A biotech's investor materials survived diligence without a single 'can you re-send that properly?'

Representative examplesEvery case study in this library is an illustrative composite of the kind of engagement we deliver — written to show our method and standards, not to name clients.

Where they started

Diagnostics research with journal-grade discipline, a listing on the horizon, and investor materials assembled from whatever the last financing round left behind: the working reality of a pre-IPO biotech. Bankers, lawyers, and analysts will move through the data room, and the finance team already assembles decks from three rounds of accreted slides. The research team's figures, protocols, and data discipline would survive any journal review; nobody has owned the investor deck since the seed round.

What it was costing

The company's investor deck had grown by accretion — every banker adding slides, every chart restyled by whoever made it. In diligence, inconsistent materials read as sloppiness in a company whose actual science was rigorous.

What they could see

• Charts in the same deck used different axes, colors per condition, and label sizes, styled by whoever made each one.
• The deck's slide count had grown every round; nobody could say which slides were current, sourced, or still true.
• During an earlier diligence, a follow-up question about a chart's source took days to answer and read as disorganization.
• The finance team needed hours to assemble a customized deck, editing inconsistently styled slides by hand.

The constraints we worked inside

• Scientific figures came from the research team and could not be artistically 'improved' — accuracy outranks beauty.
• The deck had to work in the bankers' hands — edited, exported, and presented by non-designers.
• Confidentiality meant no external stock assets without clearance.

What had been tried before

A presentation agency delivered a polished, heavily designed deck for the last financing round.

The output was beautiful and uneditable by design intent — bankers couldn't assemble variations without breaking layouts, so the deck was mined for screenshots and abandoned as a system.

The finance lead imposed a slide-numbering convention and a shared drive structure for version control.

Naming conventions govern storage, not design — the accretion problem continued inside an organized folder, and chart styling stayed personal to each contributor.

A junior analyst spent a week manually restyling the most-used charts to match.

Manual restyling fought the source exports — research figures regenerate from analysis tools and every regeneration un-did the styling, so the work decayed within a month.

What we proposed

We proposed designing the chart system before the deck: data-visualization rules for axes, color-per-condition, and label hierarchy, agreed with the research team so accuracy outranks styling, then a modular presentation system — masters, section dividers, locked content layouts — that bankers can assemble and export without breaking. Every image would be original or license-cleared, recorded in a written asset register so diligence questions get answers, not apologies. The audience edits these materials in offices we'll never see, so the system had to survive careless hands, not careful ones.

Just as important is what we ruled out, and why:

• Outsourcing deck production to the deal's bankers as needed — Bankers assemble, they don't govern — each round's styling would restyle the company, recreating the accretion problem with a new set of hands.
• An enterprise brand-management platform with digital asset management — A four-week window and a finance team of five; the platform's procurement, rollout, and training would outlast the engagement and solve a storage problem the asset register solves on paper.
• Restyling only the flagship deck and leaving other materials — Diligence reads everything in the data room — one polished deck among accreted summaries would make the contrast between them the most noticeable thing in the room.

How the work ran

Delivered by the experience pod — brand designer over 4 weeks, with working increments reviewed with the client every week.

The stack, and the reasoning

Presentation system

Modular masters and locked layouts because the users are bankers under deadline — the system's job is producing one-handed-looking decks from careless assembly, not protecting a designer's composition.

Data-viz guidelines

Agreed with the research team, not imposed on them — figures regenerate from analysis tools, so the rules had to travel with the exports to survive regeneration.

Asset register

A written register of every image's origin and license, because diligence questions about provenance need a document, not a memory hunt through three financing rounds' folders.

Editable template library

The library had to work in the tools bankers already open — editable, exportable, and intact after non-designers assemble customized decks under deadline.

What went wrong

How we worked together

Cadence

Twice-weekly sessions with the finance lead and the research team's figure owner; the CFO joined twice to sign off the register and the deck structure.

Client side

The finance lead owned assembly and handover; one senior researcher owned figure accuracy with an explicit veto; the CFO owned the diligence framing.

Decisions

The researcher's accuracy veto outranked every styling choice; all other calls were made against the diligence audience — would this survive an analyst's second look.

They provided

Access to the data room's current materials, source files for the figure exports, image licenses from three rounds, and researcher hours for the chart rules.

What changed

The headline: materials-related follow-up requests during the diligence data room review — 0, read from Diligence Q&A log. A second check: time for the finance team to assemble a customized investor deck at 3 hrs → 20 min.

Diligence stopped being a presentation problem. The finance team assembles a customized investor deck in minutes from locked layouts, and the deck they ship is consistent because the components can't disagree. The research team's figures look uniform without anyone having edited their science, and the asset register turned provenance from a scramble into a lookup. When analysts ask where a chart came from, the answer is a document — which, for a company whose actual discipline is rigor, finally makes the materials match the lab.

The result was read from Diligence Q&A log against the pre-engagement baseline over the stated window, with a guardrail check on time for the finance team to assemble a customized investor deck. Where platform-reported numbers and business outcomes differ, this record says which layer it is quoting.

What they own now

• The modular presentation system with masters, dividers, and locked content layouts
• Data-viz guidelines co-authored with the research team, keyed to their export tools
• The complete asset register with license scope and provenance for every image
• A deck-assembly guide written for bankers' hands, not designers'
• The figure-remake pattern template the research team applies to new charts