How to Make a Pitch Deck for Investors Part 11 Slide 9 Your Barriers to Entry or Moat Slide | Ep. 122 | Business Podcast
Summary
Part 11 of our masterclass on how to make a pitch deck for investors to raise money for your company in 13 slides.
In this episode we continue with your Barriers to Entry Slide and sometimes called Moat Slide. We explain exactly what to put on your Barriers to Entry Slide of your pitch deck, examples of types of barriers that can seperate you from your competition, and how to present it when you’re meeting with investors.
Remember, you’re telling a story through these 13 slides and this slide sets the stage for investors on why it going to be hard for others to grab market share from your company which reduces the risk in the investors mind.
What is this Perfecting Your Pitch Masterclass Series?
We’re perfecting your pitch so you have the very best chance to raise the money from investors to take your business to the next level.
If you want to raise or borrow money you need the right pitch deck. Do it wrong and it’s the difference between raising the money you need for your business and not raising any.
You’ll get it right by following this simple, proven, battle tested thirteen slide pitch deck outline.
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Hello Friends. Welcome to the show. Today we are on part 11 of our master class on how to make a pitch deck for investors so you can raise money for your company and we are on slide number nine. Your barriers to entry or mote slide, Here we go. Welcome to build the business success secrets. The only podcast that provides straight talk for entrepreneurs, whether you’re an entrepreneur starting with an idea or growing your business. This show is for you.
We’ll teach you how to build a strong mindset, powerful body and profitable business so you can achieve success. And here’s your host Brandon C white slide number nine. Your barriers to entry or sometimes called your mote slide. What we’re talking about here is your competitive advantages that will keep your competitors out. Think about it as a moat. What things do we have as a company that will not allow the competitor to easily replicate us or to easily get into our segment of the market that we’re addressing.
Let me give you some examples of the type of barriers to entry that you could put on this slide. Intellectual property is the first thing that comes to mind and some examples of intellectual property. The first thing is the obvious patent and the patent could keep competitors from replicating your product. And that’s great. I do want to say that if you’re only thing that you put on this slide is a patent, then make sure you’re in an industry where that patent can be protected.
And makes sense if you’re a drug manufacturer or you have some physical product that’s put together in a certain way. And the other thing that I would suggest to you is that just because you have the patent doesn’t mean that you can protect the patent because if you have to wind up in a lawsuit, it takes millions of dollars, especially if a big company decides that they’re going to go to war with you. So patents are great and they protect our property and our products, but they are not the answer to everything. So make sure that you have some other things as well and other ideas for intellectual property. You could have a trademark. These are marks, logos, slogans, you could have a copyright.
Think about if you’re in the software industry, if you’re a songwriter, if you’re making media and doing something with movies, you could have content on your website, you could have books that you wrote. Things like this are what would fall under the copyright and are barriers to entry or remote that keeps your competitors out. Another thing is trade secrets. These are things that we don’t necessarily file, but their secrets with economic value. The first one that comes to mind is coke. And the formula for coke, they didn’t file a patent because they didn’t want someone to reverse engineer and then change one thing enough to be unique and fall outside the patent.
So they just never told anybody and they put that formula in a safe that only certain people know that’s a big competitive advantage. This can happen with other types of things. It could be a customer list. Your customer list is a huge competitive advantage or an email list. If you have a list of 250,000 people or even if you have a list of 20,000 people in a niche, that’s a huge competitive advantage because with the push of a button, you’re talking to that audience who can buy things from you with little cost of sales and marketing. Another barrier to entry could be contracts or deals that you have. We talked a little bit about these in the traction slide, but these are also barriers to entry.
If you have a distribution deal with the national retailer, that’s a competitive advantage. If you have top shelf space and you’re a product in these places, that’s a competitive advantage. So simple contracts can be the competitive advantage that have a wider range of implications like distribution. Let’s talk about a few other types of barriers to entry. Does your industry require certifications? If you’re in the government space it can take a year, sometimes two years, maybe even more to get certifications.
That’s a huge barrier to entry because you can see your competitors coming because you can see them applying to get these certifications and you can predict when they’re going to be into your market, but that keeps competitors out. Another one that we talked about a little bit under I. P. Just distribution deals. Those are huge barriers to entry because you have reached your getting eyeballs on your products and they’re learning about your company and that can keep competitors out and build a really deep moat.
Another type of barrier entry could be S. E. O. Or search engine optimization. You could own several keywords in google that put you in the top three when someone searches them and that’s allowing you to get tons of traffic. Especially there’s some industries out there like CBD where some platforms won’t take the ads. So their competitive advantages if they can own the placement in the top three when someone searches for C. B D. SaV for knee pain and you come up number one. Well that’s a huge competitive advantage. And owning search results doesn’t just apply to google. This could be the case with amazon, You could get the buy button more than anybody in amazon because you’ve optimized your listings.
This could happen in, etc. This could happen in Ebay. That could happen on Youtube that you, you’re producing videos to promote your product and you’ve optimized them so that when people make these searches, your videos come up and that’s a big competitive advantage, the last one I’ll offer you and there could be more that you come up with. But the last one I’ll offer you is you could just simply do it better. You could have better customer service. Zappa’s soled shoes that were and and does sell shoes that are reasonably priced but their customer service so spectacular that it is their competitive advantage and there’s other companies out there that do the same thing.
So you could do something in your company just so good or your product could just be so much better. I will say that if your product is that much better, that’s awesome. Have some statistics on this slide to present to investors to demonstrate that and not just say it. I want to say one last thing here as we’re talking about this slide and all the other slides thus far, we are taking the perspective that we are presenting to investors in person. When we wrap up this master class series, I’ll give some tips and tricks as it relates to what you should do when an investor asked for the pitch deck before you show up, you will want another version of the pitch deck. But right now we’re talking about that.
You’re giving it in person. So with that in mind to give you an idea what I would put on this slide, I would put as few words as possible, I’d make sure it’s at least 32 font and if I could come up with images that represented the different elements that are creating your barriers to entry, I would do that. First of all, humans consume Images and Pictures Quicker and two is nobody is going to be reading from the slide. They’re going to need to look at that slide and then listen to you, which is what you want. Put all these things into action.
Get your barriers to entry, slide built and until the next episode I’m rooting for your success. Thanks for being generous with your time and joining us for this episode of build a business success secrets. Before we go, let me ask you a quick question. Are you the type of person who wants to get 100% out of your time, talent and ideas? If so, you’ll love our monthly built a business success secrets newsletter.
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