INVESTOR PRESENTATION | Part I: Don’t Bury the Lead

The age-old expression in journalism, “don’t bury the lead”, is commonly used to emphasize the importance of leading with your main message first. Communicating what you’re about to present to your audience upfront will minimize confusion and garner interest, while forcing them to search for key points through a mass of secondary information can lose their attention. This rule is critical to investor presentations, where you should aim to establish your main message before investors have the opportunity to lose interest. This can be as simple as including a brief summary of the overall ask of your pitch at the start of your presentation.

While placing a presentation’s key message at the start will help it stick with investors, you still want them to take away at least one piece of information from every slide. Leverage your headlines to deliver each section’s main point, so an investor receives it even if they skim over a slide’s information.

In order to minimize the chance of investors missing your main message, avoid burying the lead by including it early on in your presentation. Slide headlines are opportunities to hold their interest by delivering further key points.