I was discussing a presentation for a public share offering with a client the other day and we kept on coming back to the presentation advice that the investment bankers were providing.
Every investor presentation should have a “business card” slide as page 1. It should contain the history of the company, the main shareholdings, and sales, gross margin, operating profit, earnings per share and top line growth for the last 5 years.
Investment bankers know how to buy and sell companies. They have seen thousands of investor presentations. And yes, most of these investor presentations look a certain way. But that does not mean that this is “the way things are supposed to be done”.
You can stand out and design a first page that gets potential investors sitting on the tip of their chair, getting really excited about a great investment opportunity. When the company was founded, or that 2007 operating profit was $34.2m will get addressed at same stage in the presentation, just not on slide 1.
The investment banker’s advice can actually be understood. Whenever they ask a company for the investor presentation, out comes a very long bullet loaded PowerPoint deck that takes 2 hours to go through. Instead of redesigning this monster they ask: great why don’t you put everything that is important on one page or write a 2 page executive summary? In that way they know they can get through a pitch in 20 minutes.
The secret to a good 20 minute pitch is writing a full slide deck that takes 20 minutes to present.
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