What is a Pitch Deck?
A presentation is a short presentation, often created with PowerPoint, Keynote, or Prezi , used to give your audience a quick overview of your business plan.
Typically, you will use your presentation during face-to-face or online meetings with potential investors, clients, partners, and co-founders. Sometimes you will use your presentation to present your business in front of a wider audience, perhaps at a pitching competition or angel group gathering.
Other times, a prospective investor may ask you to email your presentation to them, so it should make sense without being accompanied by your verbal presentation.
Different situations will require different styles of launch pads.
When do I need a pitch deck?
At some point, all entrepreneurs can benefit from having a presentation:
Outline and Organization: Your deck can serve as an outline for your business plan . A presentation deck is easy to rearrange, so you can easily experiment with the flow of your story. They consist mainly of images and a few vignettes, so it forces you to visualize the big picture instead of getting lost in the details. If things don't seem to be working, it's easier to turn in a new direction with a presentation pad because it's mentally easier to discard 2-3 slides than 8 pages of a beautifully written business plan. If you know that you are going to need a launch pad anyway, you should probably develop and refine your platform before starting the narrative business plan.
Gain buy-in: If you are trying to persuade people to “buy” your story and become followers (for example, beta clients, potential strategic partners, advisors, co-founders, or employees), a presentation is often the best medium for express your story.
Investor Meetings: If you are approaching sophisticated investors, for example an angel group or a venture capital fund, you will almost certainly need an introduction. In fact, some investors will ask you to email them your presentation instead of an executive summary or full business plan (although you will eventually need a full business plan when investors begin their due diligence). If the investor invites you to their office for a meeting, your platform will provide structure to your meeting (although by the time you get to Slide 3, if the investor is really interested, you will start asking questions that will force you to advance to Slide 8 and then back to Slide 5).
Pitch Contests - No matter where you live, there are probably a number of opportunities within walking distance for you to present your opportunity to an audience. These are events organized by universities, angel groups, startup incubators and joint work spaces, startup conferences such as TechCrunch Disrupt , local economic development groups, and other entities that support entrepreneurship. Some opportunities give you a short, strictly enforced time limit (usually 3-10 minutes, but some are as short as 90 seconds!). Others are more generous and offer 30 to 45 minutes, including questions and answers. You should find out well in advance what your time allocation will be and customize your deck accordingly.
What makes a great launch pad?
A presentation platform is great only if it helps you achieve your goals with your target audience. You should consider the following factors to ensure that your platform has the maximum impact on your specific situation:
Length - There are many experts who will tell you that your presentation should be exactly 5 slides, or exactly 8 slides, or exactly 10 slides. There are no hard and fast rules about the length of your presentation, as long as you can do it comfortably, unhurriedly, in the allotted time. Usually this means no more than one slide per minute. So if you have 15 minutes to fill out and you want to reserve the last 3 minutes for questions and answers, then 10-12 slides should do it.
Content - Think from your audience's perspective. What questions do they need you to answer in order for them to take the desired action (note: if you are presenting to a group, the desired action is not to have them write a check on the spot? That will never happen). - it's for them to exchange business cards with you so you can follow up later). If you are introducing investors, you should focus on answering these Ten Great Questions .
Focus: Limit each slide to one idea. You want to keep your entire audience on the same page.
Aesthetics: Don't worry too much about aesthetics until you've first conquered the structure and flow of the launch pad. So, don't go crazy with an artistic flourish - you want your audience to focus on you, not your slides. Choose a file template that you can live with and that looks good on your computer screen, in print, as a PDF, and when projected to a screen. Customize the color scheme to match your corporate branding. Replace as many words as possible with graphics (photos, illustrations, diagrams, tables, and graphs). If you are presenting to a large audience, make sure your fonts are large enough for visually impaired people in the last row to read. Even if you're creating a stand-alone presentation that will be read (rather than presenting in person), strive to cut out as many words as possible. Eliminate any item that is useless. Avoid sound effects, unnecessary animation, and embedded media. In other words, keep it simple, clean, and tidy.
Delivery: If your launch pad is a race car, then you are the driver. The deck is useless without your execution. Steve Jobs was known for giving incredible presentations; you should check out some clips of his talks on YouTube and see for yourself. Jobs' delivery seemed effortless because he practiced tirelessly. You should practice your speech until it is perfect, first in front of a mirror, then with people (friends, family, strangers on the street, anyone who is willing to listen and give you their opinion). You should also practice with a video camera rolling. No matter how many times people tell you to fix something, you probably won't until you see the defect for yourself.
How do I create a Pitch Deck?
If you don't have the time or skills to put together a presentation platform, or if you think you would benefit from an outside perspective, WAM US Consultores can help. In general, we follow a two-step process:
Get started generic: the first step is to create a "generic" presentation that responds to the Ten Great Questions . We usually start by creating a slide for each question. The title of each slide is the question (for example, "What problem do we solve?"); the body of the slide answers the question. Sometimes we need more than one slide to answer some of the questions; that's fine, since at this stage we are mainly brainstorming. The key is to put your ideas (and ours) where we can all see them. Now we print it out and place the slides on the floor. We rearrange things until we have a compelling story. Then we remove anything that doesn't directly relate to your story. Finally, we started working on the Aesthetics part mentioned above.
Go specific: The second step is to tailor your presentation for a specific audience and / or meeting. If your "generic" presentation You have 15 slides and are preparing for a 20-30 minute face-to-face meeting with a prospective investor, we may not need to make a lot of changes. On the other hand, if you are introducing a potential strategic partner, we probably want to replace your company-wide financial forecast with an analysis of how the proposed alliance benefits your potential partner. If you are preparing for a 3 minute blitzkrieg, you will probably need to create a 3 slide deck that is based on the 2-3 most important charts from your generic pitch.
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