Ten minutes in front of a jury is a different sport.

What the session actually is

Fixed time, a jury with a technical and a financial member, questions strictly bounded, and scoring that often finishes after you leave the room. The rapporteur writes a summary that may be the only thing a later committee reads about you.

The deck is also an annex to the application. Where the two disagree on a number, the disagreement becomes the question, and the answer is rarely good.

Who is in front of you

Not a generalist. Someone who has read the call, may have scored a dozen applications the same week, and is professionally suspicious of enthusiasm. They are looking for reasons the project will not deliver, because those are the notes they have to write.

In sequence, within the time

• Eligibility and the ask in the first minute, so the jury stops wondering and starts listening.
• The problem in the programme's language, which is not the same as the investor's language.
• What will be built, as work packages and outputs, with the parts already de-risked marked as such.
• Why this team: specific capability, not a list of logos.
• Impact with indicators, and the mechanism that produces them.
• Budget in the programme's categories, with co-funding stated plainly.

Evidence instead of persuasion

Where an investor wants a story, a jury wants support: a letter of intent, a partner commitment, a measured result, a named customer. Every slide that carries an assertion should carry its evidence next to it.

What gets marked down

• Talking to the jury as if they were investors: returns, exits, valuation, none of which is being assessed.
• Impact described as benefits rather than as a causal path with measurable indicators.
• Overrunning the slot. It reads as an inability to manage a work programme, which is being scored.
• Numbers that contradict the submitted proposal, discovered in the questions.
• No prepared answer to "what happens if this fails", which is the question the panel asks to test judgement.
• A consortium partner speaking without an agreed set of facts.

The last one damages applications more than founders expect. Panels read inconsistency between partners as risk in implementation, and implementation is scored separately.

The part nobody rehearses

The questions. They are predictable, they are asked in a fixed order, and answering them in forty seconds each is a skill. We build the bank and rehearse it under time pressure.

The session set

• Deck aligned to the written application: same work packages, same figures, same vocabulary.
• Ten to twelve slides with the timing marked per slide, so the slot is managed rather than hoped for.
• Question bank: the twenty most likely questions with a short answer for each, and the ones you should not answer alone.
• One-page summary written for the rapporteur, essentially the summary you would like them to write.
• Rehearsal with hostile questioning, timed, recorded where useful.

What we need from you

The submitted application, the call's evaluation criteria, and the team members who will present. Rehearsal with the actual speakers, not with a substitute.

Three passes

Alignment first: the deck is checked against the proposal line by line, because inconsistency is the cheapest way to lose points.

Compression second: what survives ten minutes, and what moves to an annex.

Rehearsal third, under time, with the questions that make people defensive.

What we are strict about

No slide without a purpose, no number that cannot be sourced from the application, and no answer improvised in the room that contradicts the file.

Where its power ends

It cannot rescue a weak written application. The session adjusts a score at the margin; the document sets the range.

It does not replace the plan: grant business plan.

It does not settle the budget questions a controller will ask later: financial model for public funding.

And it does not manage consortium politics, which are usually decided before the session.

A different room, same argument

Where the reader is an investor rather than a panel, the same case has to be built differently: investor pitch deck.

Where this work leads

One document answers one reader, but the question behind it rarely stays inside a single direction.

• Project & Investment Strategy

The level above

Documents solve a defined file. Where the decision itself is open, the work moves up a level, into a direction, and eventually into growth strategy.