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

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Giving away the name of another client basically by using a previous presentation as the template and forgetting to replace all the correspondences. Damn.

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.”

Bank not even including any profitability figures even though it was a well-established company. You're just asking for people to assume the business is struggling or worse

Had a bake-off against a BB that had a book riddled with formatting issues but the best had to be a REF error showing on one of their excel links

IB team spelled my name wrong in the WGL that got included in the final deck :(

Well known investment bank spelled the company's name wrong throughout the deck and also used a pitch template that had the wrong coverage group on the front cover.

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].

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.

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.

When I reconstructed a sell side pitchbook I realized that they had been ADDING taxes to the pre-tax revenue in their model.

Group next to me has hanging on the wall in their pit a page from a near final LP that reads “$xxxMM Ass-on Term Loan B” in the title. I hope LP_vF2 got printed.

"Pubic Finance" instead of Public Finance

Investment "Baking"

Pubic was caught, investment "baking" took a couple decks to notice haha

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."

Couple that I have seen this month:

1) Spelling the client's / CEO's name wrong multiple times through the deck

2) Forgetting that 10Ks are reported in 000,000 so $45 million becomes $4.50 in revenue while showing it on a graph with competitors being in millions

3) Using the wrong stock ticker for a foreign company and then showing all of the wrong financials

an AVP where the % change in share price was not locked on current share price - effectively compounding the effect and you have multiples of 100x ebitda... pretty silly mistake on a key page

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.

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.

I see errors all the time. Bankers don't know much about industry in general. Calc errors fairly common.

“Pussibly” instead of “Possibly”

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.

I let my analyst work on it. I mean, talk about a colossal error.

One trick (for the newbies) is to print out the PPT, get your supervisor to make the comments directly onto the printouts. Then once you go thru the PPT, and make the changes, highlight the changes that you completed. That way no missed corrections enter into the final pitchbook.

intern was working on something related to Deutsche, first sentence contained the term "Deutsche Bang"..

Allow me to clarify something for you. We don't actually read your pitchbooks.

"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.