Ian Moore is an entrepreneur and an independent film producer working in New York.  He is also a ChubbyBrain guest blogger offering his perspectives into entrepreneurship, fundraising and all things startup.

If you’re raising capital for a new venture, should you set up an investor presentation to pitch the idea to potential investors? Depending on the nature and stage of the business, it might be time to let your inner salesman out—angel and private investor presentations can be a very valuable way to move forward toward your goals.

Lets say you’re starting a new venture with capital requirements too high to bootstrap yourself, that is also too early in the process to attract venture capital. In other words, you’re looking to connect with angels for a first round of funding.  There are a couple ways to think about connecting with angels, ranging from asking your uncle Murray to break out his checkbook to connecting with an organized angel group (generally we’re talking about regional collections of sophisticated early-stage investors).

The vast majority of pre-VC start-ups are going to fall somewhere in the middle between uncle Murray and Band of Angels or whatever, and you might find yourself networking to un-affiliated private investors to generate the initial cash infusion to get off the ground. It takes a tremendous amount of work, networking intelligence, and finesse to access the right people, but I guarantee that if you’re willing to put in the sweat equity, you can connect to the right investors. And presenting to a group can be a great tool here.

I’m not going to get into the content you should include in a presentation–there are tons of great resources out there in this area.   Instead I’m going to talk about the points of value in holding an investor presentation, and the ways (in my opinion) you should go about extracting the potential value on the table in this type of situation.

The presentation is a much bigger opportunity than simply explaining the venture and your business model. If done right, you can use your presentation to generate some substantial enthusiasm for the company, express the competence of your team, and extend the reach of your network in ways that can open up new avenues for fundraising and other areas of development.

The way I see it, the first point of value in the presentation is that your investors gain confidence by seeing that there are other sophisticated investors who are taking the opportunity seriously. If you get a group of smart folks together who are considering investing, the enthusiasm can be infectious, and it’s really hard to underestimate how powerful this can be. If you can have a current investor there to talk about their interest in the company, even better.

Additionally, a quality presentation is a referendum on managerial capability. This presentation is a sales opportunity, and showing investors that you can do this well will give an investor confidence that you can handle yourself in future sales scenarios when you bring the product to market. It lets people know that, not only have you thought through your sales strategy, but you have the tools to implement as well. This can go a long way toward generating some confidence in the management.  A follow on point here—if you can have different team members speak to their area of expertise and project confidence, it can make an investor feel that the bases are covered operationally in a way that they’ll never get off the pages of a business plan.

Be strategic and think beyond the room. A good investor can help you much more broadly than simply providing financing. They can bring relationships, they can plug you into sales opportunities, partnership opportunities, connect you to key staffing, and advisory board members, etc. In recommending you to members of their network an investor puts their own reputation on the line. Showing that you’re good in a room can defuse any concern that you’ll make them look bad, and in doing so really activate some of these relationships. You might just tap in to a network including all kinds of resources—quite possibly including additional sources of capital.

As far as making your pitch, I’ll only say one thing: Remember to keep your pitch straightforward and accessible. The number one complaint I hear from investors coming out of a pitch is that they didn’t even understand what the product offering is. That is bad. Keep in mind that your idea seems incredible obvious to you, but you need to be able to communicate the idea to people who don’t spend all their time thinking about it the way you do.

An investor presentation is a huge opportunity to do much more than communicate the strength of your concept. Use the opportunity for all its worth to spread enthusiasm among interested parties, leave people with a lasting impression of the competence of management, and leverage contacts for network effect in the world beyond the pitch.

Ian Moore is an entrepreneur and an independent film producer working in New York. After developing his craft in production operations working on the sets of films, commercials, and still photo advertising shoots in New York and Los Angeles, he became a managing partner of feature film production company Marvelous Pictures in 2005. Since that time he has been a part of the founding team of a number of indie film production entities. He is currently furthering his understanding of entrepreneurial strategy and finance by pursuing an MBA through the Columbia Business School Executive Program, and producing his third feature film, Happy New Year, slated to shoot in August 2009.