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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Everything you do or say during a presentation has an effect on the audience. Nothing can be taken for granted. Starting with the TITLE SLIDE.
If your title slide is uninviting, amateur-looking, or cheesy, your presentation is going downhill even before you open your mouth.
Yum! Can't wait to sit through this one.
What's that crap at the top? Who is the presenter? What pre-schooler did the logo?
There’s really no excuse for a bad title slide. Because a good title slide is easy to do, a no-brainer, if you know a few basic rules.
Safe-Harbor Title Slide Design
Here are some basic, no-fault rules for a clean, serviceable title slide. With examples.
If you’ve been reading my blog posts for a while, you’ve seen me refer to Presentation Zen more than once? What is Presentation Zen?
Presentation Zen is a book.
When I discovered this book last year, it changed the way I do and teach presentations. If you’re still among the millions who think that any respectable business presentation has to have slides of mostly text organized into bullets and sub-bullets, get the book. Spending just a few minutes leafing through the examples in Presentation Zen is the first step on the long journey to presentation satori.
The author, Garr Reynolds, is a product of Silicon Valley but now lives and works in Japan. Thus the “zen” part of his approach is somewhat authentic.
Presentation Zen is a DVD.
True story. I was invited to help coach the presentations of the ten companies incubated at DreamIt Ventures this summer. I hadn’t done the initial coaching of the presentations, so they were pretty far along before I joined the process.
I was blown away at what I saw. After the first few, I exclaimed to the group, “What’s going on here? These are great, visual presentations–exactly the style I teach! Who taught you to do this?”
I know what the ultimate, modern-day slide presentation should look like. I can visualize it, and I’ve seen it done successfully in investor presentations. Rich visuals, minimal text, lots of white space. I push the book Presentation Zen on everybody I meet because it evangelizes the promised land of rich visuals, minimal text, lots of white space.
But when I’m working with a client and time is short, it’s unrealistic to expect somebody who’s been thoroughly inculcated in what I call the “old school” text-heavy style to make radical changes overnight. So I’ve developed a list of short cuts , a few easy steps for making slides more visual and readable that can be applied to an existing presentation literally overnight. These aren’t the ultimate solution, but they yield the highest return-on-effort for a time-crunched entrepreneur.
Here is the BizClarity Cure for Clutter:
Financial projections are, on the surface, a futile exercise. Nobody believes them. Studies prove that 98% of actual business results of start-up companies are less than projected and take twice the time, compared to the projections in the business plans. Yet investors insist on seeing them, and complain if you leave them out of your presentation. Why?
Because financial projections serve two functions.
A ten-minute pitch used at venture fairs and first meetings with investors should (almost) always include financial projections.
But most entrepreneurs do them wrong.
Any type of graph is useless. Use a table. Investors are numbers people who are most comfortable with real numbers. Save graphs for data sets of greater than 30 numbers.
THIS IS UPPER CASE.
this is lower case.
This is sentence case.
This Is Title Case.
Title case is for titles, not for bullets. When I see title case in bullets and sub-bullets, I cringe. This may seem like a minor point, but it’s not. Title case used incorrectly makes your slides hard to read, confusing, and makes you look like an amateur. Luckily, it’s a very easy mistake to fix so we can all move on to the bigger issues of presenting your business story.
Title Case Is Hard to Read for Anything More Than a Short Title Because When People Read Their Eyes Scan the Shapes of Words and Too Much Capitalization is Hard to Scan.
Title case can also cause confusion because proper nouns, as we all learned in grammar school, are capitalized to make them stand out from common nouns. Proper nouns get lost in the upper-case tangle, forcing the audience to work harder to puzzle out your meaning and distracting them from your narrative flow.
Here’s an example slide from an actual presentation, untouched. The author applies title case at random, compounding the confusion.
It happens alot. I’m working with a new client, seeing their presentation for the first time. And it’s terrible. I see one ridiculously crammed slide after another, small fonts, tiny images. When I point out the problem and launch into my spiel about the advantages of putting less on each slide, the entrepreneur exclaims, “But how else can I get everything on 10 slides! You know, the ten-slide rule!”
The ten-slide rule strikes again!
The ten-slide rule causes more agony, pain, and awful presentations then almost any other single idea. To be fair, this little simple-minded rule is a part of a bigger wrong idea: that the number of slides has anything to do with the quality or cogency of a presentation.
The ten-slide rule is an old idea, originating in the ’80’s and more recently perpetuated by Guy Kawasaki in his best-selling book for entrepreneurs, The Art of the Start (which I recommend, mostly). I don’t disagree with Guy’s motivation–he’s fed up with long, cluttered, boring presentations. He laid down the law to coax CEO’s of start-up companies to cut their presentations down to size.
The problem is, any rule that limits the number of slides assumes that all slides are equally dense with content. It made sense ten years ago when all presentations were text slides in the title/bullet/sub-bullet format. When investors count slides what they’re really saying is: “Don’t show us more than ten slides dense with impossible to read, confusing crap so we can cut your presentation short and get on with the meeting.”
Here’s the truth: the number of slides in a presentation is irrelevant! It doesn’t matter one dit if you have 10, 20, 50 or 100 slides in your presentation. What does matter is how well the slides support your narrative. And the pace of your ideas. How long you speak and the level of detail.