Board decks for deals: 7 things every board deck must have

Getting to yes on transactions, commercial deals and partnerships

Photo by Arnaud Mesureur on Unsplash

Your board is not your leadership team. Or trading team. Sure, your board cares about your business, but they’re not in it every day. That’s on you. They understand the problems you face, but they don’t live and breathe them. They think about your customers, but they don’t obsess over them. They understand the competitive pressures you face, but they don’t lose as much sleep as you over them.

Strategic partnerships, commercial deals and even equity transactions (M&A) are the lifeblood of a scaling business. No one can go it alone. And trying to will yield exhaustion and waste, leaving you in the dust as your competitors zoom past you with the wind of partners behind their back.

While founders and operating teams are often brilliant at sniffing out brilliant partners, securing deals and finding potential targets for M&A. They’re less brilliant at getting their boards to agree with them and see the potential. This can create tension, cause troublesome delays, and sometimes cost the business the deal as the process becomes dragged out and the partner/asset moves on to more willing participants.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Boards are people too. Their distance often makes them appear stoicly rigid and logical. But inside they’re just waiting for you to tell them a story that makes sense. But you have to speak their language. Calibrate to the story they need to hear. And capture their imagination.

I’ve done this countless times to greenlight $100M+ deals.

Often in complex circumstances.

Here’s my foolproof way to build a board deck narrative that will secure your board’s backing, every time. Aim for 7–10 slides including appendicies. Be brief. Be succint. Be bold. Get to the point, don’t dwell. Don’t tell them every redundant detail, but tell them the stuff that will make or break it. Here we go:

1. Start with the market — The purpose of this slide is to articulate the problem or the opportunity. The easiest way to do this is with 2–3 key data points. You’ll want to cover 2–3 key things about the market that are relevant. This may inlcude market size, key players, market shares. It may include customer trends, numbers, or needs. It may include macro areas such as GDP, inflation, or geopolitical landscape. In rare cases, it needs to cover all three, but if so you need to be really precice about picking one key thing that matters for each category and not going too deep. Watch out for making this a research report — it’s not, your objective is to frame what you’re going to talk about for a group that doesn’t live and breathe your market. Max 1 slide. Really, max one slide. This slide ultimately answers ‘Why this? Why here?’ questions. Articulate a summary statement that nails what the problem and opportunity.
2. The Partner — This is ultimately a 1 pager introduction on the partner you’re seeking to do a deal with. Who are they. Where do they operate. Who is on the leadership team. Where do they have key talent or expertise. What’s their heritage. What are they #1 at. What have they achieved. Who else do they have deals with. What does the press say about them. What do their customers say about them. How much money do they make. Ho much margin. Where have they recently invested in. Think highlights, not laundry lists. A format that is part bullet point and part graphical/visual works best. Slide real estate is precious — don’t aim to be polite, aim to get to the point. For the graph panels, show the KPIs that matter for your business — sales, customers, viewers — you want to demonstrate their traction, credibility, and scale. Include a punchline summary across the bottom that nails in one sentence why you want to work with them. You’re answering: “Who are they?”
3. The Opportunity — Be specific and clear about what you want to do together and why it matters. This works best as a simple slide — I sometimes use a 3 bullet point approach and visual representation of the relationship. You don’t want this slide to be dense or make people think too much. The purpose is to make it crystal clear what you’ll be asking for (not why it’s good, not how bad you want it, but strictly WHAT you want to do.) No emotion.
4. The rationale — Why do the deal, aka. what’s in it for me. This is the climax of your story. Your storytelling, your passion, your vision all must come together. To make this meaningful you need to step back and look at the deal in relation to your strategy. Look at the pillars you are looking to achieve, which capabilities and enablers you’ve committed to building, how this deal accelerates or strengthens the areas upon which success is predicated. If you’ve set KPIs, evaluate the deal’s impact on them. If you haven’t, think about which KPIs matter and show what the deal brings in. Bold statements and clear impacts are key. If you’re wishy washy or vague, intentionally ambigous so as not to overcommitte, and masking your message in layers of wooly language, it will come off as weak. You don’t need a lot of words to convey this. Keep it tight. Sometimes you can cover 3 & 4 on one slide. You’re answering: “Why should we do it?”
5. Financial Impact — show me the money. A deal is always evaluated on it’s financial merits and synergies with the rest of the business. For a non equity arrangement, run the numbers for the complete deal — cash, marketing commitments, costs. Show everything. For an equity transaction, first, evaluate the entity as a standalone. What does this business generate and how. What is it worth on a discounted basis (DCF), what Revenue/EBITDA multiples does it generate, what’s the sensitivity to variables such as WACC and market growth. You’ll need to be clear about the money you can make. Second, show where you can demonstrate synergies and how much. Third, based on all of this information, what offer value do you recommend. You’re answering: “What is the financial value at stake?”
6. What next — the value creation plan. (Only for equity transactions.) You’ll want to show what, when and how much you’ll be able to extract in synergies. In an early stage presentation you may need to make a lot of assumptions. In later stages, and certainly to secure an approval, you’ll need to put real numbers on the table. This will eventually make it into your business plans and budgets and become targets to hit as part of the integrated business. A good approach is to only committ to the values you are confident in delivering, and maintain some strategic points as conceputal so you can refine and tune as you get more information. You’re answering: “How will impact us?”
7. Recommendations and deal structure — have a clear articulation of what you want to do and, if appropriate, propose the deal structure. This is to provoke the discussion. You don’t need to have all the answers, it doesn’t have to be fully articulated. But you do need to have something to bat for otherwise there’s no catalyst. For a deal involving equity, I would usually sketch out the structure and lay out value blocks of contributions on one side. You’re answering: “What next?”
8. Appendix — anticipate detailed questions you may get. Think about what detail or side bars your board might have. You probably already have a good idea about the ad hoc things they ask or what they really care about. If yo’ve got someone passionate about products, they’ll likely ask about a product architecture. If you’ve got a lot of people that have integrated teams, they’ll be asking about people, team and cutlural implications. Have some slides in the appendix that you can flip to if these questions come up. Even if you don’t have fully baked ansers, the art of having a slide that lays out your considerations for ironing it out is often enough to give your board the indication that it’s in hand. The worst outcome here is they want to see more from you before giving a green light. That eats into time, which you don’t have. Good things to have is your back pocket: future product architecture, joint GTM, customer implications, team integration considerations (what you’ll need to ensure, what you envision to be important).

Now that you’ve done all that, here’s 3 deadly sins to avoid in your deck:

#1 Giving too much detail

Don’t do it. Edit down, edit down, edit down. When you give too much detail, you lose your audience. Remember, the board thinks about this business 4x per year. Don’t flood them. Keep it light and calibrated to their level of insight.

#2 Assuming too much presumed knowledge

Imagine you’re talking to a 6 year old. Really. It’s not rude, it cuts through jargon and armoured language that makes people feel intelligent. But only irritates your audience and leaves them feeling clear as mud.

#3 Being ‘wooly,’ ‘soft’, and ‘nice’

Call a spade a spade. If you’re finding yourself being wordy, it’s a sign you don’t know what you’re talking about. Don’t repeat yourself. Group ideas. Sift out what’s immaterial or too small too matter. Don’t beat around the bush — just say it like it is using as few words as possible. What’s more compelling:“One of the top sports website in Europe” or “the #1 destination for sport in 7 countries.”

#4 Lacking a clear problem-solution-deal narrative

There is nothing worse than starting to talk about solutions — props, pricing, products — without first clearly articulating the problem. Likewise, there’s nothing worse than talking about problems, without getting to solutions. Make sure you have a clear fit between the deal, the problem and the solution.

And remember, the first thing anyone who gets a 40 page deck does, is close it. What you choose to leave out is as important as what you choose to leave in. When you cram too much in, you show you don’t know what matters.

Clarity over density, always.

I’m Jo, I’ve spend 15 years in business and corporate development in media and tech. Follow me for more on growth and strategy.