Mark Pearson is the founder of investment fund Fuel Ventures [1], which specialises in early-stage companies and offers a London-based incubation studio to its start-ups. Fuel Ventures currently has more than 20 start-ups under its umbrella and delivers a 70x average return on investments in the European e-commerce sector. The investment fund recently closed a £20 million round from multiple high net-worth investors and corporate institutions, which span China, the Middle East and Europe.

For many businesses, they either couldn't exist without investment to begin with or find that growth in their market is near-impossible without it. This is especially true in the technology sector.

Raising money is up there as one of the biggest challenges business owners in certain industries face; getting investment can feel like a full-time job, especially early on in a start-up's life, before you have a reputation or visibility among key investors in your field. Some founders hate the thought of creating an investment proposal (or a ‘deck', as they're often called), and struggle to work their way around a circuit of understandably cautious investors.

According to research by DocSend and a Harvard Business School professor that looked at more than 200 companies, investors spend just 3 minutes 44 seconds reading your pitch deck on average. That's how long you have to grab attention - 224 seconds.

At Fuel Ventures [2], we've been sent thousands of pitch decks, and I probably worked my way through hundreds more when I was a private investor. The decks that stand out all share similar traits and with all that combined experience, I wanted to give business owners a few tips on how best to create investment decks that won't get ignored and forgotten about.

Whether you're after millions to rapidly scale your business or something smaller to get you off the ground, there's a lot you can learn from the start-up founders that came before you.

You should be able to communicate key facts and figures about your business within these 10 slides:

1. Elevator pitch - this is your summary
2. Your team
3. Traction
4. Your market - how big is it? Who are your competitors?
5. What problem does your business solve?
6. A closer look at your product/service
7. Your business model
8. Marketing and growth strategy
9. Financials and forecasts
10. What are you looking for?

I'll run through each of these in turn:

1. Elevator pitch

This is where, in as few words as possible, I want to understand what your business is and what it does. Wishy-washy jargon-laced explanations won't do. Don't tell me that you're creating a paradigm shift - there's no quicker way to turn an investor off than to over-intellectualise what you do.

2. Your team

Show us the core team involved in the founding and development of your business. Keep it top-line, but truthful. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen company names and roles bandied about that don't later stack up.

3. Traction

This is a big one for me. My advice when I'm asked about starting companies is always the same - just get started. Prove the model and prove that people will care, and the ways we can scale will become evident. I simply won't look at decks from companies that haven't so much as set plans in motion. Create a minimum viable product and use this slide to demonstrate that people care.

4. Market

Slide 3 takes us onto slide 4 - not everybody will want to buy your product or pay for your service, no matter how many times you try to convince us that your business serves ‘everyone'. Characterise and define your market for us - what is the opportunity? Who's the biggest player in it right now? We'll look at this as market potential - we need to believe that our investment is worth it in terms of the potential growth, and/or that there's a potential buyer for your company down the line.

5. What problem do you solve?

This may seem like a simple one to you, but it might not be immediately obvious to an investor, user or customer. Why do you exist? It might be that there's more of an opportunity to be grasped rather than a problem to be solved, but either way, what drove you to create your business?

6. A closer look at your product/service

This is where you can get a bit more technical and go into further detail about your intellectual property as well as elements of the business that are unique to you, or make your business different. This could be anything from a bespoke ordering system to price. Tell us why your product(s) or service(s) deserve our time, involvement and more importantly, money. I desperately want to believe in the business featured in every deck I open.

7. Business model

How do you make your money? It might be absolutely obvious, but in the case of affiliate marketing back when I first got started, even seasoned business owners and investors had to learn what it was and why it was a reliable, scalable model.

8. Marketing and growth strategy

As touched on in slide three (traction), the potential for growth and, at its base level, a return on our investment in terms of time and money is what we want to see. Show us how your business can scale up and tell us how you're going to get there - both in terms of how you reach potential users and/or customers, and what business decisions will need to be made to grow.

9. Financials and forecasts

Talk to us about incoming and outgoing expenses. There's no easily-digestible way to do this, so add lines into a table and show us recent, current and forecasted financial figures based on everything you make and spend as a business. We need to see areas our investment and time could impact.

10. Investment ask

This is the kicker - what do you want from us? Don't skirt around it, be forthright - you want a certain amount of money and, perhaps, time from us, so just say so. From there, and depending on everything else in your proposal, we can have a conversation in relation to valuation and equity expectations.

Once you've created your pitch deck, save two versions - one as a PowerPoint (or whichever program you're using) and one as a PDF - you don't want to get to the stage where formatting issues mean your deck doesn't get read.