Blog post

Words and number consistency

July 21, 2016 · by Jan Schultink
← all posts

It is impossible to make a correct 5 year business forecast in an investor pitch. But your financial projection is not really a forecast, a prediction of the future, it is a picture made out of numbers. “If our company will be successful, this is what it could look like”.

Mistake number one is to make the projection ultra precise with 5 digits after the comma. It is just a guess, so a year 5 revenue number of $99,234,318 is not more credible than ~$100m.

But oversimplifying is not right either. The fact that you are for sure going to be wrong does not mean that you simply take 1% of a big market number to get to the year 5 scenario.

The trick is to make the words/visuals in your presentation consistent with your financial model. You are going to sell to millions of individual customers, drive the model that way. You rely on 5 big telco operators, put it in. SAAS company with recurring revenues? Model it. One-off perpetual licenses, use it as the basis of your model.

Teaching investors how the business works is more important than getting the point estimate right.

Investor presentationData visualization

About this blog

Notes on all things presentations — design, storytelling, and AI workflows.

Subscribe now to never miss a post.

RSS

About SlideMagic

A platform for business presentations.

A free student plan is available.