What you need for an investment meeting

- Receiving investment is difficult, but it's not as difficult as you may think to get a meeting with an investor. Investors want to meet entrepreneurs who may be great investments. It's the meeting itself that proves to be difficult. In order to get investment, you need to show investors why your company is a good investment opportunity. You'll want to prepare a few key materials: an elevator pitch, executive summary, a presentation deck, and a demo or prototype if possible. Let's start with the easiest one: your elevator pitch. Your elevator pitch should explain your idea in just a couple of sentences. You should be able to describe your business or idea quickly enough to share it with someone on an elevator ride. An investor will read or listen to your elevator pitch before they look at anything else, often in an email before taking a meeting. Let me share with you the elevator pitch for our previous company, Tixers. Tixers is a digital ticket marketplace. With Tixers, you can exchange tickets you're unable to use now for tickets that you can use in the future. Ticket holders can instantly trade in their tickets for site credit that can be used towards other events. Okay, next is the executive summary. An executive summary is a more substantial explanation of your business, how it works, and your performance projections. Your executive summary should talk about the problem you solve, how you solve it, why your product is better than what's on the market, and why you're the right team to build this company. If you have some high level financials, you'll want to include them too. The executive summary is typically one to three pages long and is often attached to an email as a PDF as your first true impression that you make on an investor. It's often what opens the door to your investment meeting. Once you're in the room with an investor, the most common and effective method of presenting your company is with the presentation deck. Your presentation deck should be around 10 to 20 slides and expand upon the information in your executive summary. One key addition to the presentation deck, if it's not in your executive summary, is talking about how much investment you're seeking. This goal should be based on reasoning. Don't just pull a number out of the air because it's a round number, but instead build a model for how much money you'll need in order to build your company to the next milestone. Show the investors how much capital you need and why you need it. If you're an early stage company, you may be seeking investment to build the initial product and find your first customers. If you're later stage, you may be seeking investment to hire support staff to scale up operations. Start by calculating how much money you expect to spend each month in order to reach that milestone and estimate how many months it will take for you to get there. That creates a simple formula for estimating the investment that you'll need. Finally, you'll strengthen your presentation if you have a demo or prototype of your product to share at that meeting. Don't worry if your product is in the early stages, and it's either limited or glitchy. Investors see early stage technology all the time, and they're great at envisioning what a future version might be like. The point is to show the investors how you're thinking about the problem and how you're building the product. Armed with a clear elevator speech and a compelling executive summary, you stand a great chance of getting a meeting with an investor. And by coming to that meeting with a strong presentation deck, you give yourself the best chance of getting that investment.