Investment Pitch Deck Presentation Template for Startups & SMEs
In this week’s newsletter, Dragon Argent examines some fundamentals of building pitch decks to raise investment. Certainly, for tech-enabled businesses that are capital intensive, raising investment is an essential aspect of scaling the business. We’ve also created a useful pitch deck template that can be downloaded and amended which you can access here.
Creating a pitch deck and raising investment can be a time-consuming and stressful process - so what factors most influence success?
Narrative
First, it’s important to understand the purpose of the pitch deck. What is the objective of creating a pitch deck in the first instance? You are trying to convey the story of your business and the story of you as a founder in an engaging, easy to digest manner.
If you think of your pitch deck as a vehicle through which to deliver a concise, impactful, and linear story, then that will inform everything that follows. A typical overview of contents might look something like the below:
The Introduction
The Problem
The Solution
Why Now
Why This Team
The Opportunity
The Market Size
The Product: Who It’s For
The Product: How It Works
Competitive Analysis
The Business
Our Model
Key Milestones
Forecast
The Close
Refresh 6-8 Key Points
The Ask
The contents outlined above suggests 13 slides. Certainly, you should aim for no more than 15 to ensure you are being as focused and concise as possible. Additional information can be added to an appendix and called upon if needed but remember, the deck is just the start of the conversation.
Design
The design of your pitch deck should reflect you and your business. But, the design also needs to be engaging and hold the reader’s attention. It should facilitate the linear story of the business, building up the picture of the opportunity in the readers’ mind. It should reflect the credibility of you as a founder(s).
The best pitch decks employ design principles that result in simple, clean and consistent decks. Some golden rules include:
Each slide should have a single purpose or message and should be clearly labelled. The content of the slide should only serve to reinforce that message
Text heavy slides should be avoided in favour of concise, impactful statements
Use the minimum number of fonts and sizing and include infographics or images to break up the visual content.
Try to stick to a primary and secondary colour only throughout the deck. This will help to make the deck feel clean and consistent
Ensure any images or logos used throughout your deck are consistent with your brand and values
The content of each slide should be aligned so that the information appears in clean, consistent lines
But change the way information is laid out from slide to slide. If you retain the same colours, fonts and styling throughout, simply changing the layout can help retain focus
If you consider that the individuals that are going to review your deck are likely to read hundreds each year and will probably skim the contents, you need to ensure that, yes - the design you use says something about your business, but crucially allows information to be distilled and understood quickly and efficiently.
Content
So, you’ve settled on a great looking design that is simple but elegant and reflects your business, so what do you include in the contents?
The first principle is that good decks explain difficult or complex ideas in simple terms. That’s why having one idea per slide and telling a story in a linear fashion is so important. The story any investor is interested in can be summarised as:
What is the problem > how are you going to solve it > why are you the right people to solve that problem now
Once you have captured interest by telling the “problem, solution, us” story in a personable, compelling way, then you can underpin that with the kind of information that lets investors know you are credible and serious. This will likely include:
The size of the market and your points of differentiation from competitors
Defensible assumptions on growth, costs, clients, and milestones
The KPIs that will measure your success
The financial model of the business
A credible valuation of the business
If you can deliver the story and underpin it with a credible overview of those 5 points, then you have a reasonable chance of continuing the conversation. Only include information that you can defend and that holds up to scrutiny.
The most common objection we hear from investors is “thanks, but it is too early for us.” Make sure you can demonstrate commercial traction before you raise significant investment
Finally
As alluded to earlier, there is one, golden takeaway about creating pitch decks. They are only the start of the conversation, not the entire conversation. You need to capture an investors interest and engender a motivation to find out more. You don’t need to include everything you know about your business and market.
If you need help or advice in putting together and investment deck, please contact Dragon Argent as we’d love to help, or download our handy template here.
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