BizClarity

Over the last ten years coaching and helping CEO’s create investor presentations, I’ve learned to adjust my technique to the skill level of the CEO and the quality of the presentation first offered to me as the starting point for my coaching.  My approach to salvage a misguided mess is not the same as what I do with an already excellent presentation to take it up a notch.

But I found I had trouble convincing other people that guidelines and coaching had to be matched to presentation level.  In particular, I have a running argument with venture advisors and event organizers who insist on imposing something like a twelve-slide template (or the “10-slide Rule,” or similar formulas)  on all companies, with no regard for the skill and experience of the CEO presenter.  In my experience, the templates are a lifesaver for some, yet a condescending and destructive intrusion for others.

Enter the BizClarity Presentation Scale.  I devised it at first to argue against forcing all companies to squeeze their story into the same template.  Now that I’ve worked with it for a while, I serves as a tool for making intelligent decisions about presentations at any level on the scale between disaster and perfection.

The BizClarity Presentation Scale maps four levels of presentation quality:

• Train Wreck
• Good Enough
• Outstanding
• Insanely Great

Trainwreck

A Trainwreck is a presentation that is, at best, confusing and forgettable.  At worst, it alienates investors who remember the presentation–and the company–as a waste of time.  A Trainwreck is characterized by any or all of the following:

• Wrong content, big gaps in the business story
• Too much detail
• Too technical, full of jargon and acronyms
• Too salesy, loaded with product features
• Bad slides, cluttered and unreadable
• Poor delivery, poor contact with the audience
• Rushing, or taking too long
• Bad attitude of the presenter

Trainwreck is not too strong a word for some of the regrettable presentations seen at every venture fair or endured by investors in private meetings.  At the risk of being overly dramatic, I use the word to drive home the point that trainwrecks can’t be ignored because they’re a drain on the entire venture network.

Companies who show up at venture fairs or at investors offices unprepared and expecting to “wing it,” or who are ignorant and ill-advised, not only waste a good opportunity, but they do lasting damage to their reputation and their ability to raise money.  Investors waste time and are unhappy.  When otherwise deserving companies blow their presentations, the venture community could be missing out on a promising technology.

The good news is that Trainwrecks are avoidable.  With the right knowledge and tools, it is possible and worth the effort to fix them.

Good Enough

A Good Enough presentation avoids the utter embarrassment of a Trainwreck.  At a minimum, it is an organized run-through of a checklist of topics that investors expect to hear.  The slides are legible, though often they still suffer from too much clutter.

A Good Enough presentation can be created by:

• Following a list of “recommended slides”
• Following basic rules for good slide design
• Targeting the presentation to the investor audience, and no other
• The CEO rehearsing the presentation, and responding to feedback
• Keeping within the time limit without rushing

A Good Enough presentation is accepted as the standard in the venture community.  Although it may lurch from one idea to the next and force the audience to decide for themselves which ideas are primary and which are secondary, it gives enough information for investors to decide if they want to follow up.  They may not remember the company a day later—presentations that follow formulas tend to all sound the same—but at least they weren’t left with a negative impression.

Good Enough delivery is confident, but not inspiring.  The CEO demonstrates familiarity with the slides and expands what is on the screen while making good eye contact with the audience.  (Curiously, it’s common to see a CEO give a limp delivery, then come to life during the Q&A.)

The main problem with a Good Enough presentation is that it gives investors just enough information to say “no.”  It doesn’t make the case well for how the company is different or convey an urgency for investment.

Outstanding

An Outstanding presentation showcases the company as a special opportunity—the company stands out.  It leads the audience to understand, without straining, the key ideas that make this company unique.  It anticipates and counters major objections before investors can dwell on them.

An Outstanding presentation is constructed to highlight the core story that animates the company.  The ideas unfold in a way that build the story from the beginning, ending with a persuasive argument for investment.  All the elements—narrative, slides, and delivery—contribute to the impression of a quality company led by a CEO who communicates well.

An Outstanding presentation is full of reasons why investors should want to know more and say ‘yes’ to a second meeting.  It is the one that investors recall first when asked that evening, “See anything good today?”  Because the company’s story is so cogent and repeatable, it creates buzz.

Insanely Great

An Insanely Great presentation is very rare.  The audience becomes so engaged from the first word and image, they forget to take notes.  They follow the story, get excited, and make it a priority to follow-up to find out more.  The quality of the presentation itself creates buzz.

Insanely Great presentations are the artful merging of ideas, images, and showmanship.  They require the highest skill and inspiration to create.  Many iterations of slides and content and hours of rehearsal are what it takes to rise to the pinnacle of Insanely Great.

The phrase “insanely great” is a Steve Jobs expression.  His presentations are notorious examples of how exceptional communications can be a decisive factor in a company’s success.

Although Insanely Great is a level very few companies will ever achieve, it serves as the epitome of perfection, an ideal to aim for.  The hope is that by working to be Insanely Great, more presentations will be Outstanding, and not just Good Enough.

How to Use The BizClarity Presentation Scale

The BizClarity Presentation Scale is offered as a tool to guide the efforts of CEO’s, advisors, and coaches.  It is a language for talking about what works, what doesn’t, and why.

Specifically, it’s a framework for making tactical decisions about how much time and effort to commit to the investor presentation.  What minimal effort is needed to avoid a disaster?  How far do you want to take it?  Is it worth it?  What do you address first, second, third?  What results can be realistically expected?  At what point do you ask for help?

In the course of looking for something else in the blogosphere, I came across the writings of Steve Blank, a serial entrepreneur and professor at the Stanford Business School.  (He has a blog, and lots of his videos, podcasts, and articles are all over the Internet.  All good stuff.)

Prof. Blank is known for fresh thinking and new ideas on entrepreneurship that are firmly grounded in his real-world experience founding and running and investing in venture start-ups.  He has self-published a book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, that reportedly is as hard to read as it is revolutionary.

My plan was to get the book, read it, and then tell you about it.  But this morning I twice found myself describing some of the ideas to CEO’s I was talking to.  So I decided not to wait.

The fastest way to give you a taste for these ideas is to quote a big chunk of a blog post by Eric Reis on this blog Lessons Learned.  All that follows is a shameless cut-and-paste from Eric’s post.  The exact post is here.  Thanks Eric.

There’s so much crammed into The Four Steps to the Epiphany that I want to distill out what I see as the key points:

1. Get out of the building. Very few startups fail for lack of technology. They almost always fail for lack of customers. Yet surprisingly few companies take the basic step of attempting to learn about their customers (or potential customers) until it is too late. I’ve been guilty of this many times in my career – it’s just so easy to focus on product and technology instead. True, there are the rare products that have literally no market risk; they are all about technology risk (”cure for cancer”). For the rest of us, we need to get some facts to inform and qualify our hypotheses (”fancy word for guesses”) about what kind of product customers will ultimately buy.And this is where we find Steve’s maxim that “In a startup no facts exist inside the building, only opinions.” Most likely, your business plan is loaded with opinions and guesses, sprinkled with a dash of vision and hope. Customer development is a parallel process to product development, which means that you don’t have to give up on your dream. We just want you to get out of the building, and start finding out whether your dream is a vision or a delusion. Surprisingly early, you can start to get a sense for who the customer of your product might be, how you’ll reach them, and what they will ultimately need. Customer development is emphatically not an excuse to slow down or change the plan every day. It’s an attempt to minimize the risk of total failure by checking your theories against reality.
2. Read more

I found this slide deck while surfing SlideShare.   It from North Venture Partners from Oakland, California, a firm with progressive ideas for helping entrepreneurs.  Clearly this is a group that has seen a lot of start-ups fail and out of frustration are driven to prevent more companies from making the same mistakes.

All the points made in this deck ring true.  Some of the “fails” have to do generally with getting your company venture ready.  Some are direct hits on what to say and do–or NOT say or do–in an investor pitch.

The slides all use full-screen photographs.  But the text obscures half of the photograph in each slide.  So for that reason, don’t copy this style exactly as a model for your slides.

However, my guess is what you see here is a presentation deck that has been modified to work as a stand-alone deck on SlideShare and embedded in blogs (like BizClarity).  It is a model to be emulated if you imagine the slides without the blocks of text, with only the “Fail,” “Fix” graphics and headlines positioned in a dead portion of each photo,  and with the text delivered as a spoken narrative.

The photos themselves are a good example of how to do photo selection right.  The photo in each case expands on the meaning of the slide, and adds humor or drama without being coy or cliched.

Photo selection is never as easy as it looks.  It takes time, good hunting skills, and lots of trial and error.  But when you find just the right photo, you know it.  It pops off the screen, gets a chuckle from the audience, and gives a palpable boost to your narrative.  (That said, there are a couple photos in this deck I don’t think work well.  Can you guess which ones?)