream.
One invests on the basis of a business plan, expecting a certain ROI, but it is those unquantifiable, blue sky opportunities that take an investment to the next level.
Once those questions have been answered, then other slides are what we call fillers, these may include, inter alia:
Photos of the product or project, peer comparison, the capital structure, any big names that have already invested and any useful market intelligence that backs your investment thesis.
With the right combination of useful content and visual appeal, your pitch deck will be hard to ignore regardless of your target audience.
PR | Re:public assists companies to prepare a killer pitch deck. Need help with yours? Get in touch with our team today.
