Slide 5 describes your competition. Don’t say, “There is no competition.” Competition comes in at least three different types: Alternatives, direct competitors, and keeping the status quo. List them in a spreadsheet format. List alternative approaches to meeting the need and why yours is different. Next, list your direct competitors, their market share relative to you, and how your offering is different. Finally, list the status quo: What is the cost or impact of living with the problem? What if they don’t solve it? What are the consequences?

Slide 6 is your business model. Describe how the business will operate in terms of gross revenue, gross margins, and how that will change as the company gets bigger. Describe how you’ll improve margins over time or over growth, or over subsequent generations of product.

Slide 7 outlines sales and marketing.
In this slide, say who you’ll sell the product to, and if they are a distribution channel, tell how the channel, distributor, or agent will sell the product to the ultimate end customer. How will the salespeople sell the product?

Slide 8 describes your organization. This is very important. The investor wants to know who is going to be managing their money to ensure a return. List the people that you have for the following roles: President, VP of R&D/Engineering/Development, CFO, VP of Sales and Marketing. Look at your list. Do any of them have experience starting a company? Investors will want experience on your management team. Also, list your Board of Directors. Again, experience counts! Find people who have started companies before.

Slide 9 shows your financials. Describe the costs and revenue estimates for the next three years. Include estimates of fees for defending IP and patents, as well as the revenue ramp up. This is a summary table, not the entire financials. Investors will be looking to see how fast you’ll consume their investment and what you’ll need in total to be successful.

Slide 10 is a summary of what you want. Restate the summary slide that you began with. Use this slide to ask for the money and to answer any questions that your audience may have.

Hopefully, you’ve found these to be practical, simple steps and guidelines that you can implement. No presentation is ever final: the market changes, the progress on your invention changes, your organization changes, and investors change, so expect to revise this many times. Further, expect that you’ll need to review this several times to get comfortable and show that you know all of the topics cold — not just the technology.

About the Authors
Bill Neill has over 20 years experience in bringing new products to market in the high-technology markets, including his work at Hewlett-Packard. Contact Bill at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . Drew Hession-Kunz has over 17 years experience bringing new products to market in high technology. He is currently CFO at a venturefunded company, and an Adjunct Professor at Carroll Graduate School of Business at Boston College. Contact Drew at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .