Building an Investment Presentation to Help Sell Your Website

An investment presentation is a crucial part of the selling process over at SaleAway. We strive to have the best investment presentations on the market. Not only do we encourage your presentation to be aesthetically pleasing, but also have the proper information buyers will be looking for. For our viewers and listeners reference, we will put screenshots at the bottom of the blog on our website of presentations we have created over at SaleAway. I’ll start by going over the main topics we typically include in our presentations at a high level, and then will pass it over to Zach and Jake to provide more details on each of the specific sections.

• Executive Summary
• Traffic Statistics
• Financials
• How the website generates revenues (products it sells, services it offers, etc.)
• Day-to-day Operations & Owner Responsibilities
• Business-Level Statistics (conversion rates, order data, customer breakdown, churn rates etc.)
• Growth Opportunities
• Assets Received in Sale
• Seller QnA

It does depend on what kind of website or online business you are selling, but I will pass it over to Zach to go more in depth on what each of these sections entail:

1. Executive Summary

This portion will give a summary of your overall business, revenues (preferably Trailing Twelve Months or TTM), the net income figure, what kind of business you are selling and the time commitment you put towards your business on a weekly basis.

2. Traffic Statistics

Here a buyer will find a run down of your online traffic history. What we advise putting on this slide is a graph illustrating TTM unique visitors & pageviews, traffic commentary – which will go into where your traffic is generated and any explanations to rising or falling traffic over the last 12 months, visitors by country, and your acquisition channels – in other words, where your traffic comes from.

3. Financials

This is where your P&L and other financial statements will be. We advise giving an in-depth breakdown of your financials over a 2-year span if you have that much financial history. For example, it is currently 2020, we would advise having financial information from 2018 & 2019 posted so a potential buyer can see the growth in your online business. For your financials, we highly advise showing your Sales, Cost of Goods Sold, Gross Profit, Expenses, & Income Before Taxes. Along with the actual financials we advise having a commentary portion explaining possible expenses that may not be easily understood through the financials listed out. For instance, Cost of Goods Sold may just be one number on the financials, however in the commentary, you can put “Cost of Goods Sold includes shipping costs and employee costs.”

4. Revenue Generation / Business Model

This is where it could depend on what website or online business you are selling, but if you are selling an eCommerce or Drop shipping company, then the next step would be to explain what products you sell currently. This will be where you describe what products you currently sell, give a breakdown of products sold from best-selling down to all the other products (how many units sold, sales generated by those products, and % of net sales your products generate).

5. Day-to-Day Operations & Owner Responsibilities

This section will contain all of the day-to-day tasks you do for your website or online business, how many hours you put into you online business on a weekly basis, as well as listing out your employees, and explaining their day-to-day tasks.

6. Business-Specific Statistics / Key Performance Indicators

Again, this one will depend on the business you are selling.

• • For an eCommerce or drop shipping business, this will include illustrating your conversion rate on a TTM basis, the TTM return rate, and providing a breakdown of where your online business does most of its sales. One thing potential like to see in this section as well is the returning customer rate by year breakdown. If your website or online business has a high and increasing Returning Customer Rate YoY (Year over Year), this is very enticing because it shows that not only do you have a loyal fan base, but also you have a great product that keeps customers coming back for more.
  • Now if you are selling a SaaS business, you could provide details like an eCommerce or drop shipping business with a few differences. You would still want to show your conversion rate on a TTM basis and provide a breakdown of where your online business does most of its sales. Your online business or website may not have returns, so you won’t have to worry about that portion. You will want to provide the Returning Customer Rate as well as the TTM average order value and a breakdown of the average over the last 12 months.

7. Growth Opportunities

This section is pretty self-explanatory, but it is where you will illustrate to a potential buyer what they could do to drive more customers to your website or online business if they were to purchase. Some examples of growth opportunities for a drop shipping business could be “Start utilizing influencer marketing” or “Bulk ordering best-selling products to increase your margin”.

8. Assets Received in Sale

This is where you are going to lay out all the assets a buyer will receive from a sale. This includes domains, websites, social media accounts, customer data, industry contacts, supplier contacts, etc. Pretty much anything that is needed to run the business how you are today. This will give a buyer insight on everything they will be receiving with the purchase of your website or online business.

9. Seller Q&A

• The last portion we like to include is a “Seller Q&A” and what we typically include in here is going to be commonly asked questions from buyers. The purpose of this question is to act as a FAQ for buyers to get more insight into the details of your business and make it easier on the buyers to have answers without having to reach out to the seller. Some common questions we include in this pertain to the transaction of the sale, employees, legal questions, marketing and advertising, financials, products, and operations.

If you would like SaleAway to give you a complimentary business valuation, reach out to us and we would be more than happy to provide that for you. Also, if you would like us to create an investment presentation for your selling process, we can do that as well.

Once your investment presentation is complete, then it’s time to take your website or online business to market. Where do you go from here? There are many questions you can ask yourself here, but if you reference How & Where to Sell Your Website or Online Business you will see a breakdown between using a marketplace or using a broker. Now there are advantages and disadvantages for using brokers or marketplaces, but you will have to make that decision on your own. Are you willing to wait longer for an offer or would you like a broker, SaleAway LLC, actively looking for a buyer for your website or online business?