Your Pitch Deck is Worthless Without Quality Financials | Ep 13

🎯 Why Most Pitch Decks Fail Without This | Full Send CFO

💡 You spent 40 hours on your pitch deck… but only 4 minutes on your balance sheet.
Bad news: investors are more interested in your financials than your fonts.

In this episode of Full Send CFO, we break down:
 • Why messy financials kill deals (even with a beautiful deck)
 • The 4-step financial prep playbook before raising capital
 • How to build investor-ready financials that actually get funded
 • What founders get wrong about KPIs, forecasts, and capital strategy

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⏱️ Chapters

00:00 – Why Pretty Pitch Decks Don’t Raise Capital
00:30 – The Truth About Fundraising: Your Numbers Matter Most
01:20 – Problem: Most Founders Can’t Answer Basic Financial Questions
02:00 – Investors Want Proof, Not Just Potential
02:45 – The Consequences of Poor Financial Preparation
03:10 – ✅ Step 1: Clean Up Your Financials (P&L, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow)
04:00 – ✅ Step 2: Build a 12-Month Model (Focus on Assumptions + Burn)
06:00 – ✅ Step 3: Know Your KPIs Cold (CAC, LTV, Margin, Retention)
07:00 – ✅ Step 4: Map Your Capital Strategy (How Much, Why, and What If You Don’t Raise)
08:30 – How to Handle “What If You Had $0” Questions from Investors
09:00 – Spreadsheets Over Slides: Show Me, Don’t Just Tell Me
09:30 – Final Takeaway: Investors Don’t Invest in Decks. They Invest in Proof.

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💡 Key Takeaways

✔️ 65% of Early-Stage Investors Say Messy Financials Are a Dealbreaker
Don’t lose a deal over unclear numbers. Audit your financials before the pitch.

✔️ The 4-Step Pre-Fundraising Financial Prep Playbook
 1. Clean Historical Financials: 24 months of clean P&L, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow
 2. 12-Month Forecast: Focus on cash burn, runway, and capital deployment
 3. Master Your KPIs: Know metrics like CAC, LTV, Gross Margin, Retention cold
 4. Capital Strategy: Why this amount? Why equity vs debt? What if you don’t raise?

✔️ Design Isn’t a Substitute for Data
An investor-ready spreadsheet builds more trust than any template or AI-enhanced slide deck.

✔️ Demonstrate, Don’t Just Declare
Investors are from the “Show Me State.” They want proof, not projections without support.

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📌 Next Steps
 • Review your P&L and clean it up.
 • Build a 12-month cash model with clear assumptions.
 • Prep for questions like: “What’s your CAC?” “What happens if you don’t raise?”
 • Forward this to your co-founder, CFO, or accountant. They need to hear it too.

🔗 Learn more at thefullsend.com

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#FundraisingTips #StartupFinance #FullSendCFO #SeriesA #CFO #FinancialModeling #RaiseCapital #VentureCapital

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Full Send | Accounting & Data

LinkedIn: Roman Villard, CPA
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Transcript

[00:00:00] If you've been around fundraising circles, capital raising circles, if you've raised money yourself, you've probably come across this situation where you get really impressed with some founders. You get really impressed with the pitch deck and it looks great only to find out that you're really more impressed by the design, the idea, but actually not the data supporting.

[00:00:22] The company. So today we're gonna talk about why your p and l, why your financials actually matter a whole lot more [00:00:30] than most. Founders and teams put emphasis on. So we're gonna talk about how do we fix some of those underlying financials before you go into the fundraising process. Here's the truth. If your business isn't fundable on paper, there is not a pitch deck in the world that is going to save you.

[00:00:47] 65% of early stage investors say, messy financials are a deal breaker. We don't want you to be that early stage business being rejected time and time and time and time [00:01:00] again because you don't know your underlying financials. Now, I will say this is largely intended for post seed raise, moving on to Series A rather than your pre-seed or friends and family round.

[00:01:13] At that stage, most investors are investing in. The founding team, the product, the idea, the potential. As you move forward and you have some data to support that, more mature institutional investors will be looking at the data. So we need to [00:01:30] stop obsessing over the design and the storytelling before the actual numbers make sense?

[00:01:36] In this episode, we're gonna dive into how to get your financial house in order and raise your confidence going into that fundraise. So here's, here's the problem. Here's some setup. Most founders spend 40 hours on a pitch deck and maybe four minutes on their balance sheet.

[00:01:52] And in all reality, that's kind of backwards. I've come across so many incredibly designed pitch [00:02:00] decks, but when you ask the question, what's your gross margin? There's just kind of crickets or there's a response of, oh, well, we believe that our, our gross margin somewhere in the realm of X to Y. And without that specificity, it gets really hard for a mature investor to get on board with the thesis.

[00:02:20] So if you watch Shark Tank, you'll see a lot of questions asked, what's your sales price? What's your cost? What are your margins? Uh, what's your. Customer [00:02:30] acquisition costs, things like that, and the founders that know those numbers off the top of their head, they get way more traction and engagement in conversation that those that haven't really prepared that well.

[00:02:42] So the problem is really that most early stage businesses don't do a true readiness assessment of their financials before going to market for a fundraise and. They could be investing those maybe 40 hours or whatever the time is on the front end in order to mitigate all of the stress and time and back work on the backend, [00:03:00] because effectively the delays that you cause by not being able to answer those questions, lose trust.

[00:03:06] That could result in down rounds or maybe even deals that don't ever happen. So what is the four step playbook in order to get to the right place so that you can go into the fundraise or capital raise with confidence? Step number one, clean up your historical financials, an accurate p and l balance sheet and statement of cash flows for the last to 24 months. Investors need to to trust what you send [00:03:30] them.

[00:03:30] If you're sending financials that have a bunch of personal expenses in there. We've got a problem. Now, not only that, but the, the financials need to be architected in a way that investors relate to. So if you're a SaaS company and you have a generic chart of accounts that doesn't mimic what a SaaS company would typically provide to investors, you're starting off on the wrong foot because that's creating more work for the investors and maybe creating a perception gap that you may not be the right fit to manage this company to a point and scale in which they want to see.[00:04:00] 

[00:04:00] Step two. I like looking at a 12 month forward financial model or forecast. So it's focused on assumptions, not just the projections of your actuals. Your, your assumptions are things that are going to happen in the future. I like looking at 12 months. A lot of investors want to see a 36 month or three year forward looking model.

[00:04:20] What I'll say to that is that there are so many uncertainties at the early stage that. Most good investors will realize that those assumptions are really just [00:04:30] extrapolated over the course of that three years knowing that things will change. So if you focus really intentionally on the next 12 months, there's a little bit more concreteness on the steps that you'll be able to take to meet those assumptions, to meet those projections.

[00:04:44] So what we want to do is we want to be able to display how new capital is going to be deployed and the expected outcomes of that capital deployment. Meaning you take money from somebody else, you're gonna put it to work in order to ideally send [00:05:00] money back to the investors. In that we wanna take a look at the burn rate.

[00:05:04] How much money are we spending on a monthly basis in order to achieve this outcome? How much runway do we have? If we raise $1 million today, does that give us 12 months of runway? Does it give it, give us 18 months of. Runway and then ultimately, like, how are you going to make those dollars last longer?

[00:05:22] What are your plans for expansion to your anticipated margins? So if you have a plan in place to identify what your burn rate [00:05:30] is, how much you're spending on a monthly basis, how long that will last you and your plans to expand and make dollars go further, you're getting to the right point where you can explain a model really well to prospective investors.

[00:05:41] Step number three, like I mentioned with Shark Tank, you need to know your KPIs cold. If you're in SaaS, your cac, your LTV, your gross margin, your retention, your Revenue growth rate. There's a lot of numbers that go into that, both financial and non-financial. When you look at things like retention, you can have a [00:06:00] dollar retention, but you also want to look at.

[00:06:03] The why behind your retention. What are the reasons that are causing your customers to stay and or to leave? If you can demonstrate an ability to not only know the KPI, but to be able to act on it in a way that improves those metrics and have that conversation with an investor, you are way ahead of the game.

[00:06:19] In your pitch deck, if you can have a one pager with five key numbers. Here's our cac, here's our LTV. Here are our gross margins. Here's our retention, here's our revenue growth [00:06:30] rate, and you have those numbers ready to go and can support them with additional figures to have a conversation about it. That will be a lot of what you need to know when pitching an investor.

[00:06:41] You don't need to blow out the full 36 month model in a slide that shows this hockey stick growth up into the right. 'cause most investor realize that's probably not gonna happen. And if that is the plan, there are very definite Inflection points in that journey that will cause that to happen.

[00:06:59] They wanna [00:07:00] know what those are, what the unit economics of them are, and how their money's gonna be used to achieve that. So the last step, step number four, is to map out your capital strategy. How much are you raising? And why? Why are you raising that $1 million? Why not 500,000? Why not 2 million? If there's a good reason as to why you've landed on the number that you've landed on, that will instill more confidence in the investor.

[00:07:25] Equity versus debt. What's your risk tolerance? Why are you raising an [00:07:30] equity round versus going the debt route? There's a cost of capital equation in there, but you also just wanna be able to have that conversation with an investors. The last thing from a capital strategy standpoint is what happens if you don't raise?

[00:07:42] Can you still survive as a business? What would need to be true in order for you to continue operating really, really well if you don't raise and. I can assure you that there's a lot of changes to your business model if you don't raise and you're currently in a high burn environment, but play a scenario [00:08:00] game and frame it a little bit differently rather than saying,

[00:08:04] if we don't raise what would happen, you should frame it as

[00:08:08] if we had zero additional dollars in the business. What steps do we need to take in order to get to viability? So if you can't explain your business with a spreadsheet, with numbers, with supporting data, you're probably not ready to explain it with a slide. A deck, a beautiful deck is probably not gonna be enough to get an investor super excited without the supporting details.

[00:08:28] So we can [00:08:30] skip some of the design sprints and all of the time and effort to make the deck look super pretty and start with the numbers. Demonstrating competency in that realm will impress investors. Far more than that deck template that you just ripped off of some AI website. So if you can get into a next step of auditing your p and l.

[00:08:47] So what I mean by that is going through your profit and loss, does it make sense? Is everything categorized correctly? Are all personal expenses out of there? If an investor were to look at this, would you feel really comfortable with them poking around your [00:09:00] financials? If you can do a self-audit there and then start to look at the next 12 months of cash coming into the business, cash going outta the business, how is that being leveraged effectively to drive a return on capital for your investors?

[00:09:13] If you can do, do those two things, you're gonna be setting yourself up exponentially. Well, compared to the founders who, uh, maybe aren't spending the time doing that. Investors don't invest in pitch decks. They invest in proof. It's like they're all from Missouri. They're from the Show me state.

[00:09:27] Show me, show me. Show me. Demonstrate how you've done this. [00:09:30] Demonstrate how you plan to do this. Gimme the data to support why you believe what you believe. The pitch deck's not gonna get you there. It's a conversation. It's being able to articulate those things in a conversation with an investor if you're raising soon.

[00:09:43] Forward this to your co-founder, forward it to your accountant, forward it to your fractional CFO. They probably need to hear it too, to be able to support you in this journey. And of course, go to thefullsend.com and let us know if we can be helpful to you in that journey. I hope this is helpful to you to build a more sustainable, profitable [00:10:00] business and hopefully one that's raising in 2025.