How to Craft a Perfect Pitch Deck | Startup Mentor Gary Jinks

Okay. Now there's 2 things. Your pitch deck is one thing. And what your pitch deck does, like, is to communicate the facts in the way you want them communicated. The second part of it is the pitch, the story. Now, back in the— when I got my $25 million for the first startup, we could stand here and read our entire pitch deck and still get funded. Again, everybody's gotten more sophisticated. If you do that, you're probably going to die on the vine, and they're just not going to be interested. So your pitch deck organizes your thoughts, presents it the way you want to present it. But your story has to have a little theatrics in it now. And it's kind of unfortunate, because most people aren't that theatrically compelling to listen to. So for those that aren't, it becomes a little bit more work. But it's just the way the market's worked out. It's the way things are. They expect a little bit of a story to go along. So the last thing you should be doing is telling me what's on your slide deck, because I got 2 eyes. I can read your slide deck. I know what it says. So what you're going to do is you're going to fill the gaps in with a nice compelling story of why you got here and how you got here and some cool business case and some things that are kind of fun and all these kinds of things and fill— put the sort of the wrapping around the pitch deck, if that makes sense.

Okay.

Another thing I like to say, most entrepreneurs dive too deep. And I got this quote years ago. If you want a dollar, you talk details. If you want millions, you talk vision and strategy. Nobody's going to give you millions of dollars because you have your bolts located over here and you got this cool user interface. Not going to happen. They want to understand your vision. When it's— when 2 CEOs of a Fortune 100 company sit down to talk about a $100 billion project, That meeting probably lasts 10 minutes. They don't talk about details. They don't talk about anything. They say, okay, we want to do this. Our vision is that. Our vision is this. Hey, sounds good. Looks good. Let's shake hands. Boom. Now they're going to flow that all out to all the people in the workforce that's going to now work on the details for the next 3 and a half years to make that $100 billion come. But they don't talk about any of that. That's not what they do. Their vision's in line. Toyota, Tesla, they didn't spend forever talking about whether they were going to get together. They got together and said, hey, our vision is electric cars and this, that, and the other. And Tesla said, wow, we got some really good batteries. We'll give you some batteries. You give us that little manufacturing plant up there in Fremont, that NUMMI thing, and we'll all shake hands. We'll be happy. And they go, yeah, great. Boom. Short meeting. It's all the people down below that have to deal with the details. So keep in mind, you're a CEO. Talk like a CEO. Walk like a CEO. And stay at the strategic level. That will take you much further than diving into the weeds and getting right down into the details of a bullet. All right. So now let's talk a little bit about the slide deck. So I have a format that I like to use on slide deck. And anybody who tells you they have the perfect format for a pitch deck, wrong. There is no perfect format because they— what makes the perfect pitch deck is the one that gets you funded. But that may not be the perfect pitch deck for the next round of funding. So What you need to do is you need to touch the topics. The topics, you have to be able to present it in a comfortable manner. So even though people say, oh, it has to go in this order and you have to do this and so forth, there's certain topics you have to touch because at the end of the day, what you're trying to do is sell me your business case and your pitch deck is going to be a summary of your business plan. So, but this is a format I like. Again, the wildcard is kind of the team. And there's some things, and you want to order it in the manner that's comfortable for you. Because if you're trying to force yourself— I'm working with a company right now, and the CEO doesn't do real well in public speaking. So we're getting her over that hurdle. And she gets too focused on trying to memorize every word I say, and she struggles with that. So you have to make the pitch work with your personality and make it flow with you, as long as you cover it and the story is compelling and moves along. So let's start with a quick outline. So guess what? I like to start with the opportunity. Because if you can't convince me there's an opportunity here as an investor, I really don't care about the rest of your pitch deck. So if you've convinced me there's a great opportunity— and this is the why. People will buy why you're doing something more often than what it is you're doing. Why are you doing this? Why are we here? Why do I want to fund you? And you're going to convince me in the opportunity That everybody wants it, the demand is high, they're willing to pay big bucks for it, and they want it now. Yes? Just as we're going through this really quick, about how long in minutes should a pitch to an investor be? Okay, I try to set it up so that you can give your pitch within 10 minutes, cover every topic in 10 minutes. If you have more time, you can. But here's the key to pitching. The pitching isn't the key to it. The key is the Q&A. You want to get to the Q&A. So if you've got 30 minutes, Get your pitch done in 10 and leave 20 minutes for Q&A because that's where you're building the rapport. It takes a village to get funded. It takes rapport and confidence. And they're going to ask you questions. You're going to answer them. They'll go, hey, he's pretty quick on his feet. I like him. The Q&A is actually what's going to do more than your pitch. Your pitch just gave me the fundamental information and you told me, yeah, it's a good idea. They got a plan. They're good. Okay, I like it. Now I want to learn about you. I want to learn about your team. Back to the comment back there. That's kind of where that comes in. Yeah.

My question is more related with the why. So basically, I'm based in an emerging market. We are— we're a food business basically delivering homemade meals from home chefs to customers. So originally starting in Mexico, and then we're looking at Latin America, Middle East, and Southeast Asia. So my question is—

So why are you not starting in the United States where you're at?

United States have a lot of regulations, and people are not price sensitive enough, so we don't think it's the best market to start.

So how much is it gonna cost you to put your team in those 4 countries? Do I want to invest in that? Just a thought. No, keep going.

We're starting in Mexico first, and then we're, we're gonna establish teams in all those other continents.

Okay, interesting.

Yeah, so my question is about angel investors who don't know the market, the emerging market that we're in necessarily. I want to know what's their fear of investing in us and how do we overcome that?

Okay, the biggest fear is I don't know the market you're going in. So most investors still like to invest within 100 miles. Because I can drive to your office and I can walk in and see what's going on in the office. Now, we have become more global. Again, investors have become more sophisticated. There are channels out there to go internationally, but investors are still very local. So one of the things I would look at is if you're going to go to Mexico, find a Mexican company to invest in your Mexico operation. Find a China company to invest in your China one. Those kind of things. So finding somebody here to invest in a company and the first thing you tell me is, I'm not going to do anything in the United States. I'm going to move outside the United States and do it elsewhere. I'd be a little uncertain about that. Just for reference. Yeah. As a Y, can you elaborate more about what we should talk about when we talk about the opportunity? Like what's wrong in the market or how much— Yeah. So there's a few things in the market. One of the things I want to know is you're in a growth market. Is that market growing? One. Is there demand? Do people want it? How can you convince me that there's demand in that people? So at the end of the day, if you've done a perfect opportunity slide, then what I got out of that slide was everybody wants it. Lots and lots of people want it. They're willing to pay money for it and they want it now. Now, sometimes is the most difficult one because a lot of things don't drive why now. But if you've done those 3 things, and that's probably an opportunity. What's not an opportunity, and this is my personal take, this is an area that me and my other investors get ornery. I really don't care how big your market is. Everything in the world today is a billion-dollar market. Ink pens are a billion-dollar market. It's a global economy. Nobody sells across the street anymore. So everything's a billion-dollar market. Now it does nice. So normally on this pitch deck, on the opportunity, the first thing we'll have at the top is I'm in the $422 billion X market. The important thing there is now you've defined what sandbox you're in, and I know where you're standing. And now as an investor, I'm going to start thinking in my head going, oh, okay. Now the number does have to be big enough to excite people, but I would argue if you do something really well, you're going to be in the multi— you know, you're going to be in a multi-billion-dollar market anyway. Whether you can— how much of that you can capture is the real question, okay? Now there's a gentleman that does a really good talk on why. I met him about 8, 9 years ago, and he's got a video that's been out on TEDx for about 5 or 6, 7 years, and it's actually pretty well done. If you haven't seen it, His name's Simon Sinek.

Absolutely.

All right. So Simon's my guy. He actually changed a lot when I— years ago when I met him, I go, wow, what a cool way to think about things. So that's a good— it's a good video. And so the why is really important and why you're doing what you're doing. And that really goes into your vision. So when I look at a vision, one of the sentences I want you guys to think about here, which to define your vision, is a lot of times on your opening slide, think about this sentence to put on your slide. The future of blank is blank. The future of whatever it is you're doing is what you're doing. So the space you're going into is this. So an example, if you look at Tesla, you know, granted they're more in the battery business, but for an example, you know, Elon would say the future of cars is electric. Okay, that's good. We're in the electric car market. And Toyota believed that for a while until last year when they divorced Tesla and dropped the partnership and decided we're going hydrogen. But anyway, so have your— that's your visions table. We believe the future of this is this. So the greenhouse person I told you about, she came in and didn't really have that. So what we developed was her real understanding of why she was in this business is because she believes that the future of agriculture is grow local, consume local. Don't grow everything in Salinas and ship it all over the world so it ripens on a truck. So that's her future. Now, if you don't believe— if they don't believe your vision, Then you might as well shake hands because they're not going to pay attention to the rest of your pitch deck because you guys are totally fundamentally not in the same focus of where the future is. So think about the future of blank is blank and fill in those blanks. Okay, now once you've convinced me there's a great opportunity, we can all make tons of money and everybody wants this and they want it yesterday. Like, oh, sorry about that. Go ahead.

Going back to the foreign market as an investor. What would convince you? Like you said, you'd be skeptical to go in a market that you're unfamiliar with. What would convince you? What would you like to see in order to get into that space?

I would say in most cases is that as an investor, I have access to that market. I may have partners in that market. I may know folks into that market. I know companies that are doing cross-border work in that market, and that I know we can fix whatever problems or manage whatever you're going to run across there. And there are a lot of companies like that, so that would be as much as anything.

No, but yeah, that is on your side, what you— whom you know, who you know in that market, and which people are investing there and whatnot. But as like on our part—

On your side, there's probably very little you can do to convince me that you're a foreign country and somebody in a foreign country can do it, because I'm not in that country. I don't work in that country. I don't know anything enough detail about that country to understand my risks. Odds are you're— the thing I hear most of the time is when I work with a lot of Indian companies, almost all the Indian companies I know, their cousin in India has a company that's doing all the programming for them. That's the standard one, and that's now acceptable, but that used to not be acceptable at one point. Cross-border, if you're over there and I'm not, is always a hard sell to investors. It just is, but understand that and build a strategy around it. It can work. You can make it happen. You just have to understand it going in. So I don't have a clock, so I don't know what time we're at here, but let's look. It's currently 11:57. Okay, I got 3 minutes. Okay, so let's power through this. Okay, so you've convinced me that there's an opportunity and that you're gonna— so my next question to you is gonna be, great, why isn't everybody doing it? So the problem you're gonna give me is the problem that you have to solve to capture the opportunity. And the problem— keep in mind, you get to pick the problem, so pick the problem that your product solves the best. And then formulate that to show me how solving that problem is going to capture that opportunity. If the problem you're solving is that people don't like entering long profiles to get logged on to something, then I don't see a correlation between that and lots of money. So make sure it's a strategic problem and it solves— and so if I look at that problem and say, if you solve that problem, we're going to capture some of that opportunity. That's the problem you want to be solving. And then of course, you're going to tell me that the problem is that this is broke. And then you're going to go to your solution page. You're going to tell me, and we fix it. And so basically, your solution page is going to regurgitate exactly how you fix the problems you stated. You're going to have a strategic problem and probably some sub-bullets underneath that strategic problem. And your solution needs to tell me how you solve those problems and tell me why your product's great, why it's cool, what's good about it. And it's not always your product. Many times, it's your business model. Uber did not invent the car. They did not invent the taxi. They did not invent public transportation. But they did come up with a unique business model which they put out there. So they had no technology. They had nothing. They had a model. That's all they had was a business model. Next thing I want to know is the market. And what's important about the market is that you understand the market. You understand what sandbox you're in. You know who's in the sandbox with you. You know where you fit in that sandbox. And you know how you're going to own it at the end of recess. And so that's what's really important in the market. Because we've already talked about how big it is and why we should be here. That's in the opportunity slide. So now the market slide, I want you to give me some insight and convince me that you know your market space well. And a big part of that is your competitive landscape. Now the key is the plan. And there's— and I'm going to jump real quick through this because plan is important because almost 99% of entrepreneurs I work with have a crap plan. And they— or none whatsoever. So let's talk about what makes up a plan. So now you're going to tell me about your team. Also on your team, tell me what you don't have so I know that you don't think you have everything, but you don't. And let me, you know, understand your financials. Okay, let's talk about plan real quick. Plans consist of 3 things. Milestone number 1 is product development. You cannot leave milestone number 1 until you have an MVP, and we expect you to pay for your MVP. So I expect milestone number 1 to look like this: we've completed all these things and we have $550,000 skin in the game, $300,000 in investment and $200,000 $250,000 in sweat equity. Okay. But you've done all these things. Milestone number 2 is go-to-market. The purpose of go-to-market again is to validate your product, validate your business model to ensure that you're ready. You cannot leave milestone number 2 until you have convinced me that you have the right product that everybody wants at the right price that they're going to pay for it. Once you do that, I get to go to milestone number 3, and milestone number 3 is your growth milestone. Every milestone has 3 business units in it: product development, business development, and operations. Operations is the necessary evil to do the other 2, and it's referred to as overhead. In this phase, in the first— here it's almost all product development with a little business development. As you move to the right, it becomes less product development and more business development. So by the time you're done here, you're just doing quality improvements on your product. And moving down the road. Now, all 3 of those have people performing them, and that's where your salaries are embedded. We don't talk about salaries. We don't talk about how much you're going to pay people. That'll come out in the due diligence. But you need to do these 3 things. And when you tell me where it's at, you're going to lay it down. Now, this plan right here takes me out to what I call the finish line. And the finish line for me as an investor is my exit. So now with this plan, what I can look at this plan is I can see what your funding strategy is. I can see exactly what you're going to do with it from operations, from product development to business development. I know where you're going to go. I can see where you're going to exit. It looks like we're going to exit in about 3 years down the road, and these kind of things are happening. Now we can have a very detailed discussion on whether I think your plan is accurate, inaccurate. I can understand your funding strategy and what's going to go on. So now I know exactly what's going to happen from today to exit. So that is a great way to do a plan and establish what it is and how long it is. So this tells me a lot. I rarely— when I see a plan for an entrepreneur startup, 99.9% of the time it's all about product rollout. Oh, we're going to do this. The product's going to do that. We're going to do that. And my question is, well, what's your business people doing? OK. So keep in mind on this. 3 milestones, 3 business units. And that should take me to the last slide. And there's my email address. And any more questions? Because I think we're about out of time. I'll hang around, though, if anybody wants to stop and talk later.

Thank you.