Never Underestimate the Power of a Good Corporate Presentation

While not all investor meetings require a walk through of your company’s slide deck, meetings with potential new shareholders almost always start with the investor presentation. To ensure that your audience fully appreciates your story, it’s key that your IR deck be clear, concise, and compelling.

Here are 5 tips for refreshing your IR deck to ensure your company’s story and opportunity is properly conveyed:

1. Clearly explain your business. The most common mistake we see is companies launching into their story before telling the audience exactly what they do. Make sure you allocate ample time early in the discussion to explain your business. If you lose them in the first ten minutes because they don’t fully understand what you do, the rest of the meeting is a waste of time.
2. Make sure your industry numbers are correct. When discussing your market opportunity, make sure your numbers make sense and are correct. The fastest way to kill a meeting is to base your assumptions on figures that you can’t back up factually. Management teams lose credibility when the numbers don’t jive.
3. Articulate your growth strategy. Once investors figure out what you do and that you have a large market opportunity, the rest of the discussion is easy and should focus on your growth strategy. Senior management teams need to clearly articulate both near-term and long-term growth strategies for the company.
4. Make sure the deck reflects the current story. Your company and the market you operate in will evolve over time and new, exciting opportunities will present themselves. If not kept up to date, your corporate presentation will become stale, no longer highlighting the messages you are verbally looking to convey during the meeting.
5. Strike the right balance in the financials. When it comes to your financials, transparency is paramount. A presentation can veer off the tracks if there is not enough clarity in your numbers. Make sure you provide enough granularity for a potential investor to get comfortable with your business model.

Investors meet with hundreds of companies a year and have a choice of which ones they want to pursue. If you follow the 5 tips offered above, you will have positioned your company properly and the first meeting with potential investors will likely lead to further discussions.

If you found these tips helpful, please contact us for more strategic information that can help with your IR decision making, and sign up for our newsletter to gather more insights. You can also follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.