Pitch deck

A pitch deck runs twelve to twenty slides and comes together in three steps: structure in bullet points, then the words, then the design. The order matters, because a beautiful slide carrying a weak idea gets rebuilt twice. A strategist and a designer usually make it, ideally a few days before anyone actually needs it rather than the night before.

The difference between a good and a bad deck is how many questions you have to answer afterwards. A software company brought us an investor deck and every reader asked what they were selling. The design was not the problem. The product appeared on slide seven. We moved it to slide two and meetings got shorter by twenty minutes, which left time for the real conversation.

The process: a brief on the audience, structure for approval, copy, design following the brand manual, then a read through out loud. You supply the numbers you are willing to show and clarity about who receives it. The investor version and the sales version cannot be merged into one. A pitch deck usually takes one to three weeks depending on how fast the inputs arrive.

Honestly, the part that gets oversold is animation and transitions. Most decks are read silently as a PDF, where the animation does not exist. The money belongs in structure and in two or three well drawn diagrams. And a forty slide template from which you will use eight is simply extra work for everyone involved.

We follow a one headline rule: every slide must make sense even if you cover everything except the headline. Anyone skimming headline to headline should get the whole story. Try it today: copy the headlines out of your presentation into a single document and read them in a row.