Pitching to Investors and Venture Capitalists

Instigator Blog provides five simple and powerful tips for making the most out of pitching to investors for a startup. These tips also apply to seasoned businesses looking to raise working capital.

Here are his five tips with my notes.

1. Tell your story quick: Quick or not -- the key here is to tell a story. He suggests telling a story on the problem you solve or will be solving. If you're growing your business, consider telling a story on what prompted you to add another product or whatever it is the money will fund. Cliff Atkinson's Beyond Bullet Points (BBP) offers a great method for creating presentations that tell stories.
2. Change the pace throughout. Just don't be flat and use a monotone voice... EVER. That will surely put folks in a daze and not listen to your message. When you hear someone reading a children's story, they don't read at an even speed. They slow down when things become complicated or the plot thickens and speed up when excitement hits. If you have technical or financial details you must share, slow down and use plenty of visuals.
3. Sexy slides work. Just don't put your entire speech on the slides. Limit the text. Challenge yourself to avoid the old method of big bold headers followed by a bulleted list with an image slapped on. Boring. BBP helps you overcome this.
4. Don't overemphasize the product. Cover the important basics: why the product or service is different and why the company is the right one to bring it to the market.
5. End strong. According to the movie, The Prestige, a magic trick contains three parts: the pledge, the turn, the prestige. The pledge is the set up that shows something ordinary. The turn is the trick in action and the time when the ordinary turns into the extraordinary. Then kapow! The prestige shows the audience something they've never seen before.

OK, maybe showing the audience something they've never seen before would be tough to show in a presentation. Find a way to introduce something new. After all, if you're a computer manufacturer, your audience has seen many computers. What makes yours different from any other computer out there? More affordable? That's been done. Smaller? Mac Air. Colorful? Yep, that's been done, too.

Financials are important in discussing the need for working capital, but not at the very end of the presentation. Work the numbers in the middle of the presentation or before the end. Avoid temptation to copy a spreadsheet into a slide. If you need to share a spreadsheet, then use paper. We don't like to kill trees either, but no one can read a spreadsheet in a presentation.

Think about it this way. If your investors run out of the door, what do you want them to remember? Make that your prestige.