SlideMagic Blog

Writing emails to busy people is hard. One thing to keep in mind is that they usually get the same type of question.

• Can I meet you for a coffee?
• Do you want to be on my Board?
• Do you want to invest in me?
• Do you want to buy my software?

If you are asking one of these questions, stand out from the others

If you are actually not asking one of these questions, make it very clear. Your email might get eyeballed very quickly and rejected with “no, I don’t have time for more Board seats”…

When pitching our new venture in the healthcare industry, we discovered that there are 2 totally different pitches, one to industry insiders, and one to complete outsiders.

• The insiders usually get the idea in a second, so the pitch switches to why they should join (and change the way they have been working for decades)
• The outsiders do not have the context and don’t understand the jargon of what we are doing. It requires an extra step back to explain the idea. When that is done though, they understand instantly why people should join.

In meetings, my partner and I are adjusting. I step forward in discussions with industry outsiders, while she leads the story for healthcare insiders.

Often used as an excuse for a meeting, but is it really?

Every meeting should have an objective. Just casually chatting is a waste of time (in a professional context). The PYB sentence has been abused so many times that many investors and other people receiving such requests will instantly turn it down. There are better things to do.

• Do you really think you need to pick someone’s brain? Maybe think again, and there might be a very specific objective that you are actually after. Adjust your pitch, pitch deck, and meeting invite accordingly. It makes things clearer for everyone.
• Maybe you have a specific agenda and are afraid to reveal it. In the age of Zoom, people have become more efficient and open. Maybe your meeting target is actually totally happy to take a short Zoom call and brainstorm which of her contacts could help you in a job search.

Making a company business plan is tricky. Nobody can predict the future. Everyone can argue about the validity of a point estimate of sales in year 5: $45m…

I tend to remove as many of these hard coded point estimates as possible from my spreadsheet, and instead build the whole thing up from drivers or factors that ‘you can touch’. Instead of a hard sales number it is # of potential clients x market share x price per client.

Here is my approach, starting top down, then building a bottom up model

1. Start with the hard coded number (top down)
2. Back out of the number the implied number of clients, price per client
3. Make an assumption what market share that number of clients implies
4. Now hard code the market size, market share, and price numbers and tweak those to calculate the top line number

Now that you have set the revenue forecast, apply a similar approach to cost. Given the amount of clients you need to get every year, how much would it cost to get them? Sales trips, sales people, conferences to visit etc. etc. How much would it cost to support each client? This is a much better cost planning tool that simply adding a number in your P&L.

The result of this exercise is that you get a dynamic company model which logically makes sense, the only wild card being that number of clients that you put in.

In business school we learned how to write a business plan and which slides go with it: market size, competitors, business model, etc. etc. The resulting slide deck is usually the first “presentation” of the company and often used as the basis for an investor or sales pitch deck as well. (Same happens when the last Board strategy deck gets recycled into a sales presentation for a more mature company).

Board presentations and business plan presentations are well, sets of slides that serve Board and strategy meetings. A sales or investor meeting requires a sales or investor presentation.

If you noticed that you always deviate from your slides when pitching your company, you might have the wrong slide deck in front of you,

Exactly my view as well:

Videos and podcasts are sequential tapes, text is a hard disk where you can access specific sections instantly. The first is great for a story, the latter is better for a quick reference.

Think about this for your pitch presentation as well, both have different advantages

• A short introduction video (sequential):

  • Gives a glimpse of who you are as a person/CEO, especially useful in the absence of personal meetings
  • Enables you to re-record your elevator pitch until you get it absolutely right, live presentations are a one-shot game
  • Eliminates storyline hiccups and tangents that you might not spot when shuffling slides in a deck.

• A short pitch deck:

  • Is the “graphical business card” of your idea, the look and feel
  • Enables people to skip through your story very quickly, especially useful for investors who are deeply specialized in a particular field
  • Allows quick repeat access to reference slides: key metrics, team bios, current investor profiles, etc.
  • Can be viewed on mobile devices on the go without the need for audio

The internet is full with standard layout for pitch decks. Yes, they mention all the ingredients of your story that should be covered. Many of these topics will be “hygiene checks”, the audience will get them instantly and you can cover them with a placeholder slide.

Where your story is different from others, you have to elaborate with some good visuals.

• A business model that nobody has ever seen before (think eBay when it just started out)
• Photos of your the prototype of your hyper car which prove that it actually exists
• A detailed CV timeline to show that you are perfectly able to run this company at the age of 21
• A collection of the standard KPIs for online retailers that every investor is expecting
• A market size that nobody realized existed, “wait, what, $5b per year on erasers?”
• Etc.

An almost 50 page scientific article was published last month that looks at the impact of images, on financial investment decisions. A quote from the article:

We demonstrate that positive images significantly increase and negative images significantly decrease investment, despite the fact that the images do not provide additional information relevant to the investment tasks and should be disregarded by rational investors.

It all seem statistically relevant and scientifically sound.

It makes intuitive sense as well. A boring presentation without any images is not very effective. But people sometimes ignore the ‘mood’ of an image. Even if the visualisation of a concept is perfect, but you picked an image that is ugly, scary, gross, its visual impact will be the opposite of what you want it be.

Does this mean that you should plaster an financial presentation with meaningless pictures of rainbows? Probably not, everything in moderation.

See the results of the study here.

It is a waste to spend presentation on things your audience already knows, or already assumes is the case.

• Already knows: common knowledge among informed audiences. A specialized investor who invests in crypto knows the basics of what is going on in that market.
• Already assumes: something that people guess instantly, you IPO-ed both of your 2 previous startups, so the question can she be a startup CEO does probably not need any more time

You can score the obvious points very quickly with a snap reminder slide. Now it is time to move on to things that might surprise the audience (in a good way).

But remember, things can work the other way:

• Already knows: “It is impossible to make good returns in healthcare diagnostics”
• Already assumes: “She looks like she just got out of college, she cannot sell to big pharma”

Put yourself in the shoes of the adience.

The quote from the Jerry Maguire movie. Some pitches go well. Maybe because the other side knows you, trusts you, knows the industry/competition well, and is ready to take things to the next step. No point in trying to pick up the pitch at page 15 with that very optimistic revenue forecast, and/or booting up that demo with potential bugs. That can happen in the next meeting.