Disclaimer: This guide is not a pitch deck template or an exhaustive line-by-line instruction booklet of what needs to be included in a pitch deck. It is, however, a useful guide to what we look for in a pitch deck and what information EHE and its portfolio of investors must see in order to capture our interest. This information is derived from our collective years of experience at both sides of the investment table. 

One of the most important documents to prepare is your pitch deck. We can’t stress enough how crucial it is for helping you get through that initial evaluation stage of due diligence. This is where you get to tell your story. As investors, we’re looking for something that’s brief and simple, but that captures our imaginations too. 

The purpose of your pitch deck

The purpose of your pitch deck is to get investors excited about your company so that they want to progress to the second stage of due diligence. Your story is a fundamental part of this, so it’s worth taking the time to make sure it’s told in an engaging, entertaining and simple way. Your pitch deck should not be too long. You will have a window of 15 to 20 minutes to capture the heart and mind of the investor; this is how long they’ll look at your pitch deck before making a decision about whether to proceed. Use it wisely. 

Of course, your pitch deck is about more than just your story as an entrepreneur. It needs to very clearly state why you need investment and how much investment you’re asking for. Making this obvious and putting it up front is key. You also need to clearly demonstrate what you’re offering in return for that investment. 

Your pitch deck also needs to identify any problems you’re facing and outline how you will approach the solutions. Keep this realistic and make sure that any figures you provide are accurate, as these will be investigated at the next stage of due diligence. 

Investor insight: Pictures, illustrations and diagrams often speak louder than words. Use these at the front of your pitch deck if you can and provide further details in the appendices of your pitch deck should the investor want more detail. 

It’s also essential to answer the question of “Why you, and not somebody else?”, particularly if you are operating in a saturated market. The investors you’re approaching might also be looking at other companies in the same industry, so you need to be able to articulate why you are different to your competitors, what your USP is and why you are the better investment opportunity. Think about any objections an investor might have and tackle those in your pitch deck when you can. 

Finding the balance in your pitch deck

Putting together a strong pitch deck is a real art and you have to strike the right balance between providing a succinct and exciting overview of your company and its story and why it’s a great opportunity for investors, with figures and details that demonstrate your company is on the path to high growth and will be a good investment.

We recommend having no more than 10 to 15 slides in your pitch deck and then using appendices where you can provide more detail for those who are interested in reading it. It can help to think of your pitch deck as a synopsis of your business plan. Your full business plan will be examined in detail once you reach the second stage of due diligence: investigation. Of course, depending on the stage your business is at, a pitch deck and a business plan can be the same thing. This would likely be the case for a startup seeking investment, for example. 

However, if your business has been established for a number of years and has evolved, your business plan and your pitch deck shouldn’t be the same, because you will have a lot more data and detail that you can include in a business plan from your initial years of operation. 

It can also help to think of your pitch deck as a showreel for your company; this is where you get to show off the highlights and present you and your business in the best possible light. This is the tip of the iceberg, but you want to demonstrate that there are very solid foundations supporting the tip of your iceberg. 

Pitch deck principles

Use the following as a guide of what to include when you’re putting together your pitch deck. Not all businesses need all of these sections, so take what you need to effectively showcase your business to potential investors. 

• Executive summary and proposition: This needs to explain who you are, what you want and why. Keep it brief (one page) and include a brief history of the company, a brief overview of the opportunity (your unique selling point), what you are asking for and what you are offering. This slide needs to be powerful because it’s your opening gambit.
• The problem: Clearly state the problem your service/product solves and explain why the current solution is broken or non-existent. Don’t forget to cover current industry issues if they’re relevant too.
• The solution: Explain your approach to the problem and why it’s effective. If your solution is unique, explain why. 
• Target market and opportunity: Cover your route to market, what/who you’re targeting, the size of the market and your target share. Mention any barriers to entry and/or regulatory obligations and explain how you’re tackling them. An overview of the competitive landscape is also useful.
• Competition and competitive advantage: Explain how you will compete with your competitors, why you’re better, what your key advantage is and what’s stopping them copying your approach.
• Team: Provide an overview of your operating structure, what your hiring plan is and how you’re structuring your business to take advantage of the opportunity you outlined at the start of your pitch.
• Key milestones: Provide a graphical representation of your company’s formation, previous investments, first-round funding, key hires, first profit, geographical expansion plans and second-round funding.
• Revenue or business model: Be very clear about how your business makes money and break it down if it’s complex! Cover your high-level business plan, including cashflow management and timings, as well as highlighting growth opportunities. These include key revenue streams and any supporting information on potential returns. If you have one, a more in-depth investment management plan would also fit here. 
• Marketing and sales strategy: Share your top-level marketing plan and be clear about what you plan to spend your investment on. Include data points such as cost per acquisition and how much you’re spending on your marketing and sales strategy. Explain how this will ramp up in line with the business and revenue model and highlight any spikes in marketing spend (customer acquisition via loss leaders and offers etc.).
• Financials: Give a financial overview, sharing your trading performance to date. Explain how you will fund high growth. Talk about the investment and how you’ll use those funds.

• Contact details: Make sure your website and social media, as well as your email and phone number, are on this slide.
• Appendix: The place for any supporting information, data sources, case studies, reviews etc.

Who should write the pitch deck?

As the entrepreneur behind the business you have to take ownership of creating the pitch deck because it is telling (and selling) your story. No one will ever be able to tell your story better than you can, and if you don’t feel that you can tell your story then you have to ask how you’re going to get anyone else to believe in it or understand it. Let your passion for what you do come through in the slides.

That said, often as an entrepreneur you might have a great idea and a good overall understanding of your business, but you may lack specific expertise in some areas. This is when it’s important to work with the experts within your business to make sure you are filling in any gaps in your knowledge and providing investors with the answers to the questions they are most likely to ask. 

Remember that investors like to invest in people, not in slides, so talk about the team you have behind you. You might have a great product, but an investor is going to want to know how you’re going to produce it and bring it to market, and that will come from the team you have in place (or are putting in place).

Play to your strengths

Like many people, you might be picturing the TV show Dragon’s Den when you think of delivering a pitch for investment. Presenting your pitch deck verbally is one option, but it’s not essential when you’re seeking investment. Whether you want to take this approach will depend on both you and the investor you are pitching to.  

If you will be delivering your pitch deck to investors in-person, think carefully about who you want to bring into the room with you. If you know that you’re great at talking about your story and that your passion really shines through, but that you struggle to remember the finer details about operations and finance, make sure you have at least one member of your management team with you who can provide that important supporting information. 

If you know you come across better when you’re speaking than you will in slides, another option is to record a two- to three-minute video that you can include in your first slide. This can then be followed up with the detail that an investor will look for next in written slides. This can be especially effective for investors who have a shorter attention span and need to be drawn in within the first minute or two of looking at a pitch. 

Should you tailor your pitch deck?

Deciding whether or not to tailor your pitch deck can be tricky. Much like when you’re applying for a job, in an ideal world you would tailor your CV to suit each role and business. However, when you’re sending dozens of job applications a month this simply isn’t practical (or necessarily a good use of your time). It’s very similar when it comes to tailoring your pitch deck. 

In some cases you may decide it is worth taking the extra time to tailor your pitch deck. For example, if you have researched a particular investor and believe they will be a great fit for your business, you may decide to tailor some of the slides to appeal to this specific investor. However, the reality is that you will likely need to go through multiple rounds of pitching with different investors, which means tailoring your pitch deck every time won’t be practical. 

In general, your pitch deck needs to cater for all investors. What you want to avoid is turning some investors off by leaning too heavily in a particular direction. Some investors are certainly making decisions based purely on these elements; however, if you tailor your pitch deck too heavily towards a D&I or ESG audience, you risk alienating investors who might be catching up in these areas, but who aren’t quite there yet. That said, these are not areas that are nice to have. Investors will expect to see some content around D&I and ESG, so make sure this is included in your pitch deck. 

Of course, if D&I or ESG (or both) is particularly relevant to you and your business, it is certainly worth highlighting that side of your business, because in doing so you are more likely to connect with and therefore attract investors who also value these things. If, as an entrepreneur, you clearly align with and focus on these areas, you may find there are some funding options that are particularly applicable to you, such as investors looking for female-led businesses, or those led by people from ethnic minorities. The key, as with everything, is balance so that you’re not pigeonholing yourself unnecessarily. 

How to help your pitch deck stand out

Investors will more than likely see dozens of pitch decks each week, so it’s important to think about how you can make yours stand out from the crowd for all the right reasons. This is where your PR and personal branding can make a real difference. 

In this day and age, most investors are active on social media channels (especially LinkedIn) and consume local news (or industry-specific news depending on their focus). This means that if they have already seen you and your business either featuring in news outlets or on their LinkedIn feed, your pitch deck is more likely to jump out to them simply because you are known to them.

This goes beyond what’s included in the pitch deck itself, because it’s about what approach you’re taking to promoting yourself and your business in general. Putting this groundwork in not only benefits your business, but also means that you are more likely to get noticed by investors when you do come to send pitch decks in.

We’ve said several times that investors invest in people, and this is why personal branding and PR is so vital. As Ross explains, “One of the first investments Gary and I were involved in together hinged on exactly this. The business in question was trying to secure a lot of investment at a time when the business made no money at all. Our decision was based on our confidence in the entrepreneurs who were going to deliver that business. We looked at their social profiles, what they had done and how they had integrated into the business community to inform our decision. Ultimately, the question was: could we trust these people to deliver high growth? Based on what we knew of them, we believed we could.”

That pitch might well have gone very differently had the entrepreneurs in question not had that presence in their business community and online. It all comes back to being able to show investors why they should choose you and not somebody else.

Common pitfalls to avoid

There are some simple mistakes entrepreneurs can make when creating and sending pitch decks that are very easily avoided.

• Using pitch deck templates

It can be very easy to search online for a pitch deck template; you will find dozens of examples within seconds. However, be very cautious about using these. We have seen pitch decks in the past where it is very obvious the person in question has taken an existing pitch deck from another business and simply overlaid their information on it. We have even seen examples where the other company’s name has been left in a footer on the page! 

This is a very easily avoidable situation. When an investor sees this in a pitch deck, they question your passion. It will make your whole pitch deck feel impersonal, because they can clearly see you’ve just filled in boxes rather than tailoring your pitch deck to really show off your business in its best light. 

• Failing to check the figures

Whatever concrete data or financial information you’re sharing in your pitch deck, you have to make sure it adds up. We have seen pitch decks where the income less the costs to the business doesn’t equate to the figure that the business is presenting as its profit. This is very easy to spot (and should therefore also be easy to correct when you are putting your pitch deck together). 

When we see this as investors, we immediately start to question what else might not add up, or what else might have been missed. It breaks trust before it has even been built. 

• Including too much information

You have to find the right balance between providing enough information for investors to see that you have a strong business and providing so much information that investors feel overwhelmed. We have seen pitch decks of 40 or more slides and it’s just overkill. An investor doesn’t want to wade through that much detail at this stage in the process, they simply want the salient points and top-level figures.

• Using too much jargon or too many acronyms

You have to get your language right and avoid using too many technical terms and jargon in your pitch deck. Keep it simple and keep it to the point. Make sure that it’s easy to understand and, where jargon is unavoidable, make sure it’s clearly explained. Avoid acronyms unless they’re essential and always make sure they are spelled out. Don’t assume that the person reading your pitch deck will know what an acronym stands for.  

• Including too much text

When it comes to pitch decks, less is generally more. Don’t try to fill each slide with text. Use bullet points rather than writing lengthy paragraphs. Use graphs and other diagrams to display information in a way that’s easy to visualise and understand. Don’t be tempted to reduce the font size to fit more in (we can remember one pitch deck that used font size four!), it doesn’t help. All this does is demonstrate that you have no concept of how to keep your business simple.

• Spelling and grammatical mistakes

Make sure you proofread your pitch deck before you send it out. If you know this isn’t your strength, find someone who has a good eye for spelling and grammar to look over it for you. Sending out a pitch deck littered with spelling and grammatical errors shows a lack of care and attention. 

• Failing to talk enough about you

While it’s important to address your position in the marketplace and cover the business landscape and your main competitors, you have to remember that the pitch deck is fundamentally about you and your business. If you spend 80 percent of it critiquing other businesses without telling the investors why you’re unique and how you will improve on what’s already out there, your pitch deck will fall flat. 

• Misrepresenting yourself

Your pitch deck has to be an accurate reflection of you, because this is what the investor is buying into. Investors want to find entrepreneurs who align with them and who are a good fit. Obviously if you’re pretending to be someone you’re not in your pitch deck, you’ll run into conflict somewhere along the line. Make sure you’re honest and true to yourself and that you allow your passion to shine through. Don’t tell people what you think they want to hear, tell people about you and your business. Remember that what an investor really wants to hear is your story. 

• Know who you’re sending your pitch decks to

It might sound basic, but make sure that you have the right email addresses for the investors you’re approaching. Check the spelling of their name and address the email personally to them. If you are going to personalise your pitch deck, make sure you do your research so that you hit the right mark. These kinds of mistakes are easy to make and very hard (if not impossible) to recover from. 

Keep it simple

Remember that your pitch deck is an overview of your business that’s designed to whet the appetite of an investor, it doesn’t need to be lengthy. We recommend 10 to 15 slides, because this is enough to give you space to cover the key points and information an investor will expect to and want to see, without going overboard on the details. That said, if you can distil all the essential information into five slides, don’t feel as though you need to stretch your pitch deck to 10 slides. The pitch deck principles we shared earlier in this chapter are there to act as a guide, but if not everything we’ve listed there is relevant to your business, don’t shoehorn it in.  

The information most investors will want to see is:

• Have you thought about your problem?
• Have you got the right approach to the solution?
• What is the marketing opportunity?
• Who is part of your team?
• What is your revenue model to reach your market?
• What is your marketing and sales strategy?

Try to capture all of this as simply as you can in as few slides as possible. Think about how you can best present certain data. For example, we recently saw a pitch deck where the entrepreneur had used a diagram to highlight the USP they were driving for, which in this case was cost and route to market. By making it visual, they presented a really powerful comparison of their business compared to the major players in their market. It was one slide that created the “wow” factor. By slide four, we were sold. Had that entrepreneur explained this in writing, it would likely have covered two or more slides and would not have had the same impact. 

As well as the information you’re putting in your pitch deck, think about how it’s structured. Make sure you cover your key points in a logical order for the investor and don’t use 20 words where five will do. Visual elements can be incredibly useful for showcasing complex information so think about how you can incorporate these into your pitch deck. 

Summary

Your pitch deck is a vital part of the process for raising funding for your business. You have to get this right if you want to progress through due diligence and get to the investigation and then the legal stages. If you don’t, you’ll fall at the first hurdle. Your pitch deck needs to create enough intrigue in the investor that they want to pick up the phone and have a conversation with you without drowning them in information. It needs to demonstrate your passion, because ultimately this is what the investor will be investing in. 

However, it’s important that whatever you include in your pitch deck can be substantiated with detailed information, because this is what any investor will be looking for when they decide to move into the next stage of the process. 

Your pitch deck is the gateway to investment conversations. It is one of the first hurdles you need to overcome on the road to investment to grow your business. If you think of it like applying for a job, this is the equivalent of submitting your CV. If you don’t send your CV out, you won’t even be considered for a job. If you don’t send your pitch deck out, you won’t be considered for investment. 

Only if your CV is appealing do you get invited for an interview (the investigation stage of due diligence) and from there move into negotiation. It’s no different when it comes to seeking investment. Sending your pitch deck is the first active step you’ll take towards seeking investment, even if you have been building strong foundations for your business for a while.