An investor pitch is the story of you, your business idea, the opportunity you're chasing, what money you need to make it happen, what result you are predicting and what reward your investors get when it all comes good. That's the logical progress of the story and that's the logical way to present it to potential investors.
What a pitch deck often struggles to get across is the energy, confidence and broad market knowledge that the founding team have, so potential investors are going to be watching you and your presentation like hawks. This is Show-Time; time to bring out your best, animated, confident, knowledgeable self.
Slide 1 - Vision & Mission
This is your big idea and is such a powerful statement that everyone in the room stops fidgeting and takes notice. Something like: Vision - "We envisage a World in which not a single animal is slaughtered for human consumption” and then Mission - "We are creating a range of vegetarian & vegan foods that are so incredibly delicious no-one will ever want to eat animal flesh ever again." Simple and to the point. The audience knows your vision is bold and your mission goes straight to the heart of it.
Slide 2 - The Founding Team
"People buy people first." You know if you trust someone a few seconds after meeting them, and investors will be interested in your personality, intellect, experience and drive/ambition. The question they are asking is, "do I trust this person/team with my money?" That comes immediately before, "do I believe in this opportunity?" and "does this team have the experience/knowledge/tools/runway to deliver?"
Slide 3 - Why?
Why is this such a big opportunity? Why now? You need to explain why you believe there is a market for what you're proposing and why the time is right to go after it. Remember, one of the main reasons businesses fail is that there is no market for what they're offering - you're too early, too late or too myopic. Timing is everything.
Slide 4 - How?
How do you plan to exploit this opportunity? What's the USP that makes you different from everyone else, and, crucially, how do you protect that advantage. Hint: although investors might like the idea of generating patents, no-one is stupid enough to actually think you can protect a business with them. Be careful, the intellectual property discussion can be a bit of a minefield. What's your secret sauce and how do you maintain it? That's what they're really asking.
Slide 5 - Competition
This isn't simply a list of the competition, but a quick SWOT (4 short bullets) of each major competitor and why there is a place in the market for you. Please don't fall into the trap of using price as a competitive advantage - talk about the value you generate, not how cheap you are. An infographic can be a quick way to show where you are in relation to the competition.
Slide 6 - Business Model
Here you explain what the business is (i.e. what you're selling) and how it generates revenue, creates a profit and delivers cash. Not how much it delivers (which comes later), but how it delivers. Future investors will be particularly interested in the money needed to get the business fit to fully exploit the opportunity (usually called traction), the planned gross & net profit positions and whether it generates or consumes cash. They will also want to understand the working capital position as your business grows. Ultimately, businesses hit the wall because they run out of cash and go bankrupt, so investors will want to understand how quickly cash is consumed, whether the business has time to generate some traction before it does and what the next investment round might need to be.
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