Transcript
Welcome to the Vision2Success digital marketing Workshop, on how to pitch deck to secure investment.
These are free regular workshops that are designed to help you take your vision and realise it in a successful business. The overall structure for the next hour will be a short introduction as to who we are and what Vision2Success is all about. And then I’m really delighted today, we’ve got an education presentation by David Pugh, and I’ll do a bit of more of an intro in a minute.
This is the last one before summer, and then we break and then the next one will be on the 14th September. And there’ll be a chance to ask questions at the end. We are using restream. So anywhere on LinkedIn, Facebook or YouTube, past clients and so forth, those will come through to restream. And Rachel, our sales and marketing manager will then be reposting into chat, so that we can see the questions.
And then at the end, there will be time to answer those questions and have a discussion. And you know, talk about some of the things, one of the things we’d like for people to get away with is actions that they can then get on with. And as I say, David will be here, we run this thing to 12 o’clock, we will have time for questions and things pertinent to your particular projects.
And then hopefully, we’ll get a chance to find out what actions you’re going to take away from today.
Okay, so first of all, we’re going to have a short introduction of what vision2success is all about.
So, a few of you know me because I have quite a few regulars on the call today.
I’m a business coach, business digital coach got qualifications founder and managing director of KUB, which provides support and help through the vision2success. And we also are an agency for any of your marketing requirements.
My daughter joined me seven years ago, and we’ve now got a team of seven. And over the sort of 20 years, I’ve been working as a coach and specialist, I’ve worked with over 500 companies for over the last 20 years.
I’ve been using technology since 1984. And we’ve got 2000 connections on LinkedIn. So I’ve been around quite a bit. Okay, so running speak of you during the presentation.
And then I’ll review when we have the interactive sessions, please use mute, we’re not talking. And then I think given that we’ve got quite a few in the room today. If you’d like to raise your hand electronically, when we when we do start the discussion so we can see who wants to ask a question. And then hopefully, we’ll have a good chat at the end. Okay.
So why do we do this? I mean, this is you know, we’ve got screens, microphones and all sorts here. And why do we do this? We want to make the world a better place. Sounds a bit trite.
But there’s so much not too good stuff going on, it’s good to have some things that actually are free and you can get something out of it. And, you know, we can share and collaborate, you know, and hopefully make things better for everyone.
And because it’s marketing oriented, we’re here to help you solve your digital marketing problems. And we are looking to build a community of support. I don’t just mean people use digital marketing, but also marketing professionals and also marketing suppliers. So that we can create a heady mix of people who need help and people who can provide help. It’s not just about ourselves.
We are doing quite a bit of stuff to facilitate all that. So we’ve run the Wednesday morning workshops, starting again on the 14th of September, running every fortnight with myself and guest speakers. We’ve also got a book so if you want the detailed knowledge, you can buy the book, it’s on Amazon.
We have some online courses and are developing another one at the moment. We have got an app which we are soft launching at the moment, which will help you do your strategy and implementation, and currently building in financial models so that you can budgeting and costing as well.
And then we do a fixed price strategy, and implementation planning projects for people as well. For those who want outside help.
We do provide all the tools. So this is the book if you would like a copy, it’s on about 12 global stores around the world. But probably the easiest one is Amazon just type in drive sales with digital marketing. And it pops up, we’ve got three chapters on overall process and seven on its practical implementation.
We also use a platform called net hub, which is building an online community. If you’re interested, please let me know we do have a page on the website. Unfortunately, SiteGround are having cooling issues. So the actual server, the actual website, vision2success.co is currently down.
Not a lot we can do about it. But the actual net hub community on the net hub is fine. So if you’d like to be part of that community, please let me know. Okay, I’d now like to introduce our guest speaker for today.
We work with a lot of high growth companies who are often going to seek funding, so forth. And it’s got to be one of the hardest things ever to get that funding, but also to prepare a slide deck that really gets that message over.
And so securing investment for your project can be extremely challenging. And although you’re raising money. It’s it’s very much a marketing campaign. So some people treat it as go and get some money. But actually, it’s a full on sales.
And so you need a proper investor deck and you need somebody who’s an expert in that. So today, I’m delighted to be joined by my guest speaker David Pugh, founder of Scrub the Deck who’s going to illuminate us on critical elements of an investor deck. And it will help you to secure that crucial funding for your next project.
Okay, can everyone hear me okay, am I on? Right. Okay, great. So I’ll share my screen and share my deck.
Okay, so this is the pitch deck guide. I’m going to talk about pitch decks and why it’s so important and all the elements that you need.
First, I’m going to just introduce myself. So you get a bit of history about what I’m about. So this is me, David Pugh. I’ve been self employed since 2007. So haven’t had a job as such since then, which is a good thing.
So I quit my job, I was a graphic designer, full time professional. And I went to found freelance graphic designer.co.uk. So that’s my site, I’ve built up a big portfolio of clients working in London over the years, so that’s, that’s still going now, but during that time, I actually worked on a lot of decks.
Now one of the first companies I did decks for was actually the BBC. So off to sort of establish myself as a designer. I was hired to work with the BBC to create offline presentations for exporting programmes from the BBC.
So the BBC make much more money from exporting their shows out than they do from the licence payers. So to get a package a presentation for big networks in America and all over the globe. For big brands, like Strictly Come Dancing and Doctor Who and Top Gear. These decks had to be quite fancy multimedia, lots of video, but they also had to tell a story and get that message across.
So that’s sort of where that started. But then since then, I’ve also worked on a lot of other decks, sales decks, investment decks, in multiple industries such as luxury sector, sports, tech and travel.
So then last year, I sort of specialised into that, working with a business coach quite closely to sort of work on that this – this is like the highest value problem that I can solve. So I founded Scrub the Deck, it’s only been about a year, I’ve got a registered trademark on that got a.com. So that’s established now.
And now, you know, it’s grown very quickly. And now I’m working on investments from anything from $500,000 to up to 250 million, which I’m working on at the moment.
So in terms of LinkedIn, I don’t quite have as many on LinkedIn as Peter, but I’ve got 21,000 connections, and off that a lot of them are investors. So I’ve also got the ear of some of the investors, I can create the decks for the decks, and I’m on the inbox of up to 600 investors.
And that’s really important because investors get a lot of these things sent to them. But someone that they’ve kind of trust, they will open my email, they will read the deck. So that’s, that’s very important part of the strategy, you know, write the deck, complete it, help my clients get the deck right, and then be able to give it to investors as well, and it’d be opened.
So I’ll get on to like the content of a pitch deck now.
Now, I hear this a lot. Founders are confused about the different types of pitch deck – do I need a teaser deck, detailed deck? Do I need a full business plan? Do I need a presentation deck? I’ll just quickly go through the reasons why you only kind of need one.
So if you think about trying to connect with investors, or trying to send out decks, it’s a little bit like dating, right? If you go on a date, and you want to impress, if you send them a teaser, that’s a bit like going on a date, and really not talking very much, you know, keeping the cards close to your chest or not sharing very much, you’re not really going to get a second date.
If you go full business plan that’s a bit like proposing on first day, you know, you’re basically you’re going to the investor and you’re gonna give them tonnes of information and facts and figures and documents and it’s too much.
The thing is you can kind of integrate those two things into one deck. So it’s kind of like a detailed deck, there’s a sweet spot of information, not too much, not too little. But that deck needs to get you a meeting, right.
So the way it can be a teaser deck is that you can present it nicely, so they can scan it very quickly, you know, because they will, they will spend not very much time on this. They’ll they’ll flick through it in five minutes. So as long as it can be quickly scanned, then you kinda don’t need a teaser deck. If you send a teaser deck first, you’re going to still have to send them a detailed deck anyway. So I would say don’t bother with it. Get one deck.
Now the full business plan aspect, you can with it being a PDF, you can externally link to extra stuff. And I’ll go through that as we go through this content. So that kind of negates the full business plan. If they want to invest, they’re gonna go through proper due diligence with you. So all of those facts or figures will come out anyway.
But when you’re first introducting, you don’t want to just send them loads of – you want to make them read stuff. You’ve got to realise that every word they read of this deck is a cost to them. It’s a cost of time. And that’s their most valuable asset.
And then the final one is the presentation deck. Now that’s basically your normal pitch deck. But without the words, just bullet points. And this is going to be like this that I’m going to talk through now.
So you’ve got to realise investors, they see about 100 decks a month, you’ve got about five minutes, okay, so this is why you can’t waste stuff and can’t waste your time. The standard is extremely high. You know, if you if you if you go in with a little PowerPoint thing you’ve done yourself and you don’t really know what you’re doing, forget it, you know, they won’t get past the first page.
So I’m gonna go through all the different sections of the deck. The first one being the introduction, I also like to say that it’s good to have these little title slides, because it breaks things up. It allows people to understand what these next sections are, the brain is very good at concentrating on three things, you know, so if you can make them in threes, not all these are in threes. But if you can make them threes it’s quite good.
So on my introduction section, I’ve got elevator pitch, problem and solution. So a lot of people sort of start with a problem. I don’t like to start with a problem because it starts on a negative, I like to start in a positive. So the elevator pitch. People are familiar with this term. You know, you’ve got 10-20 seconds to impress them to tell them what it’s about.
So what would you tell an investor in an elevator pitch? You know, you definitely highlight your positive vision, what you want to change in the world, right? What does it do? What’s your main goal, your main vision, you want to try and share that. You want to quickly list achievements, accolades, awards, that kind of thing. Anything that paints you in a good light.
You want to talk about your customers and your clients and your traction, especially if you’ve got things like, you know, big brands, you know that that will say a lot about your company. You know, KFC is one of our clients, you know, suddenly, you know, that’s like a shortcut to say that how much they will have done their own due diligence on you, and they trust you, and they use you. So that’s a big tick.
And then it’s important to give them a reason for investment, you know, like, you want to try and invite them in and say, you know, come on this journey with us, we want you because or we need this investment because, you know, give them a reason. Because hopefully, the challenge of each page is to just make them read the next page. And if all those ingredients are there, they will, they’ll read on.
So now we get to problem. Define it in simple terms, quite obviously. Maximise the pain of that problem, make the investor feel it or identify with it. And put $1 amount on that, because investors they do think in terms of money, you know, and if they might not see as a problem. But if you highlight the actual cost of that problem, suddenly, they understand that it’s a problem, right?
Here’s a quote, all good pitches should have at least one Elon Musk quote, you get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of the problems you solve. So you could talk about difficulty, you can also talk about the value of the problem you solve, that’s why it’s important to put that dollar amount in there.
So solution, define how you fix the problem, quite simply. Highlight the difference that you make in the quality of your customers life, right? There’s a change there, your solution makes this big change. And again, put $1 amount on that, you know, if it’s companies, put $1 amount on the profits, it’s quite obvious like that, if you add stats, and the biggest stat of all is the money stat, you know, then investors are going to be interested in that.
So you’ve highlighted your elevator pitch, the problem and the solution. Now, the next logical step is to talk about the product, you know, hopefully now, they’re interested by the problem and the solution they want to know about your product.
So why is there a picture of a beach here? Well, if you think about an airline company, and their product is not really the aeroplanes you know, their product is that it’s the beach, it’s the destination it’s the result. So when you’re talking about the product is good to focus on what result it gives, you know, paint that picture.
Wow, factor imagery will really help you know, if it is a product, invest in good photography, or CGI imagery, or if it’s a service, then find good photography that illustrates that emotionally.
Put the investor in the headspace of the customer. They will do that anyway, you know, so even if you’re b2b, the investor will still think who is the actual end customer? Are they going to buy it? Why are they going to buy it?
And this is another thing, this is what I’m talking about. Putting in external links. Now you’ve got the product overview, especially in tech, which is what I do a lot of work in tech, consider doing a link to a walkthrough video, you know, and make it short, and engaging and charismatic. But you know, a minute maximum. Screenshot this is how you sign up, this is our main features, etc. But don’t make them have to sit through it, make it an option, you know, because they’re not going to sit through it the first time. They’re going to flick through at high speed in five minutes. But they want to go back to go, I wonder what that product is all about, then they can access it straight away.
So now talk about product benefits, rather than the features. So if your product is an umbrella, you could say that the feature is waterproof material, where the benefit is that it keeps you dry. So it’s important to just focus on benefits keeps you dry, curved handle feature, comfortable to hold is the benefit. Expands and contracts, that’s a feature, but it means it’s easier to store. So make sure at least if you do highlight the features, make sure you give the benefits as well because they might not always be obvious.
We talk about customer. So you want to you want to demonstrate on the next slide who your customer is. So is that you know age, sex, job income, all that kind of stuff, demographics, but also understand the psychographics you know, understand their hopes and dreams. You know, that’s very important. You need to illustrate this.
Show that the customers love you. That’s very powerful, you know, because if the if the investor hasn’t got it so far, don’t really see the problem. Okay, it’s got a value okay, you know, I can understand that now, even if I don’t understand it as an invest.
If I see video, video, video video video of customers raving about your product, and five star reviews and you know, 1000s of followers, that’s enough social proof for me, you know that there’s something good for you, and you cannot fake video testimonials. And again, you can link externally to a website or something on your page, don’t make them sit through it link to it.
So now after you’ve talked about all of that, we’re gonna talk about the core technology. Now, the point of this slide, is to demonstrate that there’s a moat around your castle, that means that it’s protected.
Now, if you think about it, if you’re asking for 5 million, if an investor is there thinking, Well, you know, for 5 million, I could just make this myself, or for even 500k, I could make this myself, if they’ve got that impression, they’re not going to invest. So it’s game over right there.
So you need to show that you’ve got your intellectual expertise, the amount of money you’ve spent on it, the people that you’ve worked with a number of years and prototypes, you know, you need to really emphasise how strongly protected it is.
Avoid highly technical language. You can’t assume that the investor will know about the technology, the ins and outs, it’s built on a dotnet core, it uses JavaScript, blah, blah, blah, it’s not important, you know, so don’t talk about technical language, just talk about the top level stuff.
Again, if they want to dig in deeper, that will happen in the due diligence process, they’ll have been maybe have a meeting with your with your CTO or whatever. So avoid it for now.
But do explain the techs deployed in a unique way. So highlight how you’re different.
So that’s all the product section, right? So you’ve got all that. So now they understand the intro, what you’re all about, they understand the products very well. Hopefully, they’re still reading, they’re still excited.
Now we get onto the business section, the business model. Now, this is what they’re really, but some of them might just flick straight to this, you know, so So here we got, we’ve got three slides here, how you make money, your milestones, and roadmap and your projections.
So let’s launch into how you make money. So this can be simple as some nice little clean infographics like this, a customer acquisition cost, an average spend per customer, the lifespan of that customer. How many customers you’ve got at the moment. And how many new signups you get a month. Add a bit of text as well. But basically give them that sort of core information about how you make money, the basic stuff, they’ll quickly be able to add all that up, you know, they’ll do that mentally anyway.
And then you could talk about sort of journey, your milestones and roadmap. So you can do this year by year, you could do it quarter by quarter, talk about, you know, just again, just this much information is okay for now.
Q1 stats revenue, Q2, Q3, and then once you’ve got those three, and you’re not into q4, then q4 can be a projection. Now, it makes a lot more sense to put those numbers in your predicted q4, if you’ve got the other three lined up, and it makes a natural curve, you know, so you can that sort of highlights traction as well, as well as maybe highlighting some goals and something accountable that they can hold you to or you said you’re going to expand Europe- has that hasn’t happened yet? You know what, if you write it down, it kind of makes you accountable for it, which is good.
Now projections, a lot of investors won’t take that much notice of it, because they all look like this massive graphs in the future. You know, and if you have put some time into this, and it is backed up by a lot of financial data again, you can externally link to that to those spreadsheets and show your working and show maybe who’s done these projections. But ultimately, they’re not going to take too much notice of this.
So that’s your business model. Now, once you’ve covered the business model, you want to talk about the market, what’s the opportunity? And so here traction, growth strategy, really important and total addressable market.
So in the terms of the traction again, you could do it with nice little infographics.
What your stats were in 2019 and then how it progresses and when you can see three years in a row, you can see how you’ve grown, how that journey, you know, is increasing or your popularity is increasing. You know, that’s a good story to show you and it’s obviously in the past.
Now growth strategy, I’ve seen so many decks that don’t put forward any kind of growth strategy? You know, when you look at these projections, these projections only make sense if you’ve got a growth strategy. Okay, so it’s really important to have a slide talking about what you’re going to do next, you know, what are the big plans, and this, this could include what you’re going to do with the investment fund, you know, because you can’t show a graph, that’s deeply hockey curves up without giving some illustration as to why.
So you can just put some basic stuff in there, you know, like, I’m going to increase the ad spend by 20%, this is going to increase, customers were 12000. An like, just some simple stats like that, we’re gonna be doing this, we’re gonna be doing more public speaking, and this is going to bring in, so and so customers a year, or something, or all three, or maybe even more, we’re going to develop and innovate three new products to add, you know, and again, these are things that you can be accountable to, but it just shows that you’ve got that vision for the future, you’re just plodding along in the same way.
So total addressable market, if they don’t understand and, again, you can’t assume that they do understand the market, show them the total addressable market, the TAM, a lot of decks has probably heard this term Tam. So that like the total total total. So that could be a big figure, it’s definitely it could be hundreds of millions, it could be billions.
But it only really makes sense if you have the next two metrix, which is the serviceable addressable market, which is a smaller chunk of that total addressable market. So that’s the percentage of the tam that you’re you can reach via your own business model. So it might be geographic, it might be you know, how you sell or whatever, you know, what it is, whatever it is the product, whatever.
So that’s, that’s that portion of that big number, it gets to a smaller number. And then an even smaller number of that is, realistically what your market is, which is just serviceable, obtainable market, who you can realistically capture, because unless you’ve got a monopoly, you’ll not get all those customers, you know, your competition is going to get some you might need to fight, you might need to try and steal some of those customers. Or you might need to find customers that they haven’t accessed yet.
So that’s really, you can see how that big big number goes down to a small number, investors will want to see that you realistically understand this, there’s plenty of ways you can calculate this.
So that’s the market section. Now we want to talk about the why us section.
So straight away competition analysis, you never want to say, we’re completely unique, we have no competition, it’s there’s no way, if you don’t have any competition, you’re not in an industry that’s worth anything. You know, there’s no way you don’t have competition, you might have a very innovative product, which is great. But highlight the competition, highlight things that are similar, you know, highlight other options for the customer, because I tell the investor will know about this, and they’ll certainly research it. So dig into this.
And also, the thing is, you didn’t realise how many other companies, the investor might have seen similar, so you’ll never be able to find all the competition. So don’t be surprised if they come back and say this is a crowded space, because I’ve heard that before, people who will have something highly innovative.
Other people can independently come up with the same idea. And they’re all sending to the investor as well. So you know, you will never be able to identify your competition. But certainly, you can do a little table like this, which shows some of the things that you offer that maybe your competition doesn’t offer. So you want to highlight the competition, you can even write little stories on each one if you want. And you want to highlight how you’re different.
So then this is another really important one, your team Profiles page, right? So you want to talk about maybe three core members, the founders, certainly, if you’re in tech, you want the CTOs profiling. You want the managers, you know, the founder, the owner, and maybe one other person, that’s key. You don’t need to have a 14, but you do need to write about this amount of text for each person. You know, I’ve seen a lot of people that just go, name and job. And that’s no good for an investor, they really want to know, this is your chance to Blow Your Own Trumpet here.
And it’s easier for someone else to write it than you to write your own one. Because we always see our own acheivements as not that important. And sometimes it takes other people to show you, you know, well, you’ve done this, you’ve done this, you’ve done this, you go okay, I suppose I have, you know, so put that in, you know, if you’re sort of pre revenue.
This is so important this page because the investor is not investing even in the business, they’re investing in you. So if you’ve already made a company that’s done a million and you’ve sold it, you know, and you haven’t got any sales on this one, then this slide is going to be so important. Because they’re buying your intellectual property, the buyer, they’re trusting you.
So it’s a chance to show the team synergies, you know, if one person’s very good at sales, and the other person is very good at operations, and the other person is very technical, that’s a perfect synergy of skills in your team. So, to highlight this, talk about yourself, don’t be afraid to Blow Your Own Trumpet.
So that’s that section. And this is the final section is the ask, you know, the whole reason for the investment really. So a core financials table is absolutely essential. Now, this is a good format for it, you don’t want to be going to – this is like a top level view of your finances.
And what I’d suggest is you do kind of the last three years if you’ve got it, and then the last year broken down into quarters, and it’s it’s exciting to see a recent change in revenue or profits, you know, so if you do have that, you know, showing that because that’ll be exciting for the investor, they’ll wonder what happened between q1 and q2 that cause that, that big growth.
But these sort of stats, sort of things, you want to put in a top level, if this is 100, you know, so if your top level revenues 100, you know, just break it down cost of goods sold, your gross profit, operating expenses, operating profit, interest, earnings before taxes, net expense, and net income.
So if you just do at least do that, and again, I really recommend, it shows a lot of confidence. If you’ve got more financial data, just link it to external spreadsheets. And then if the investor wants, if they are really interested in it, they can download it and they can have a good look at it, then remember, this deck is to get you a meeting. That’s all it is.
And that’s where the investment comes in at the meeting.
And then kind of the final bit of the pie really is this pie graph, which is the use of funds, you know what you’re going to do with that chunk of money. This is important. It’s just to sort of highlight how you’re going to spend it what you’re going to do with it.
Pretty self explanatory. But again, a lot of people forget to put this in.
Yeah, and that’s it. That’s that if you get that information in there, you’re done. And then obviously, you want the contact page. Here’s my contact page. I’ve got an ebook, which outlines all of this. So if you want the ebook, you can go to scrub the deck.com. You can email me, Dave@scrubthedeck. I’ve got some slots this week, if you want to have a meeting, a little chat, a little strategy chat. I’ve got a few slots. So just booking your seat on the website or speak to Dave, talk to David Leek. And you can book a call with me. And that’s the end of my presentation. Thanks for listening.
Thank you very much, so much for a very useful presentation there.
It’s funny, you know, most of us probably in the room know all this stuff, but then putting it in the right order and, and getting that focus into the document I think is really helpful.
Yeah, I should have said, actually. But the reason why it’s in that order in that structure is because I’ve actually taken the time to speak to investors. So I’ve talked to them. And that’s kind of their structure, really, you know, I’ve done a lot of research myself and read a lot of books. But talking to the investors, you know, and sending them the eBook and going look at this. Does this make sense? One of the investors that read it said, This is so good. I’m going to use it as my guide to check other pitch decks. That was the best endorsement I had.
Absolutely. Well, I Yeah, Jeff, what would you like to? What’s your question?
Oh, congratulations. I thought that was fantastic. I’ve seen other presentations of how to do a pitch deck, and that’s certainly the best I’ve ever seen. One of the things I do tell clients, though, is to at least do a business plan before they do something called a pitch deck. Because what you find what I find that if they go straight to a pitch deck, what they what you realise that they realise they haven’t actually thought through the strategy.
And they ended up having to do the strategy on the fly in order to do the pitch deck. Whereas I often get them to do the business plan. I’ve given them a template for doing that. So they forces them to think it through. And so one of the dropouts from that business plan makes it a lot easier than to do a pitch deck.
Yeah, absolutely. And you can link like I said, I think that’s that’s a great way of doing it, do that first, then get the pitch deck which sort of shows the sort of emotional story and all that and gets them interested in the idea and you can just link to that document. That’s the thing, if you want to, you can present that as a separate document and link to that inside your pitch deck. So it’s nice and tidy and clean.
One other point, which I thought was great, is you didn’t say something like, You got to keep it to 12 slides or 20 slides, you know? Yeah, I don’t know, 30 slides or whatever it was, but, you know, we weren’t you weren’t fixated on. I’ve only got five minutes. Therefore, I need to do half a dozen slides.
Yeah, absolutely. It’s about how long it takes them to read it, rather than how many slides because like I said, you can have title slides, which you flick fast in one second, you can have a slide with a quote, whether it’s with a statement, they’re very powerful, you know. So yeah, the number of slides doesn’t matter, the size of the document in megabytes matters. If you’re sending it, you can’t email a 30 meg file, you have to link to something, but just, it’s not that difficult to make it a five megabyte two and a half megabyte file. So yeah.
What do you think about you know, because we work, I’ve worked as a business coach and do business plans, and etc. But what do you think about using that as like a checklist? You know, obviously not do the deck but as a checklist to sort of to them to go through, right, does the business plan actually pick up on all these things? Because sometimes you see business plans.
And, you know, we get Pitch Deck to Secure Investment in sort of saying, This is how we want to market something, we go, well, actually, you’re not very clear on these things. So we’ve had to use it as an agency just as to almost checklist. When can people when we onboard people to actually think to see if they’ve actually thought about stuff? Because sometimes they come to us with no strategy?
Yeah, well, I agree. I just said like, it’d be because as a as a, as a guide, you know, so even if they don’t work with me, you follow that guide, you’re gonna have all the ingredients.
Yeah, that’s brilliant. Any questions? Sara, did you want to ask some questions? Because I know you’re quite, you’re very interested with all your tech companies that you work with?
Let me unmute. Yeah, no, that was really helpful. David, thank you for that. I did put in the chat, whether you could share when I appreciate the very sensitive but whether it’s an old one or, or whether you can take all the financials or anything sensitive out of it, I’d be interested to see your approach visually.
That will be one thought, yeah, the tech companies, I find you made a really good point about – I made a note of it here – about keep it top level. I find, particularly with tech companies, they really focus on the platform, or the mechanism that they deliver it and not really what they’re achieving – there’s a classic one about you know, if you need to drill a hole, you’re more interested in the hole being created, as the end result than the actual tool that does it. And I found tech companies particularly get engrossed in APIs, and, you know, mechanisms and kind of get very involved.
I think businesses generally I find, get very involved in what they’re doing. And not really the need, and the benefit, and the customer. So constantly, I feel I’m drawing people back to the message, the benefit, the actual top level, what’s happening here, you know, why we’re here? Why we’re doing this? But you highlighted that very well. So no, I think it was very clear. Thank you.
So David, if you want to, you know, because I’m always keen that people take away actions things are going to do so what thing out of all that would you say as the the big takeaway from your presentation today?
Well, I would say don’t, don’t take things for granted do follow a very tried and tested system, because the standard is extremely high. You know, like these guys get 100 texts a month. And if yours is bad waffley, poorly laid out with big blocks of text are very complicated diagrams to get it you know, you’re not going to get response, you know, you have a it has to it has to have the right amount of information, a real sweet spot. So test it against people that know and don’t be if you don’t be afraid to rewrite it, you know, three or four or five times you know, because you might have to.
Okay, well, if nobody’s got any more questions, I’m very happy to do while you go all the contact details in the slide deck as soon as SiteGround fixes the problem and put our website back up again, the recording will be up there, we’ll have a transcript. We’ll have David slides, please contact David direct. If you do have any questions, happy to do an introduction, if you prefer me to introduce you to David.
You know, it’s really interesting if you look at the slide, which shows David’s competitors, and there’s plenty of people say they do slide decks, I mean, we occasionally do slide decks, but it’s always under the sort of working for a particular client, who knows what they want to put in it.
But if you look at the bit for me, and why I’m so excited to have David on here, because not only does he do a slide deck that’s got a high chance of getting it, he’s got a network of 600 people. And I’m sure David and I will be talking in future when a high growth company comes to us and says, Look, we need to launch x, y or z then so we’ll actually come speak to David because he will give you the money which will help the projecture to you. So yeah, super excited for today.
Yeah, I think what I’ve learned as well, is that any slide deck I’ve done in the past, is always improved by giving it to a graphic designer.
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I think design is critical, you’ve only got a very short time to get across a whole bunch of really useful information.
Yeah, that the the advantage of that. But there’s a there’s quite a few, but you’re talking about visual communication, you know, and you’re also talking about how they’re perceiving you, you know, so it’s almost like going into a job interview with a nicely laid out CV and a nice suit. You know, and then you’re gonna come across, well, aren’t you in the interviews from day one from the from the start, whereas if you come in with a dirty T shirt, and like, Oh, I’ve just scribbled this on a bit of paper, CV, you know, forget it, they’re not going to hire you. That’s the same as not using a graphic designer.
I mean, what’s happened over the years, when I started in consulting, we’d have a graphic graphic designer, and you give your PowerPoint slides to the graphic designer, and it would be improved. What’s happened now, of course, is that all of that support has gone. And the individual consultant is trying to do it all.
Well, it isn’t, David’s here.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I yeah, I mean, I work I also work with really good designers, but because design is my background, you know, I can find the best one. So I hire a designer who’s gonna be better than me.
Brilliant. Alright, guys. Well, there’s no more questions. Thanks very much for coming along. And, for the questions and so on. As you can see, you learn more when when people do get engaged, we are going to take a break over the summer. And I’ll be back on the 14th September.
