How to Pitch Your Business Idea to Investors

Are you ready to pitch a business idea to investors? Then it’s time to figure out how to best do this.

In most cases, this isn’t a hard process but it is time-consuming and there is a lot of work that goes into it. It’s all about having the right information set up in the best way possible that sells your idea to an investor in a way that speaks to them.

If you’re trying to pitch a business idea to investors, here are five things you’ll want to think about:

Create a Compelling Elevator Pitch

Your elevator pitch isn’t the be-all-end-all of pitching a business idea to investors. But if you can’t pitch a business in a sentence or two, finding an investor could be harder.

Your elevator pitch is a quick overview of what you’re looking to do and why it matters. Crafting one of these is a crucial part of selling your idea.

Design a Good Pitch Deck

Your pitch deck and your elevator pitch are not the same things.

While your elevator pitch works to give someone a quick-and-dirty overview of your business idea, summing it up so someone gets a high-level overview of what you’re planning, your pitch deck goes into details for prospective investors that you have ready to listen to you.

If you’re trying to pitch a business idea to investors, a good pitch deck is incredibly important. Do your research, gather the information that you need and get someone to help you professionally design it.

This is not the time to learn how to use Adobe InDesign for the first time. You can get inexpensive help to create a great pitch deck that will have a better chance of convincing investors.

Have Accurate Finances and Predictions

Your investors need to know how you’re going to make money. That means knowing where your business stands financially today and how your financial future looks.

While I’d probably recommend getting help on the overall of your pitch deck, your financials are an important part where you should definitely seek professional, expert help. An accountant can help you build accurate financial statements and information to share with prospective investors.

If your investors do not understand how you’re going to be making money and how much you can expect to make, chances are they will not be investing in you.

Demonstrate Your Team’s Skills

Even the best business idea will be a bad one in practice if you don’t have a good team making it happen. Teams that can’t manage a project or don’t have the proper skills to build and grow your business will not bode well for your future success.

Your investors want to know who you have on your team and what they bring to the table. Make sure that you have this spelled out in detail in your presentation. This is especially important when not everyone who will be involved is in the room with the investors.

Demonstrate what their role will be and provide examples of how they’ve contributed to similar projects in the past.

Be Clear About What You Need

You need to know exactly what your business needs from its investors and relay that to them clearly. If you can’t explain what you need, it’s likely that you’re not yet prepared to take on investors.

So, be clear. This is not the time to avoid exact numbers.

Taylor Haahr

Tae started out as a journalist before following the money into the corporate world. But it turns out that the grass isn’t always greener and now you can find her spending most of her time writing about all the things she loves. Namely, money, travel and business with a hefty dose of self-deprecating humor. She is a podcast fanatic, blogging aficionado and loves to find new ways to turn passions into cold hard cash!