Financials can tell a story too…
BEYOND YOUR BUSINESS model, the audience also needs to understand how big your revenues are expected to grow, how big the expenses will have to be to reach that growth, how much capital (a.k.a. cash investment) is required before profitability, and how long it will be before the company earns a profit.
It is expected that you have created a financial model to predict all those answers. However, your pitch is not the time or place to explain the details of that model. Your pitch instead needs to summarize those values and explain them as a simple, logical story, ideally in a single page with just a few rows of numbers.
RULE 33:
Present financials as big, simple models that are easy to understand.
Do not fill the screen with numbers. Do not take screen shots or embed spreadsheets into your presentation. Try making the font as big as possible, ideally at least thirty points in size.
Include a graph, not just a table. Some people like the table format, but an audience can understand the growth on a graph much faster than parsing numbers in a table.
Ensibuuko—[Financials]
“Our goal is to reach two million farmers by 2017. Reaching that goal will grow revenues to two and a half million dollars. We are confident in this goal, as it requires sales to less than a quarter of all the SACCOs and assumes the revenues from only the existing MOBIS services.”
