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Join for freePosted: Thu 30th Jul 2026
Raising investment isn't just about having a great idea – it's about presenting a compelling, credible case that gives investors confidence in your business.
In this workshop led by Seamus McGurgan, learn how to build investor-ready documentation that stands out.
Through real-world examples, anonymised pitch decks and practical frameworks, explore what makes investors engage with an opportunity, what causes them to lose interest, and how to structure your materials to maximise your chances of securing investment.
Whether you're preparing for your first funding round or refining an existing investment proposition, leave with practical techniques to strengthen your pitch deck, business plan and overall fundraising story.
The essential content every investor expects to see and the common omissions that can seriously weaken an investment proposition
How to structure a pitch deck using a clear, problem-led narrative that keeps investors engaged from the first slide to the last
How to build a credible customer persona and use a bottom-up approach to market sizing that demonstrates a realistic and compelling growth opportunity
Seamus is a business adviser specialising in early-stage start-ups seeking to raise their first round of capital. He has worked as an investor-readiness adviser for over 200 new start companies through incubators, enterprise offices, and economic development agencies across the UK and Ireland.
Seamus’ core interest is in helping founders build documents that investors will actually read, i.e. business plans, pitch decks, and data rooms.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Beth: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. My name is Beth, and I'll be your host today. For those of you attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for start-ups and small businesses.
I'm very pleased to introduce Seamus McGurgan, who is a business adviser. In this session, we will cover how to build investor-ready documentation that stands out.
If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please place them in the chat, and we'll do our best to answer them at the end of the session. Today's session will be recorded, and we'll send a follow-up email with the recording and further resources later today.
So, over to you, Seamus.
Seamus: Hi, everyone. Thanks to Beth for hosting this, and thanks, everybody, for coming.
Today's session is going to cover investor readiness documentation – that's pitch decks and so on. There are other parts to that too, such as data rooms and business plans, but today's session is mostly going to focus on pitch decks for early-stage companies.
That's the likes of seed or pre-seed, or maybe pushing up to series A. Some people might find this stuff useful, but it's mostly focused on that early stage.
A few of you might have come across this stat before: the average investor spends less than three minutes making a decision on a pitch deck. For those of you who haven't spoken to a lot of VCs or people who work with them, this might seem really shocking.
How could anyone possibly understand a start-up in all its complexities within such a short amount of time? But if you think about it for a few minutes, this makes sense.
This stat isn't because investors are lazy or bad people, or because they don't care – it's purely out of necessity. The inboxes of VCs are absolutely hammered by deck after deck, opportunity after opportunity, and even junior analysts at investment firms have no choice but to develop rapid decision-making processes, or else they'd become entirely overwhelmed.
The challenge that VCs face, then, is not how to get their eyes on more decks or more opportunities, but rather which opportunities are worth spending time with. And that is why this stat only tells one part of the story.
On the surface, it's obviously true: most investors do make decisions very quickly about whether a start-up is worth their time, especially at seed or pre-seed stage. To do this, they either consciously or unconsciously develop a series of internal rubrics and decision trees that allow them to quickly assess whether an opportunity is worth continuing with.
But my contention is that this means good businesses which are worth investing in can often fall through the cracks – because the decks are poor, and because the team weren't able to communicate the opportunity to an investor quickly or effectively enough.
But this is understandable: most founders will only ever write a couple of decks across their careers, but most VCs will see thousands, if not more.
Over the past few years, I've had the good fortune to spend a lot of time speaking with investors and funders across the UK and Ireland. On the other side, I've seen a lot of start-up pitches across sectors and industries, at various stages from pre-seed through to series A.
I've also worked closely with a number of these teams, and unlike a VC, I've had the capacity to really sit down with them and give the decks the time that they deserve.
Most importantly, I've worked directly with teams across their funding journey, and I've seen the decks that they used – both the ones which got funded and those that didn't.
When I set out on this journey, I sought to answer two simple questions: how do VCs make decisions, and how can start-ups improve their chances of getting funded?
So, over the next 20 minutes or so, I hope to share some of the lessons I've learned over the last few years – the rubrics that I've seen investors actually use to make decisions – and, ultimately, how to leverage those to make your start-up more investable.
So, I'm going to start with a simple question: what actually is a pitch deck, and what's it for?
At the beginning of this presentation, I mentioned that investors only spend a very short amount of time with a pitch, and how this fact only tells one half of the story. Whilst it's true that investors will quite happily reject a proposal after just a few minutes, those which pass the initial test will still have to follow through with enough substance to hold their attention and encourage a follow-up phone call.
Therefore, a deck must do two things. The first is to pass the initial filter – if an investor cannot understand the business within a minute and a half, they'll just move on, so a good pitch must grab an investor's attention.
The second is to follow through with substance. The numbers must be concrete, the facts verifiable, and there must be real milestones and achievements to lean upon, so that the case for investment is made super clear.
Investors can smell lies and exaggeration from a mile away, so the claims made in a pitch deck must be credible. A good pitch must therefore also hold an investor's attention until they've decided that you're worth that follow-up phone call.
So, challenge number one is to know your audience. All investors are different, and they may prioritise different things, but at the end of the day, broadly speaking, they all share one thing in common: they all want a return on their investment.
Therefore, the goal of any start-up pitch deck is to convince the VC on the other end that they will get their money back, and then some. This might all sound obvious, but the number of pitch decks I see which don't stick to this simple principle is astounding.
A few years ago, when I was pitching for funding myself as part of a start-up team, I shared around a deck that I'd built – it was the first one I'd ever made, and I was trying to get feedback.
I received a piece of feedback which, at the time, felt extremely harsh and almost personal, but it really rings true with me today when I look at other companies' pitch decks. They asked me point-blank what the purpose of the document I'd shared was.
I said, well, obviously, to get investment. And they said, no, it isn't.
I said, well, what do you mean? And they said the document I'd shared with them was written to make me sound smart – and that matters very little to them.
What they needed to know was whether they should invest. So don't try to sound smart – try to be understood.
So my first piece of advice is to know your audience. Keep that principle in mind: always try to be understood. Use the simplest language possible, with the fewest buzzwords and acronyms.
Always try to make sure that the investor believes they will get their money back. Remember that investors are experts in investing, not experts in your industry – so keep it simple.
Whilst each investor will have slightly different priorities, this means they'll typically read a deck non-linearly, rather than slide by slide from start to finish. That's a generalisation, of course, but it's the pattern I've seen over and over again.
Usually, they'll focus on a few key areas, and these are as follows.
Number one is the problem and the customer. Firstly, who is the customer, and how well are they explained? Secondly, what problem does the business solve, and how well does that come across in the deck?
Number two is the market. How many of those customers are out there, and how accessible are they? Or, put more clearly, are there any major barriers to them purchasing your product – market barriers, essentially.
Is there a history of purchases in this product class with these customers, or do they need to be convinced to buy?
Number three is competition. Who will the business be competing against? Is this a fractured market, or are there a small number of big players?
What do competitors do well, and what do they do wrong? Is there a market niche which is poorly served by these competitors? These are the kind of things an investor will want to see regarding competition.
Number four is the team. Who's the team behind the business, and how well-suited are they for their roles? Is it a sole founder team, or are there multiple founders or shareholders?
What is their professional history? Do they have qualifications, expertise or experience in the sector? Do they have any past involvement with start-ups – successes or failures?
Does the team cover core competency areas of commercial execution, operations and product development? Finally, are there any advisers on the team to help shore up any weaknesses?
Number five is finances. What does the financial past and future of the business look like? How is revenue expected to grow over the next three to five years?
Are these figures based on prior trading, or are they purely aspirational? Do they seem realistically attainable, or are they beyond the scope of what's possible? Will the business have enough cash on hand to fund this growth trajectory?
Number six, and finally, is the return on investment. Basically, how much money does the business need to raise to fund progress towards its next milestones?
For how much equity, or on what terms, will the business raise this money? How many subsequent raises will be needed, and at what valuation? How and when does a business expect to exit and provide a return to shareholders?
Essentially, an investor will look at four or five of these key areas very quickly before making a decision. As I said, each will have their own priorities – team, finances, problem, and so on – so they'll place more or less emphasis on each element depending on what they need, and read them in a slightly different order.
But importantly, these elements must absolutely jump off the page. They must be easily understood, mature, credible and, above all, interesting.
Leaving out content on any of these core elements is an absolute death sentence – a weak element is better than none at all. This might sound really basic, but the percentage of decks I've seen which leave out one or more of these elements is well over 50%.
I'm now going to go into a few specific examples of decks I've seen over the years, and go through a few different key elements to show what looks good and what doesn't.
So, the first of these is problem over product. The most important thing to get right is a clear, unambiguous problem statement – literally everything else in the deck flows from this.
The critical failure here is thinking that investors care as deeply as you do about your product. They don't.
What they want to know is that your business solves a real-world problem, that only you can solve it, and that the problem is big enough and painful enough that someone is willing to pay to have it solved.
A good framework I like to open a pitch with is something along the lines of: ‘Our company solves X problem for Y client, giving them Z benefit.’ Honestly, don't overthink this one.
Think about the person or business who will ultimately pay you, and think about the problem you're solving for them specifically – make this the kernel of your entire deck.
This one's a bit facetious, but a little trick I like for B2B businesses in particular is that there are really only three types of B2B business. Number one: we make you more money by increasing revenues. Number two: we save you money by reducing costs. Number three: we stop you getting sued – i.e. reduce risk.
Obviously, there's a bit of oversimplification here – some businesses might fall outside this or overlap multiple elements – but it's a really useful framework for explaining the core problem, especially to someone who doesn't understand it. What is the end benefit that the business is going to deliver?
So, the second core element is customer personas – this refers to who's actually going to buy your product, and it's a huge area where a large number of decks fall apart.
The mistake I see again and again is founders describing their customers far too vaguely. I've seen customers described as ‘small businesses’, ‘millennials’, or – my personal favourite – ‘everyone with a smartphone’. I've literally seen that.
If your customer is everyone, then in practice, your customer is nobody. Investors don't want a demographic – they want a person.
So ask yourself this: who specifically wakes up in the morning with the problem that your business solves? Give them a name, a job, a budget.
The more specific you are, the more it signals to the investor that you've actually gone out and spoken to real people, rather than dreaming this up at your kitchen table.
The second half of this is market sizing, and I want you to unlearn something with me here. You've all seen slides along the lines of ‘the global market is worth 40 billion, and we just need to capture 1% of it’.
Investors have told me, in no uncertain terms, that they hate that slide – hate it with a passion. Because 1% of a massive number isn't a plan, and it leaves them asking questions like: why 1%? Or, more importantly, which 1%?
It tells them nothing about who your customers are or whether you can get to them. What they want instead is a simple bottom-up calculation: start from the ground, work out how many real customers you can actually reach within the next year, and what each of them will pay.
Multiply that out. The number you land on will almost certainly be smaller than the big ‘1%’ figure – sometimes dramatically smaller. But the counterintuitive bit is that your investor will believe it, and a smaller number that an investor believes in is worth infinitely more than a huge one that they don't.
Number three is competition, and this one's also a bit counterintuitive, but stick with it. When founders reach the competition slide, their instinct is to make themselves look good by making everyone else look bad.
So you get one of two disasters. The first is ‘our competitors are rubbish’, and the second – which is somehow actually worse – is ‘we have no competitors’.
But here's what an investor actually hears when you say you have no competition. They don't hear ‘oh, wonderful, a totally open field’ – they hear one of two things.
Either there's no market here because nobody thought this problem was worth solving, or it actually isn't worth solving, or, even worse, you simply haven't done your homework. Neither of these is a good look.
Think about competition as proof: if other people are already making real money solving the problem, then the market has validated itself. What an investor really wants to hear is that you understand the landscape – who the big players are, what they do well and, crucially, what they don't.
What is the specific gap they're leaving open that you're going to walk straight through? So be honest, generous even. Give competitors credit where it's due, then show clearly the niche that is underserved, and why you're the one to serve it.
An honest competitive assessment doesn't make you look weak – it makes you look like someone who's done the work and knows exactly where they fit.
At the early stage, investors will tell you they're backing the idea, but they're not, really – they're mostly backing you, especially at pre-seed and seed stage. At Series A, the business starts to grow, but at that really early stage, investors are ultimately backing the team.
So what makes a team look investable? Firstly, on sole founders – plenty of great companies have been built by one person, and I wouldn't pretend otherwise. But for investors, this is a game of risk, and they treat a sole founder as a major risk.
One person is a single point of failure, and building a company alone is brutally hard. Two or three founders is better, and the best of the lot is a multidisciplinary founding team – someone who can build the product, someone who can sell it, and someone who can run the business.
Cover those bases, and an investor can see how the whole company will function. If your founders can't cover all of that, that's totally fine – bring in an adviser.
Advisers genuinely help, so talk about them in your deck. A credible adviser with real sector experience plugs huge gaps in start-up teams, and lends you a bit of credibility with the investor while you're at it – they can also open doors and connect you with people who'll help you further down the line.
Now, when you're presenting a team, please, please, please don't give me a CV. I don't care that you did a summer internship in 2011, or that your grandad used to play for Mayo's Gaelic football team.
What I care about are the achievements and relevant experience – the things you've actually done that prove you can do this. If you've run a start-up before, put that front and centre, even if it failed – especially if it failed.
A founder who's been through it once or twice, and lived to tell the tale, is worth a great deal. You've paid the tuition for the school that most first-timers haven't even attended yet.
Element five is finances. This is the slide where founders most often lose an investor's trust in a single moment, and it's nearly always for the same reason. The number itself is rarely the problem – the problem is that the number is based on nothing.
If you show me a graph where revenue does very little for 18 months and then suddenly rockets to 10 million after three years, my first question is going to be: based on what? And if the honest answer is ‘we're just being ambitious’, that's not a strategy.
Hope is a bad material to make hockey sticks out of. Projections have to be anchored in something real, and the best anchor is prior trading – actual money from actual customers, however small.
If you feel embarrassed by the small number of sales you've made, don't – that's the single best thing you can signal to an investor, that there's a market out there. And if you don't have that yet, a genuine sales pipeline with named prospects and ongoing conversations is better than nothing.
If you don't have either, then proper bottom-up market research – interviews with real people in the real world, using the same discipline we talked about earlier – is the next best thing.
The point isn't that your numbers have to be modest – be ambitious, by all means. But every ambitious number has to trace back to an assumption that the investor can interrogate and believe.
‘Shoot for the moon’ might be a lovely sentiment for a motivational poster, but it's not a financial model. And be sure to make sure your plan actually shows that you have enough cash to survive the journey you're describing – growth always costs money, and running out of it halfway to your milestone is just how good businesses die.
Finally, element six: don't forget to actually ask. We've arrived at the thing that most founders find awkward to talk about, and therefore skip in their decks – in other words, does the investor actually make their money back?
Remember, when we started, we said every investor, whatever their quirks, is after a return. So a deck that never gets around to explaining that the return is imminent just won't get funded.
And yet, I'd wager that the majority of decks I see are very vague on it at best, or leave it out entirely. I'd say 30% to 40% literally don't even talk about how much money they want to raise, or how they're going to exit.
Three things need to be here. First, how much are you raising, and what will that buy in terms of equity – which milestones does this money get you to? Second, the terms – how much equity, and at what valuation?
You don't need it perfectly nailed, but you do need to show that you've thought about it seriously, and not just plucked a figure from the air. Third is the exit: how, and roughly when, does everyone get paid? Is that going to be by trade sale or acquisition, and how would that work?
I know how this feels – talking about your own exit when you've barely started can feel a bit grubby. But to an investor, a founder who can talk openly about the return shows that they understand the end goal.
So those are the core elements. What I want to do now is show you a couple of anonymised examples. Some of these are taken from real decks that I've anonymised the names out of, and some I've changed the business model slightly and used AI to generate an example.
But it's entirely based on real-world examples I've seen, and you can see how teams I've worked with looked before and after. Hopefully we'll have a bit of time at the end to discuss those – so I'm just going to show you a few now.
This one was a skincare brand I worked with – not a real company, but you'll get the gist. It was a real company that I worked with, but this name is made up; it's not real.
This example is a seaweed skincare brand, and they described their customer as ‘all women in Ireland’ – three and a half million potential customers, a vast total addressable market. What does that tell an investor? Not very much.
So when I spoke with this team and gave them feedback, we ended up agreeing on this: Well, who actually is your customer? It's somebody like this – somebody who grew up on the coast, and now lives in Dublin.
They work in a well-paid, senior professional job and have high disposable income. They spend a lot of money on premium, luxury skincare, and they want their daily routine to feel like home.
You can see how this is a much more concrete, accurate picture. You could take this a step further by talking about other demographic characteristics, or by showing different types of customer segments who might also be interested in your product.
What you can see now is that with this customer profile, you can start to build really detailed, really concrete go-to-market strategies around this type of person. Targeting ‘all women’ isn't a strategy, but you can find where Aoife shops, what websites she visits, and how she spends her money – and target those channels.
So it's not just about the deck – it's a strategy thing too. Having a more concrete customer persona can really help you build out a go-to-market strategy.
This was a health tech platform I worked with. Their initial slide said the company was ‘the global digital health platform developing world-class real-world data assets’. When I looked at that, I thought: I don't know what that means.
If I were an investor, that doesn't tell me anything about who they're selling to, what it actually is, what problem they're really solving, or what it means for their end customer.
They then went on to say that ‘limitations of current health data offerings to the market lead to poorly informed research and treatment positioning’. Sort of getting there, but it still doesn't really hammer home what the business is doing, who they're doing it for, what problem they're solving, and what it means for the customer.
As an investor looking at this, I'd think: I don't really understand that, I don't have time, move on.
So we changed it to this, which is a little wordy – there's still room for improvement – but it's a lot better: ‘Blank is a digital health technology business, licensing solutions to the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry to build world-class health data assets.’
The problem was then described as: ‘Pharmaceutical companies lose revenues by relying on low-resolution, aggregated data to make critical decisions, limiting return on investment.’ That's the problem this business is trying to solve.
You can see here, in one statement, who the customers are going to be in broad strokes, what their problem is, and what it means for them.
Here's one talking about a raise. There are a couple of slides here – mostly, raises are left out of decks entirely – so this is one I mocked up to show, at minimum, what sort of information should be in your raise and exit slides.
The first is: how much money are you raising, for what equity, and how are you going to use that money? You can see down the right-hand side what the percentage breakdowns are, and having a nice visual for that is very useful.
Second, you want to show the milestones: what is that £250,000 going to get you? Where are you today? Where will you be in six months, in 12 months, and in 18 months? Again, you can see that at a minimum, you need to have that sort of information included.
Finally, how are they going to exit? Tell the investor that you're targeting a trade sale in five to six years, to a strategic acquirer in the hospitality software sector.
This is really vital: show a few comparable exits to prove that this sort of thing does get bought. Companies like Larder here – a fictional kitchen company – do actually get bought, and having a few examples signals that you've done your homework, and that this is a proposition that really could exit down the line and return investment to the investor.
And finally, here's one of our team's slides. This is one team, and you can see it's one founder, basically a CV-level overview – not very good, and it doesn't really tell the investor very much. You look at that and think: not really buying it.
Whereas this one is much more to the point: three team members, each in different roles, showing their key achievements and skills, plus an adviser, which signals credibility.
So that's it, that's everything in the presentation. If we've got any questions, I'm happy to take them now. Thanks for listening, everybody.
Beth: Thanks so much, Seamus. That was really interesting. We'll go through a few questions if we have time. So, what are the biggest red flags that cause investors to lose interest immediately?
Seamus: We've talked about a few of those already, but I think the big one for me is trying to hide in plain sight – when things are stated but not really backed up. When there's a claim like ‘we're going to achieve 10 million ARR within the first three years’, you have to ask: why? What makes me believe that?
So you have to build the case that that's going to happen – it's all about telling that story and weaving that thread through. You can see how having a strong customer persona, a strong market, bottom-up market sizing and a sales pipeline can lead to building that case.
So, yeah, I'd say just trying to hide in plain sight, saying things and not verifying them, is the biggest red flag.
Beth: Absolutely. So, how much do investors care about the founder versus the business idea itself?
Seamus: It depends on the stage – the earlier the stage, the more they care about the founders. I'm using ‘founders’ there rather than a single founder – obviously, sole founders do start businesses and go on to succeed, but in the majority of cases I've seen, investors are very cautious about investing in sole-founder teams.
For me, it's about having a multidisciplinary team, where everyone has a different role and different skill sets, and brings something to the table – especially because the biggest risk to a start-up company is the founder. It's not competitors, it's not anything else.
If the founder gets sick, has an illness, gets hit by a bus, or just decides they don't want to do this any more, that can kill the business just like that. But if you have multiple team members, you can survive one person leaving.
So, at the early stage, it's much more about the founders. At a later stage, the business is a bit more mature, and can probably survive if the founder leaves – so it becomes much more about what the business is doing, its IP, its trajectory, revenue, and all of that.
Beth: We've got one in from Andy, who'd like to know: how do you target funders in the first place? Are there different funders for different businesses, sizes and markets, and how do you find this out?
Seamus: Really good question – it's not something I'm a particular expert on, in terms of the outreach piece. What I have seen is that a lot of VCs, especially the big ones, receive decks that just drop into their inbox, and you often don't hear back from them.
That's because a junior analyst, or whoever it is, has just looked at the deck and thought ‘no, move on’ – it's not their fault. They might not tell you why, and it might just be that they're not the right fit, or there's a conflict of interest, among other reasons.
But for me, the thing you have control over is how good your documentation is and how strong it is. I think it's a lot about networking, to be honest – just getting out and meeting people. Warm introductions are always better than cold ones.
And VCs have different cycles, so they might fund at certain points in the year and not others – that's something to be aware of as well.
Beth: Great, we've got time for one more. I'll try to squeeze it in. So, Sebastian says: ‘We're a govtech sales rep putting together our pre-seed pitch deck. Given that investors won't spend a lot of time qualifying a pitch deck, what is your view on the value of including lots of content in the annex?’
‘We're thinking of including information such as different pricing models we've evaluated, the sources of different organisation counts for our market sizing, and some quantitative information from our discovery research. Would you recommend leaving this for follow-ups?’
Seamus: What Sebastian's talking about is really the age-old question of whether there's a point in building a business plan. That sort of information is much more business-plan relevant than it is pitch-deck relevant.
But in the age of pitch decks, where investors aren't reading through 30, 40, 50 pages of information, I think what's important is that you have your deck – your core 10 slides – and then a pause, and then your annex with that information in it.
So absolutely include that information if you think it's relevant, but don't weave it into your main deck. The main deck should articulate what the business is, who your customer is, what problem you're solving, and what your plan is – that core piece.
The follow-up information can go in the annex, and I don't see any problem with that. My only worry would be that somebody opens it and thinks ‘there's 45 slides here’, and doesn't look at it – but if you make it clear that you've got a deck plus an annex, I think that's fine.
Beth: That's great, thank you. So, we have run slightly over, so if you do have any further questions, I'm just going to pop Seamus' contact details into the chat, so please do reach out.
As I mentioned, the recording will go out later today, along with some further resources. So, thanks so much, Seamus, and thank you, everyone, for joining today. I hope you found it useful, and we'll see you in the next one.
Seamus: Thanks very much, everyone. Bye.
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