A pitch deck earns its keep in two ways. Most people only ever use it for one of them, and they leave the bigger prize sitting on the table.

Two reasons to build one

The first reason is the obvious one. If you are pitching for investment, a pitch deck helps you get that first meeting, that first phone call. Across this series I will cover what a pitch deck actually is, how to use one, and a whole stack of practical tips.

The second reason is the one almost nobody uses, and it is the more valuable of the two. A pitch deck is a way to understand exactly where your business is and how well it is doing, because it pulls every significant metric of the business into one place. It shows you where you are and, set against your forecasts, where you intend to be. In my experience well over 99 per cent of people only ever use a pitch deck to raise money. The premium companies I have worked with use it as a measurement tool, and as a measurement tool it is phenomenal.

Tell the story as it is

This is where most investment pitches come unstuck. People build the deck around how they would like the business to look rather than how it actually is. They wrap it in blue-sky bullshit and present that to an investor. When you do that, you are deluding yourself first, and then you are denying the investor any fair chance to understand the business. Worse, you are essentially lying about where the company stands, and you are going to piss them off.

There is no value in saying “this is how we would like to be.” Tell the story as it is, then provide your forecast figures and be ready to substantiate every one of them.

When I set up a pitch deck with a premium client, we start with an as-is picture: this is the business right now, these are our forecast figures, and yes, we can back them up. Then we build a second deck for where the business is headed in three or five years. That forward deck is the blue-sky one, but it is not bullshit, because it is grounded in what the as-is deck already proves. Now you have a target to aim at, and you can measure backwards from it to work out exactly where you are and what you have to do.

What a pitch deck actually is

In the traditional sense, a pitch deck is a document you send to investors to spark their interest. It gives them enough to say “yes, I want a meeting”, whether that is a call, a video conference, or a face-to-face presentation. It is a standalone document. You are not there to talk to it, so every page has to hold attention and make the reader want to go further. That is why these things follow a fairly standard, tried-and-tested structure. What counts is what you put on each page, and that is something I will get into in detail.

In full disclosure, my background is private equity and venture capital, and by private equity I mean the ultra-high-net-worth end that you do not normally get access to. It is a specific world I have worked in, but what I will share applies right across private equity, venture capital, and investment more broadly.

More than anything, I want to move you away from the idea that a pitch deck is only for raising money. Go through the process of building one, then build the second, future-focused deck, and you will come out the other side in a far stronger position to optimise your business towards where you want it to be.