How to check a pitch deck before an investor meeting

The days before an investor meeting are when most founders keep adding to their pitch deck. Another slide on the market, another logo, another chart. It feels productive, but it’s usually the wrong job. What helps more is a careful review of what’s already there.

This is the review a good mentor would sit down and do with you. It won’t tell you whether your business is investable. It will help make sure the deck isn’t getting in the way of the conversation you want to have. Give yourself an hour, a printout or a second screen, and work through it in order.

Start with the story in the titles

Read only the slide titles, from first to last, without looking at anything else. Do they tell a story someone could follow? A useful test is whether a person who has never heard of your company could say, from the titles alone, what problem you solve, for whom, why now, and what you’re asking for.

If your titles are labels like “Problem”, “Solution” and “Market”, rewrite them as statements. “Small clinics still book appointments by phone” says more than “Problem”. This one change often reveals gaps and repeats in the story faster than anything else.

Check that every number agrees

Investors notice inconsistent figures, and a mismatch can pull the meeting off course. Go through every number in the deck and check:

• Do the same figures match everywhere? Revenue on the traction slide should match revenue in the financial summary.
• Are the time periods clear? Label whether a figure is monthly, annual, for a quarter or to date.
• Is each figure one you can explain? If someone asks how you got it, you should be able to answer in a sentence.
• Are projections clearly marked as projections? Never let a forecast look like an actual.

If there’s a figure you can’t confirm, take it out or soften the claim. It’s better to be modest and right than to spend the meeting defending a number.

Make the ask impossible to miss

Many decks build a strong case and then go quiet at the end. Find your ask slide and check it says plainly what you’re raising, and what it will help you achieve. The investor shouldn’t have to guess the size of the round or what the money is for.

Then check the opening. If the first few slides don’t hint at where the deck is heading, consider adding a short summary near the start. Busy readers often decide in the first minute whether to keep going.

Look at each slide the way a reader would

Pitch decks are often read before they’re presented, sometimes on a phone. That makes readability more important, not less.

Go through slide by slide and ask:

• Does it make one clear point, stated in the title?
• Could the text be read on a small screen without zooming?
• Does each chart have one message, with labels large enough to read?
• Are there any leftover placeholder words, old dates or a previous company name from a template?

Common slide design mistakes and how to fix them covers the fixes for most of what you’ll find here.

Grade it like a stranger would

Once you’ve checked the parts, judge the whole. It helps to use the same four areas every time: clarity, structure, readability and design consistency. A presentation rubric to grade your own slides describes what each grade looks like, so you can be honest about which area is weakest.

If you can, ask a friend outside your industry to read the deck cold and tell you, in their own words, what the company does. Their answer is a good measure of whether the deck is doing its job.

Prepare the files you’ll send

The deck you present and the deck you send ahead may need to be slightly different. A presented deck can lean on your voice. A sent deck has to stand alone, so it may need a little more on each slide, or a short appendix.

Before you send anything, open the file on another device and check fonts, images and charts survive the trip. Sending a PDF avoids most layout surprises, and it’s worth knowing how to export a PDF backup of your slides in case the meeting room’s screen won’t open your original file. Name the file clearly, with your company name and the date, so it’s easy to find later.

The morning of the meeting

Keep the final checks short:

• Open the deck from the exact file you’ll present.
• Run through the opening and the ask out loud once.
• Have your backup slides ready for likely questions, such as unit economics or competition.
• Keep a copy on a second device.

Then stop editing. A deck changed an hour before the meeting is a deck you haven’t rehearsed.

You’ve done the hard part by building the company. A careful review just makes sure the deck represents it fairly. If you’d like a second pair of eyes on the slides themselves, PPT Grader can point to the ones worth another look.