Your pitch deck is a critical step on the way to acquiring funding for your business. Almost every startup I have encountered already had a pitch deck completed. It is the first thing investor see about your company, and it is often your only chance to set the hook and get followup meetings. However, you don’t always have control of the way in which your deck will be seen.

Ideally, you will present your deck in person, but sometimes you will have to send the investor a deck that they will read on their own. In many cases you will be required to upload it to a portal or email it to the investor.

Unfortunately, most founders I meet use the same deck whether they are presenting or emailing their pitch, and that can be disastrous. The pitch is essential to growing your business. It is critical that it has the largest possible impact, but a pitch optimized for presenting will be confusing when read alone. Conversely a deck optimized for reading will be busy, distracting, and redundant when presented live. Finally, a deck that tries to fill both roles will be optimized for neither and have less impact than it might otherwise. Funding is too competitive to use a less than optimal deck.

The deck you present in person should put the focus on you as the speaker. The slides should support, but not repeat, the things that you say. You never want to see the audience tune you out while they read the text over your shoulder. 

However, live presentation decks don’t have enough information to stand on their own. That supporting information without the context of your talk will just seem like random facts or images. Decks designed to be read alone require all the context to be included in the slides. They need to tell the entire story, and generate excitement, without any help from you.

The answer is to create two different decks. They should tell the same story and follow the same structure, but they will require independently designed slides. It is best when they share a visual theme and language, but resist the urge to simply add text to the presentation slides or strip text from the read alone ones. Invest the time to create new slides for each format.

With these two decks in hand, you are ready to put your best foot forward with any investor, whether in person or not.

I would love to see any examples of these two types of deck that you create and are willing to share with the community.

Till next time, ciao!