A Summary Guide To Creating A Pitch For Investment

As an entrepreneur, one of the steps you have got to take to bring your business plans to the limelight is to look for investors who will invest in your business idea. Sometimes, you could get lucky and have someone listen to you till you break it all down from start to finish, but most of the time, all you got is just a few minutes. It is therefore necessary to have a summary of your business proposal so that you can just pitch it in a few minutes and get your potential investors salivating. 

Here’s a quick guide to creating a pitch for investment.

1. Put up a Presentation or a Pitch Deck

You need a presentation in place, which is also known as the pitch deck. It is what contains the summary of the business idea you are pitching. It is just the summary, devoid of all of the details which may bore your investors out. The purpose of a pitch deck is to wow your potential investors so that they can ask for the details. Basically, you can use Microsoft PowerPoint to put up a deck. Make sure you arrange the juicy parts of your business idea first and the boring details later. You will also need tons of different calculations and numbers. The numbers are important as most investors do not have the time to do the calculations. Having the numbers, ideally off-hand will help wow the potential investors.

2. Rehearse Your Presentation

After you might have arranged your pitch deck with the summary of the details you want to pass across to your potential investors, you should rehearse your words. You can get someone to mimic your investors while you rehearse. Make sure you pick your words carefully. Do not assume you know everything about your business and don’t need to rehearse. Your investors are smart and are able to see through your words. If you do not prepare, one question can throw you off-balance and you may never recover from there. Proper preparation will ensure you envisage what questions your investors may have and as such, prepare answers already to those questions. All these can only happen in the place of preparation and rehearsals. Some important things to tackle when preparing include:

• What Problem Does Your Business Idea Solve?

This is probably where your investors are interested anyway. If your business cannot have any problem then there is no need for anyone to invest in it. Careful identify and state what problem your business idea will solve. What value is your business bringing? Why should anyone pay for the services you are about to render? What’s the guarantee you will be successful.

• Who is your Target Customer?

Since you are starting up, you probably don’t have any customers yet, but you should have a target customer. Do you know who they are? What are their interests? What do they do? How much do they earn? Will they be able to afford your product  or services? You should drill down and ask every possible question about your target market because one thing is sure, your investors are going to ask you these questions and if you are not ready, you will be thrown off balance. Remember, it is your show and you should wow those who are listening to you; you should make them feel like if they don’t invest in your business idea, they are losing.

• How do you intend to market your Product or service?

It’s one thing to have a good product or service and it’s another to get people to know that there is a good product or service available for you. This is called marketing. So what is your marketing strategy? Do you know your competition? How do you intend to take market share from your competition? What if your marketing strategy doesn’t work? Do you have a plan B? Make sure you ask every possible question and provide answers to them too.

• When Do You Hope to Be Profitable?

Let’s say you hit the market and start sales, how long do you think it will take for you to start making a profit? This is one of the parts investors are interested in. If you fail with the numbers, you are not going to get anyone on your side. The only reason why anyone will listen to your pitch on investment is because they believe that your business will make money and they will make a profit from their investment into your business. IF your numbers are not anywhere correct, then you are not going to get their attention, no matter how sweet your presentation is.

• What about Exit strategies?

This is one part that most startups hate to talk about; everyone believes that their startup will thrive and become big. No one goes to labor to think that they may not actually deliver a live baby. However, it is a sad reality that not all startups survive, some are dead on arrival. So let’s just assume that everything may not go as planned. So what will be your exit strategy? How do you intend to save the investment of your investors? Will you run the business aground or you will diversify? If you will diversify, what are you diversifying into?

You need to deal with all of the above for you to be able to defend your business startup with potential investors. The easiest part is preparing a presentation or pitch deck, the hard part is knowing your onions and telling it to everyone who cares that you do.

The above is only a summary guide to creating a pitch for investment, there are definitely a whole lot of possible questions an investor may throw at you, but you have got to be ready. If you can get it all together, you can be sure that you will get the right function.