BizClarity

Here’s a piece I wrote for the Angel Venture Fair.  Lots of specifics here for avoiding a Trainwreck Presentation and building a Good Enough presentation.  Tending to these basic elements is also prerequisite to advancing your presentation to Outstanding.  (See the previous blog entry, just below this one, to see what I’m talking about.)

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There is a lot of advice floating around on how to do an investor presentation:   “Be concise.”  “Be compelling.”  “Show how you’re unique.”  Etc.

None of this advice is wrong.  But it’s too general to be much use when you’re staring down a deadline and struggling to describe two years of work and planning in ten minutes.

Some of the common advice out there does more harm than good—especially prescriptive lists of required slides and investor topics.  Why harmful?  Think about it.  How can you rise above the pack, show you’re different, and capture the attention of jaded investors if your presentation is built from the same formula as the next company?

To be honest, building a truly outstanding presentation requires lots of time, hard work, and all the communication skill and creativity you can muster.

But you have a deadline.  So here is a list of hard-hitting, practical tips you can apply immediately to help you avoid errors in your next investor pitch.

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1.  Start fresh.  Don’t recycle slides from other types of presentations—marketing or technical.

2.  Start analog.  Don’t open PowerPoint first. Storyboard and outline the narrative on paper or a whiteboard.

3.  As you write the narrative outline, build a list of all the ways you might use to show each point by using an image, photo, or prop.  You won’t use every idea, but this will get you thinking visually.

4.  Devote roughly 20% of the narrative to describing the product itself.  Do it in two ways:  1) Customer facing—how does it satisfy a real customer need?  2) Secret sauce—how is your solution different from all other solutions? (Keep it short by leaving out most of the feature/benefit detail from your sales brochures.)

5.  Devote the remaining 80% of the narrative to describing how you build a sustainable business around the product.

6. Don’t just give rote team bios.  Instead, match the specific strengths of the team to the particular challenges of the venture.

7.  If the market is specialized or unfamiliar, estimate addressable market.  If the market is obviously huge, don’t waste time discussing it.

8.  Structure with stories, not slides:

• Organize the entire presentation around the core story that drives your success.
• Find the core story by asking yourselves the questions:  Why you?  Why now?
• Tell the opportunity story in the first half.  What drives the opportunity?  How big is it?  How do you createcustomer value?  (Use images as much as possible in this part.)
• Tell the business story in the second half, with the focus on execution:  How do you capture customer value and make money?  (Fewer images, more text and numbers.)
• Wind up with the investment story:  How will investor money make a difference?

9.  Keep it short by talking at high outline level.  Select only the most telling examples and facts to illustrate your argument.  Prune out everything else.  Prune again.

10.  Keep it short by being intentionally incomplete:

• Illustrate, don’t prove.  No need to pile on evidence at this stage.
• If it’s 80% true, it’s true.  No need to qualify every statement, or cite every exception.

11.  Watch your language.  No jargon or acronyms (unless you define first).  Talk in common business language—match the vocabulary and writing style of The Wall Street Journal.

12.  Forget everything you learned at you corporate job about how to do slides.

13.  Design slides to serve exclusively as visual support for your narrative, not to do double duty as print-outs or stand-along executive summary.  This frees you to use more images and less text.

14.  The number of slides is irrelevant.  The audience doesn’t care.  Don’t count slides.

15.  Slide density is relevant.  Use as many slides as you need to keep slide density low.  Spread multi-part ideas across many slides.

16.  Use lots of white space.  Resist the temptation to fill every inch of every slide.

17.  Where possible, use full-size, high resolution photographs to help the audience see what you’re talking about.  Fill all or most of the slide with the photograph, bleeding to the edge.

18.  Don’t use a busy template or one that eats up too much slide area.

19.  You don’t have to put a title and logo on every page.  For example, if you want to show a photo full screen, eliminate the title.

20.  Don’t put your entire script on the slides.  Rehearse to remember what to say.

21.  No full paragraphs on a slide, ever!  Avoid long sentences.  Telegraphic, “billboard-style” phrases are best.

22.  Don’t frustrate the audience.  Eliminate anything on a slide that can’t be seen easily from the back of the room.  No exceptions.

• No fonts smaller than 24 pts.
• Sans-serif fonts like Ariel, Calibri, Verdana, Century Gothic are easier to read.
• Use only high contrast colors, especially for text.
• Prune charts, graphs, diagrams down to the bare essentials so they can be grasped in a few seconds.  Label directly on the chart elements whenever possible.  No tiny keys.
• Never more than ONE chart or graph per slide, and make it big enough to fill the screen, even if that means eliminating the title, logo, and everything else on that slide.
• Title Case in Bullets is Hard to Read.  Use sentence case instead.

23.  Don’t be cheesy:  shun clip art and clichéd images like the plague (examples: business people shaking hands, chess pieces, piles of money).

24.  No agendas, a mission statements, or “Thank you” or “Questions?” slides.

25.  Always show financial projections as a table, not a graph.  Simplify to no more than 5 or 6 rows.  Round to thousands.  Annual projections, not quarterly.  Three years, maybe four or five.

26.  In financial projections, use “Goldilocks numbers”—not too hot, not too cold, just right.  Never, ever say the words “conservative numbers.”

27.  Don’t calculate any type of investment return, or say anything about offering terms.  Don’t show a valuation (but be prepared for the question).

28.  Rehearse at least three times out loud, in full voice.  Time your presentation and practice until you can do it in 30 seconds less than the allotted time.

29.  Practice maximizing eye contact.  Speak to the screen and you’re dead.

30.  Begin and end with the same title slide that includes your logo, presenter’s name, and contact information, possibly the amount of the raise.

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