What good is your brilliant business idea if you can't communicate it and win over institutional investors?

We have all heard a good number of brilliant business ideas, but what good will they do when you can't communicate them clearly and compellingly and get institutional investors to put serious money into them? Investors tend to make up their minds in the first 3-5 minutes about whether this is going to be a polite 30-minute conversation (if that) that won't go anywhere (while thinking about "what time this afternoon should I deliver the kids to their after-school activities"), or whether there is perhaps something there that might interest them and prompts them to listen and engage.

How, for example, does 6-year old Singapore-based e-commerce platform Carousell pull in $85 million worth of commitments in its Series C Round?

A few months ago my good friend Mark Laudi, CEO of Singapore-based media group Hong Bao Media, and I teamed up to coach C-suite executives of both start-ups and more established companies on how to make compelling presentations to institutional investors in various settings. Like Carousell, these tend to be companies which are well beyond the friends, family and angel funding rounds and which now need to learn to pitch to institutional venture investors. In a four-hour time span we record various iterations of a CEO's pitch in Mark's studio, at every turn critique the presentation and often delve into the business model, and then go at it again until the CEO nails it. It is intense. Standing in front of a camera, with brights lights in your face, a microphone in front of you, a green studio wall behind you, presenting your business idea and explaining why people should give you their money, is about as hard as it gets -- that's why we set it up that way. If you can pull this off, other settings are a cake walk. Remember that the majority of people rather die than speak in public. And we have not even gotten to the pitch part and the ask. But practice eventually does make perfect. We help accelerate and compress this process.

Let's go over the basics again.

I would generally look for eight elements, listed below, in a pitch to an institutional investor, be it an elevator speech, a 2-3 minute pitch to a live audience or a 3-5 minute video presentation. It presumes that this presentation is for fundraising purposes, i.e. the audience is not very familiar yet with the venture but they may have seen, for example, a short two-pager or a summary term sheet in an introductory email that led to the meeting. This situation would be in contrast to general investor relations purposes, e.g., a presentation to an audience of equity analysts who have covered a publicly listed company for some time. A more established company going through an initial public offering, however, still in many cases needs to build a rapport with the investing public at large and the analyst community, so the investor presentation is akin to a general introduction of the company, which should cover the same basics below and convey the same strategic clarity.

1. Define the problem - The most critical element is that you identify a problem worth solving. If the product or service doesn't solve a problem that (prospective) customers have, you don't have a viable long-term business model. The problem will need to be described in just a few simple sentences, and ideally resonate with your audience. Preferably, the problem is a lasting one, i.e. not one that will be solved for by new technology coming onto the scene shortly.
2. Describe your solution - Once you have clearly defined the problem you are solving for, you need to explain your solution to that problem. If there is a clear vision and mission statement to the business that relate directly to the problem definition and the solution, this would be the time to articulate it.
3. Know your target market - Who has the problem you are solving and how many customers have you already sold to? How many more customers does your market research indicate you could you reach with your solution? How have you segmented your target market, and what geographic boundaries does it have? What is your customer profile, and what do they spend on their current solution (if any) to the problem you are solving?
4. What is your business model and your revenue model - you will need to be able to explain succinctly how you have been making money, and will continue to do so. Focus on current and future revenues, expenses, and the bottomline.
5. Who is on your team? - Only the right team will be able to effectively execute and build a great company. Why are you and your team the right people to execute your vision and why is your team's skill set precisely what is needed to lead your company to success? No matter how great or unique your solution, if you don't have the right team, the company will in the end not be successful. It is also useful to touch on governance - who sits on your Board and how will outside shareholders' interests be served.
6. Define the competition - What is the competition to your business? Even if nobody has yet come up with similar solution, your potential customers may be solving the problem they have with some alternative. What are your solution's advantages over the competition, i.e. what is your unique value proposition that you offer but your competitors don't and won't? (Faster, better, cheaper etc.). How defensible are these advantages (how long can you stay ahead of the competition?) and why is this (IP; proprietary intel; unique approach that is hard to replicate etc)?
7. What is your growth strategy? - Articulate clearly where you see the business heading in the future, what is the strategy for growth, how are you going to implement that strategy and what are the milestones you seek to accomplish. Be prepared to explain the risks and how you are going to manage them.
8. Make the ask and stop talking. Countless times we have seen that executives improve to make a fine pitch, are so glad it is over and then forget at the end to ask for anything. Don't forget the ask! And when you are done asking the investors for the investment you want from them, stop talking. You put the ball in the investors' court and then you wait for them to speak.

Needless to say the presentation also needs to be memorable, i.e. the audience needs to walk away with a clear picture of what business this company is in, how it makes money, what makes it unique and poised for greatness. Some investors hear up to ten pitches in a day. How will your pitch be remembered amidst that onslaught? The more the elements are worked into the telling of an engaging story, with the speaker really connecting with the audience, the better it is. For that reason, you are also very well-served to do some deep-dive research on the institutional investor(s), both the firm and the individual(s) you are going to meet, especially what they have (not) invested in and why (not), so your can personalize your pitch to the investor in front of you. Why would you give your investors a cookie-cutter approach, if you don't like to be treated the same way?

All pretty logical and simple, isn't? These elements, with some variations, can be found in lots of places online and in many how-to books, and there is really nothing novel or revolutionary about them. Yet, we frankly see even experienced C-suite executives struggle with this.

We find that sometimes PowerPoint presentations are useful in meetings - a picture after all can be worth a thousand words - but other times they are a hindrance, especially when presenters mechanically go through verbose slide after slide and lose their audience in boredom. Presenters sometimes hide behind their presentation deck. Free yourself from the tyranny of the PowerPoint. Have your presentation deck ready, certainly, but first tell your story, with great strategic, clarity and drive. When you have captivated your audience in the first few minutes, and the investor starts engaging and asks for clarification or data, then you can jump to slide 9 where you have a bar graph outlining, say, your net margin growth projections, broken out by regions, in year 2-5. Your powerpoint is merely a means to an end, not the end itself. Nothing trumps direct human interaction and the building of rapport. We have seen too many slick presentation decks presented by people who don't know how to pitch.

Your investment pitch is not something you improvise, or rarely, if ever, will get right the first time. Of course the successful Carousell executives did not do their pitch on the fly either. As we said, it takes oodles of practice, and that's alright. We can help.

Next week I will touch upon "How to wow your audience with your investment pitch when you are a female presenter". Recent research shows that the female gender unfortunately turns out to be a handicap, due to conscious and unconscious biases, when it shouldn't be. Please stay tuned.

Robert van Zwieten is the CEO of The Serendra Group, a boutique emerging markets advisory firm, helping clients build sustainable and profitable businesses in emerging markets. He also serves as the CEO of Private Capital Development, a new-generation full-service economic development firm which mobilizes private capital within and into markets to fuel sustainable economic development, entrepreneurship and innovation in support of the Sustainable Development Goals. He has been on both sides of several hundred investment pitches and raised billions of dollars in debt and equity, as a corporate treasurer and as a sponsor/incubator of various ventures. He is a former CFO of Singapore Exchange.

Mark Laudi is a former CNBC anchor and has long given media training, and coached executive presence and crisis communications. His company, Hong Bao Media, is the only media training provider in Singapore and Malaysia with its own purpose-built TV studios and training facilities.