How To Create Investment Banking Pitch Books

So lets get started:

Types of Pitch Books

People use the term pitch book for almost any type of PowerPoint presentation that you create
in investment banking.

But this is too broad for our purposes, so Im going to split pitch books into the 3 main types of
presentations you create:

1. Market Overviews / Bank Introductions Introducing your bank and giving updates to
potential clients.
2. Deal Pitches Sell-side M&A, buy-side M&A, IPOs, debt issuances, and so on.
3. Management Presentations Pitching a client to investors once youve actually won the
client.

There are other types and sub-types, but 99% of your work in PowerPoint falls into one of these
3 categories.

Common Elements

These 3 main variants have a few common elements:

1. Title Slide with the date, bank or client logo, and description of the presentation.
2. Table of Contents listing the different sections right after the Title Slide.
3. Slides with bulleted text and slides with graphs / diagrams.

There are no fancy transitions, animations, 3d effects, or anything else: pitch books are printed
out 99% of the time, so none of that makes sense.

The length varies widely some presentations might be 10 pages and others might be 150
pages depending on the category, where youre working, and how much your MD wants you to
suffer.

Market Overviews / Bank Introductions

This is the simplest type of pitch book its usually around 10-20 slides that introduce your bank
and give an overview of recent market activity to prove that your bank knows what its talking
about.

Common elements:

1. Slides showing your banks organization, the different departments, and how global you
are.

2. Several tombstone slides that show recent deals your bank has done in a particular sector.
So if youre presenting to Exxon Mobil, you might show recent energy M&A deals, IPOs, and
debt offerings you have advised on.
Along with these, you might create league table slides that show how your bank ranks in
different areas like tech M&A deals, equity issuances, and so on.

3. Market overview slides showing recent trends and deals in the market and data on how
similar companies (comps) have been performing lately.

These types of pitch books are the least painful for investment banking analysts because you
mostly just copy slides from elsewhere and update existing data.

Some banks dont even use these types of presentations at all theyre more common at smaller
banks where you actually need to introduce yourself.

Sell-Side M&A Pitch Books

Heres where the fun begins. These pitch books are the longest and most complex, and can
sometimes be well over 100 slides.

You create these when a company says, We want to sell, and were selecting a bank to
represent us. You get to play create a presentation and then pitch us on why we should choose
you.

The usual contents:

1. Bank Overview

This is similar to #1 and #2 above, but theres more of an emphasis on cutting data in creative
ways to make your bank look better than it actually is.

Were not #1 in energy deals over $1 billion? Try $1.5 billion try North America only try
between $750 million and $1.5 billion!

2. Situation / Positioning Overview

Heres where you create a few textual slides on what makes the company attractive and how you
would pitch it to potential buyers.

You might also create graphs showing how quickly the market is growing and how this company
dominates the competition, even if it doesnt.

3. Valuation Summary

This is where you exaggerate the companys value and make bold promises so that your bank
can win the deal.

You start off with a textual summary, then present the infamous football field graph showing the
companys valuation according to different methodologies.

Then you show individual methodologies such as public comps, precedent transactions, and a
DCF.

Senior bankers usually know how much a company is worth, so they give you a number and you
have to work backward to make the data support it.

Yet another reason why banking is not rocket science.

This is where you give an exhaustive list of everyone who could potentially buy this company.

You might split this into strategic acquirers (normal companies) and financial sponsors (PE firms
and hedge funds), and you include a summary slide in the beginning followed by detailed
descriptions (company profiles) afterward.

This can easily be the most painful section of the entire pitch book.

Imagine looking up a companys business description, products, executives, and financial

5. Summary / Recommendations

You give advice and recommend how many buyers the company should approach, how long it
will take, and what your bank is going to do in this section.

These are almost always templated slides taken from other presentations, so this part isnt too
painful.

6. Appendix

This contains all the data that no one reads.

You might paste more detailed models, backup data, and even lengthier lists of company profiles
into this section.

Bankers like to make presentations as long as possible so thick appendices are very common.

Buy-Side M&A Pitch Books

These are similar to sell-side M&A pitch books, so I wont repeat everything the key
differences:

1. Theyre shorter because not as much data is stuffed into the appendix.
2. Rather than listing potential buyers, you list potential acquisition candidates this list may
be much longer and you may create more profiles for these companies.
3. Theres not as much information on the companys own valuation youre buying another
company, not being sold.

Despite being shorter, buy-side pitch books may be more annoying because you have more
time-consuming company profiles.

Debt Financing or IPO Pitch Books

These are both similar to the sell-side and buy-side pitch books above. The differences:

1. There are no company profiles and no potential buyers / potential acquisitions sections.
2. You include relevant financing models for example, an IPO model showing what multiple a
company might go public at and how much in proceeds it will receive.

With no company profiles, these presentations are somewhat less painful than M&A pitch books.
 Management Presentations

These pitch books created for real clients instead of prospective clients are less
quantitative and are more focused on the clients strengths.

Youre pitching the company itself to investors (for debt / equity offerings) or to potential buyers
(for sell-side M&A) so you use the clients colors and presentation theme rather than your banks.

The structure depends on the clients industry a management presentation for a bank will look
much different than a presentation for a tech company.

If we assume that the company is a standard one selling products or services to customers, a
typical structure might be:

1. Executive Summary / Company Highlights

You never use company profiles, information about your own bank, information
on other companies (e.g. showing the comps), or valuation data in these presentations.

You still use a mix of bulleted text slides and graph/diagram slides, but its harder to generalize
the exact slides you might see.

Common slide types: Bar graph showing the total addressable market each year; graphical
display of all the companys products; customers by geography, industry, and size; historical and
projected income statements and the most recent balance sheet.

For asset-heavy industries like financial institutions and oil & gas, it doesnt make sense to
discuss products or customers so you would instead give more detail on their assets, proven
and unproven reserves, and so on.

Management Presentations are less repetitive to create than other types of pitch books, but
they also take more time to complete.

You might throw together a sell-side M&A pitch book in a few days, but management
presentations often take weeks.

Thats not because theyre longer most of the time theyre actually shorter, in the 30-50 slide
range.

Instead, they take more time because you need to interact with the client, get their feedback, and
go through more iterations.

Regional Variances
 Other Types of Pitch Books

There are a couple other types of pitch books and sub-types of the ones described above:

1) Combo Pitch Book / Scenario Analysis

A company isnt sure whether it wants to go public or sell so you create a pitch book with both
scenarios and show the tradeoffs.

You might also do this if youre pitching a restructuring deal and you want to show what happens
if the company sells vs. declares bankruptcy vs. restructures itself vs. refinances its debt.

2) Targeted Deal Pitch Book

A buyer has just approached your client with an acquisition offer and you want to show accretion
/ dilution under different scenarios.

In this case you would skip all the upfront materials about your bank and just get into business,
showing mostly numbers from your analysis.

3) Client Update Presentations

You create these if youre running an M&A deal and you want to update the client on your
progress.

You would skip all the fluff and just create a few slides showing who youve contacted, what
theyve said, and a summary of any offers received so far.

4) Fairness Opinions

You do these right before a deal is officially announced they consist of detailed valuations that
prove the price your client is receiving (or paying) is fair.

Again, you skip all the fluff and get straight into business with a few slides that summarize the
offer terms and then a whole lot of slides with valuation graphs and data.

Differences at Boutiques vs. Bulge Brackets

Pitch books are similar no matter what bank youre at, but there can be a few differences:

1. Bulge brackets tend to be more numbers-focused while smaller places may be more
qualitative and market-focused.
2. Bulge brackets often show more scenarios than boutiques and therefore have lengthier
pitch books.

In Other Areas of Finance

Sometimes you see similar types of presentations in private equity, hedge funds, and asset
management.

But these presentations are shorter and have less fluff compared to investment banking pitch
books.
Some buy-side firms like to make analysts and associates create investment memos that
summarize everything for the Partners before they make an investment decision.

These look similar to the Management Presentations described above whether or not you do
them depends on your firms culture.

Attention to Detail

You will spend a lot of time making sure that everything is properly footnoted, that all your
sentences end with periods, and that the employee counts for all 50 of your company profiles are
100% correct.

Conflicting Changes

If youve read Monkey Business, you already know about this one: yup, nothing has changed in
20+ years.

When you distribute your pitch book, the Associate will make one set of changes, the VP will
make another, and the MD will make another which results in conflicts on every single slide.

You will also spend a lot of time receiving marked-up pitch book faxes at 3 AM and then
implementing all the changes.

Dozens of Revisions

Its not uncommon to see v73 and other large numbers at the end of each file name
sometimes you go through over 100 revisions of a single pitch book.

These have diminishing returns after the first few major changes, but bankers follow the 20/80
rule instead of the 80/20 rule.

Youll also spend a lot of time trying to decipher what your VP meant when you cant read
anything he marked up in red pen on your latest draft.

Inefficiencies & Pride

Its one thing if a senior banker wants to sketch out a new graph for you to create, but often they
re-write the text of entire slides on the printouts of those slides.

That alone takes longer than re-typing it in the first place, but then it also costs you time because
you have to read their markup, interpret it, and type it all over yourself.

Why? Because senior bankers are above editing PowerPoint files directly.

Irrational Obsessions

Finally, bankers have irrational obsessions: if youre not murdering people in your bathtub, youre
changing minutiae in a pitch book instead.

When youre pitching a company, relationships and the actual in-person pitch matter far more
than the presentation but rather than focusing on those, bankers like to spend time on tasks
they feel more comfortable with, like changing font sizes in a presentation.

Where Can You Get Example Pitch Books?

So, its far more difficult to get sample pitch books than it is to find sample Excel models.

Still, you can find a few if you scour the Internet:

Many of these are quite old, but bankers are creatures of habit, and pitch books barely
change aside from the formatting and color schemes.

Another Option

If youre looking for another way to learn, we also offer comprehensive PowerPoint
training on Breaking Into Wall Street:

PowerPoint Pro

Master PowerPoint by creating a sell-side M&A / valuation pitch book for Jazz Pharmaceuticals -
plus company/deal profiles and more.

learn more

These tutorials walk you through the process of creating a sell-side pitch book as well as
company and deal profiles that you could use in assessment centers, case study-based
interviews, and even on the job itself.

These arent 100% representative of what youd see at a bank because they skip over the bank
introduction section but you dont do much original work there as an analyst anyway.

Before you start working in banking, you should get familiar with the layout of these different
types of pitch books and try to learn some PowerPoint basics.