Cold Investment Pitch

A current live project sees me helping an organisation that have big ambitions in the world of everything “organic”.  They’ve already achieved a great deal, including setting up entire ‘value chains’ (as they call them) from the smallest of farmer to enormous retailers.  A significant eight-figure sum is now being sought to build on their terrific foundations and form a syndicate of investors.  My input is to help craft associated overtures to help seal this round of funding.

One such task along this process involves preparing for a twenty-minute questions-at-end powerpoint presentation for two possible funders.  Although not perhaps ideal, this framework still allowed me to recommend a format around seven slides.

I know there are all sorts of anti-powerpoint movements (with which I’ve sympathy) but on the grounds that we’d do what the audience asked for this time round, I elected to keep the Hollywood theatrics to a minimum.

I firmly believe there are some pretty hard and fast rules that apply in cases such as this, bearing in mind that if you do your homework with your audience properly you can often uncover their preferred way of being pitched to, adding to the mix.  The rough approaches of each of the slides is as follows:

1. What I hope we achieve today
2. What’s in it for you
3. What’s in it for me
4. What we’ve achieved to date
5. How it’s done
6. Numbers
7. (back to slide one for) The Close

There are all sorts of intricacies and reasonings for these being the way I proposed which could take me an entire book to reveal, save for one essential insight.  When the guys first showed me the task, they’d already put together some ideas.  It basically involved talking for five minutes about the size of the global opportunity, fifteen minutes talking about why organic farming was different to normal farming, before pausing a moment at the end to ask for x-Million in cash.  Needless to say, this is a structure I recommended can be improved upon.