This video emphasizes the importance of including an executive summary in a pitch deck, noting that investors spend very little time reviewing presentations. It defines an executive summary as a short business description, often used as a one-pager for introductions to investors.
What this video covers
Including an executive summary in your pitch deck is critical. You are setting up the expectations for what that investor is about to review. Remember that investors only have or only allocate, on average, 2 minutes and 41 seconds per presentation. And, by the way, you can use the pitch deck below that founders are using to raise millions all over the world. In today’s video, we’re going to be breaking it down for you and giving you all those insights on how you go about including that executive summary in the pitch deck. So with that being said, let’s get into it.
What is an executive summary? An executive summary is a short description of what your business is about. You have the executive summaries that you’re using as a one-pager that you would typically send to advisors or to investors to introduce you to other investors or to people that may know to invest in your business.
The executive summary that is the traditional one is completely different from the executive summary that you’re using on a pitch deck because the one in the pitch is more in the format of slides, of PowerPoint, while the other executive summary that is traditional is more like a PDF or Word version. On the deck, the executive summary is a very short description. You can put it in bullets. You can add it with a paragraph, but it also has some visuals either with the product or with the service in action. So you really require that balance from the test to the visual and having those very well weighted in on the slide itself.
So how do you put together the executive summary that you’re going to be including on the pitch deck? The way that you can go about it is, literally, create a traditional executive summary. Maybe you can put it into one or two pages. Then what you do is you grab the most relevant information from those one or two pages, and you literally summarize it to one single paragraph or one, two, or three sentences that you combine with a few bullet points so that what you’re doing comes across very, very straightforward.
The way that you want to do this, as I mentioned, you also want to use a really nice powerful visual. You can do it in the background, which showcases your product or your service. But what you want to do is avoid as much text as possible, so try to have a small amount of text that you combine with a visual, so that right away when the investor is skimming through the presentation, and they land on that executive summary that you’re going to be placing on the second or the third slide of the presentation, right away, they get it. And you’re helping them in order to continue skimming through the flow and through the structure of the presentation that you put together for them to review.
To summarize it, having an executive summary as part of the pitch deck is going to help you to get the attention from that investor because the attention span is very small. It’s just like Apple. When you buy a product from Apple, there are no instructions, and that’s the way you need to think about a pitch deck. In a pitch deck, you need to handhold the investor throughout the entire presentation, and having the executive summary is going to, right away, if you include that at the beginning, give that framework, that guidance to the investor to understand and to know what they are going to be reviewing.
