What’s the WORST pitchdeck error you’ve ever seen?

I’ll start. The client’s 10-year financial projections (based on user count) were on the basis of exponential growth. And by the time he got to year 10, he didn’t have to forecast anymore because by year 8 he had already attracted 1.26 Billion Users for his app, and was raking in $636B EBITDA per year. Great job buddy.

 
thefamilyofficesdb:
I’ll start. The client’s 10-year financial projections (based on user count) were on the basis of exponential growth. And by the time he got to year 10, he didn’t have to forecast anymore because by year 8 he had already attracted 1.26 Billion Users for his app, and was raking in $636B EBITDA per year. Great job buddy.

10 year projections are retarded in and of themselves. Might as well tape a Magic 8-Ball to a piece of cardboard and slap a title page on it.

“H-here you go. Now where the FUCK is my goddamn retainer? Soothsaying isn’t cheap, bub.”

 
dr_mantistoboggan_MD:
I've seen a Strengths/Weaknesses slide make it to committee with the classic [need to downplay this point or credit is going to hammer us].

This one is brutal.

All you interns / first years, make this a standard part of your double checks before you send out any draft! Ctrl+F "TBU" Ctrl+F "[" Ctrl+F "]" Ctrl+F "Update"

If it's a complete draft you'll catch any huge screwups, and if it's an in-progress draft you'll be able to verify that all your TBUs / bracketed items are appropriately represented.

 

When I was in IB, we put together a product comparison chart for a potential client who took offense to us rating his product lower in one category than a competitor's and decided to go with another bank. They told us we're lying and he doesn't hire liars.

Not pitchbook-related, but once had a banker send me emails addressing me by various names. It was pretty obvious he got us confused with another strategic.

 

The deck they show you at training the street where Tony the Tiger is pasted unevenly on the top right of every slide and dances as you go down

Also the slide that obviously didn't get used but when I was an intern I didn't know we had a photoshop team or whatever they're called and drew the map of the U.S. using MS paint.

What concert costs 45 cents? 50 Cent feat. Nickelback.
 

This is a major BB in the fairness and board decks on a $50bn+ deal you've all heard about:

They have only a couple of comps and because the comps output has logos instead of names, when they price updated, the rank-sorting switched the order but they didn't update the logos. So the comps are now completely fucked. For example, Amazon has Walmart's financials and Walmart has Amazon's financials. Just plainly mislabeled. Pretty sure if people knew which deal, they'd be filing a shareholder lawsuit as we speak.

 

When I was an intern, a director made me paint over a guy's goatee because we were using a picture of the guy we stole from the internet. The director wanted it to look "professional" and we didn't have Photoshop (graphics understandably refused to alter a picture of some random hedge fund PM who didn't even work at our IB), so I recolored pixel by pixel trying to match his skin tone. It actually looked okay. We also stole another PM's picture where he was holding a fish, so we just cropped it above the neck.

 

Goes to show how stupidly precious and conceded you have become from this industry.

Who gives a shit if once in a while it has baking instead. Everyone knows what it’s meant to mean. Move on and get a grip on reality and what actually matters in life. Loser

 

I've seen a slew of embarrassing book errors where the Associate/VP who's directing the model got way too excited about making it "robust" with 5 financing scenarios, 3 purchase price scenarios, 4 post-acquisition spin scenarios etc etc. And then when it comes time to print the book (always after a last minute round of worthless comments 3 hours before the flight) the junior team is rushing around and inevitably pastes the wrong model output because the cases weren't set perfectly.

Happened so much I started calling it The Manhattan Project. As in "hey Mr. VP, this is just a simple model, if you're going to turn it into The Manhattan Project then at least agree to sign off well before printing so we it doesn't become a shitshow."

 

We put panoramic photos on our cover sheet. I was doing a deck for Chinese PE fund, and I put a panoramic of a Taiwanese national monument on the cover. It looked Chinese (and culturally it is) but that is a major political faux pas to put Taiwan's national monuments on China's PE deck. Kind of like putting a North Korean statue picture on a South Korean deck, etc.

 

Nowhere near as bad as some of these, but in a pitch the partner wanted us to swap out one financial sponsor for another with very similar names about 5 mins before printing, but we forgot to update the logo, so it ended up having ones logo and the others name listed. Honestly not very bad, but the phone call he gave us before the pitch may have been the worst I ever got. I think it was the first client he sourced one hundred percent independently so thats probably why.

 

Unfortunately it's pretty common for banking / consulting leads to change things last min - at times I think they do it on purpose, probably makes them feel macho / compensates for insecurities

 

Not too crazy but one of my Analysts recently sent a Disposition deck over and made the property we were considering selling sound like some type of AIDs infested crack den. I'm like dude, we have to take this to our LPAC, they're going to think we're mental for ever having bought this property if we show them this. I told him to include data that "tells the story we want to tell" and he includes pictures of the fucking paint chipping. Super literal guy, cracks me up.

 

Not a pitch deck, but when I did an equity research rotation I put a few Zoolander jokes in the writeup. I even called the title of the doc "the center for kids who can't read good." The other associates got a kick out of it so I just kept editing that doc, always intending to remove the little jokes. When it came time to submit the report, I failed to correct the title. So, yeah, I submitted an equity research report with a Zoolander title, and a joke in the body. It didn't go well.

 

This was a model not pitchbook error very similar to OP story, but I saw one analyst for a huge developer completely mess up the rental growth rate for a $750mm construction project. Instead of growing rents at 3% a year, he grew them at 3% per month. I mean all I had to do was look at the apartment rents doubling in one year to immediately realize something was fcked, no clue how it got all the way to us (brokers) before anyone noticed. Pretty sure he was fired lol.

 

This is one of my new favorite threads.
1) Fucking hysterical, especially since I'm still outside the ring 2) Super useful to know about these ahead of time and hopefully catch most of them in the future.

"In order to make a man covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain." ― Dan Ariely
 

"Some of the parts" instead of "Sum of the parts"

Also, heard a story of a disgruntled analysts planning to quit, who wrote F**K all over the pages in the middle after everyone had signed off. MDs didn't see it until they were walking through with the client. May be folklore, but even if there's a seed of truth, that's how you go out in a blaze.

 

Not the worst I've seen, but relatively bad and cringey: Was doing analyst work for angel investment organization, guy is last at our screen meeting (top 5-7 apps do in person pitch for a few of us, top 2-3 then move to the whole org). He's a musician, which was interesting for me since that's my background too. He says in a very cringey way at the start: "I don't do powerpoint". lol ok. He still gives a strong presentation and we put him through to the next round. Next round: he goes like 10 minutes over bc he had like 3 videos that weren't really relevant in his ppt. Not that bad when reading it, but it was mega-cringe.

Now I actually remember the WORST I've ever seen: PM class in MSF. Had some really long case studies. Due to scheduling probs, two of them got due at the same day. Worked in small groups. Everyone obviously split to where one person just did a whole case themselves for efficiency. Had a smart Chinese guy as my partner with a good work ethic, so I wasn't worried(most of my classmates sucked). Mine was a convexity/butterfly trading case. Nailed it. Partner had L/S equity optimization case. Looked good to me at a glance, and I trusted him. Day of presentations and we went last for the L/S equity(partner was very late, close call already). For everybody else's presentation, partner was always VERY confidently and bluntly saying each team's numbers were way off for the whole case. Whole class was already tripping out over it. I thought whatevs, "he's my quant" a la big short lol. We finally present, and teacher outright confirms a ton of his numbers are way off. Class is losing it. Partner was so confident he was still in denial. I'm hiding behind the podium computer. Turns out the fucker didn't uncheck no negatives in solver so his optimization didn't include shorts. There went my A... This was baaaad too; whole class roasted him so bad. The one time I don't neurotically triple check a partner's work bc they actually seem competent I get burned bad.

JUST DO IT. Don't let your memes be dreams.
 

It's funny when you send a deck to presentation services to add photos of management. And the page comes back with someone totally not on the management team (eg some other random famous person)

 

We were in negotiation stage of a deal - BD person forwarded an email summarising key discussion points to the team. 2 deal directors then replied to the email chain on suggestions to negotiate up price and terms we could trade off as it didn't matter to us... sellers were copied on the chain from the very first email....

 

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