Gravyty Business Planning
Andrew Corbett
2019
This case is comprised of the executive summary and pitch deck for Gravyty, a software
fundraising platform powered by artificial intelligence. Gravyty’s mission is to help non-profits
raise more money – without hiring more people or buying more data – in order to help them
deliver on their mission! Babson entrepreneurs Rich Palmer and Adam Martel started Gravyty in
2016 and by the end of 2019, they had raised two angel rounds and another with a private equity
firm.
The primary purpose of this case is to provide an overview of the business planning process. We
provide the pitch deck and executive summary because more often these days potential investors
do not look for a complete, formal business plan. In fact, the Gravty guys were never asked for
a business plan throughout their fundraising process. While this has become more of the norm
today, it is important to remind your students of two VERY important points. First, the time may
come where potential investors or other stakeholders may ask for a formal business plan –
especially during due diligence after initial pitch meetings. And, second, the energy, time, effort,
and work put into developing your executive summary and pitch deck are the same as if you
developed a fully written plan. It is only that the final deliverables that are different – you cannot
create a tight pitch deck or executive summary without putting in the same business planning
research and work!
This case is a step back in time and lets us see the early version of Gravyty’s business planning
materials. This firm was eventually successful at raising money but what you and your students
have is an early version of their work. These materials come from a time when one co-founder
was in the midst of working as a fund-raiser while pursuing his MBA part-time and the other was
in the last year of his MBA program.
The case provides an opportunity to critically analyze the quality of the executive overview and
deck (while they are solid, there is room for improvement). Note: there is a version of the both
documents available to post to your class website that has a number of comment boxes on
aspects of the plan that I like and that I don’t like. I typically post these after the case discussion
so that students can refer back to it as they start their own planning. As you read the plan, you
and your students will see many strengths and weaknesses that I missed, so please add or take
away comment boxes as you see fit before posting the plan.
Class Outline
When teaching the case, I use the following outline and cycle between the attached
pitch deck, the executive summary, and in class activities.
I. Gravyty case
A. [BREAKOUT] Evaluate the quality of the planning process. Divide the students into 3
groups comprising the roles listed below (while they should read through both
documents prior to class, it may help to have them focus on the executive summary
for this exercise). I usually provide them with a poster sheet to record their
observations and to facilitate sharing their thoughts with the entire class once the
breakout is completed. Have each group prepare the following questions. While I
ask every group to determine a valuation (it is okay if you haven’t yet covered this
topic, let them come up with wild-eyed guesses), I ask them to put this on a separate
piece of paper, fold it up and hand it to me.
a. Teachers
i. Grade the executive summary and the pitch deck (focus on executive
summary).
ii. What is the Gravyty story?
iii. What are the three most effective aspects of the executive summary?
iv. What three aspects need more attention?
b. Investors
i. Would you invest in Gravyty?
ii. How much would you invest (they are seeking $500k)? This is an
opportunity to point out that an investor may put in less money than
asked (can talk about staging and reaching milestones) or put in far
more if they want the entrepreneur to pursue an aggressive growth
strategy. It is important to focus on investor <> entrepreneur
alignment since these are often multi-year relationships.
iii. Create a due diligence agenda – what are the key questions? How do
you answer those questions? While these two documents and initial
meetings with entrepreneurs are a good foundation for due diligence,
investors will have to develop a strategy to validate claims in the plan.
c. Entrepreneur
i. Anticipate investor concerns. What might they be?
ii. How do you answer them to investor satisfaction?
d. Managing this section.
i. I have the teacher group present their evaluation to the class. In the
vast majority of the cases, the teacher group typically grades the plan
harshly (which is good because it gives them less room to complain
about their own grades at the end of the semester, which are often
higher than how they grade Gravyty). Having the students present
their analysis, sets up the following surprise…
ii. Instead of having the entrepreneur and investor groups present
independently, I toss aside their poster sheets (with great dramatic
flair) and have them select a representative to negotiate with a
representative from the other party. You are basically setting up an
entrepreneur/investor role play. You can then debrief the role play
and draw parallels to actual entrepreneur/investor negotiations.
Make sure to point out how the planning process helps the
entrepreneur best present her case to the investor.
iii. After the role play, I put the three different valuations that the groups
each handed me separately. Again most of the time, the
entrepreneur group’s valuation of the business is 2-5x higher than the
investor’s valuation. This creates a good opportunity to discuss
overoptimistic biases on the part of entrepreneurs.
B. Build upon breakout. After the breakout, I go to a more traditional case discussion.
Starting with a positioning vote.
a. [VOTE] Is this business going to survive? Thrive?
b. What are the key hurdles to its success?
i. Many of these were discussed in role play; what else does Gravyty
need to think about?
c. How can Gravyty reshape the business going forward? They did pivot the
business before taking off, so what are some potential pivots might need to
make (perspectives to consider: product, marketing segments, pricing)
d. Students are going to search for Gravyty on line and will find the current
website and information about the firm in other places. This provides an
opportunity to fill in some gaps from then and now:
i. How has the company changed in mission, customers, segments, or
focus?
ii. Why do you think this happened?
iii. Where are the future opportunities for Gravyty?
C. Continue with other points from the deck or summary that students may want to
discuss
a. Executive Summary
i. Does the tagline “Art + Science of Better Nonprofit Fundraising” serve
its purpose
ii. Similarly, what does the Venn diagram graphic add?
iii. What about the usefulness of the Market & Competition Overview on
page 2?
iv. See the comment on “Strong Integrated Solutions” on the marked up
copy of the executive summary. Predicting the next gift isn’t that
difficult. The difficulty is how to manage closing the donation over
what can turn out to be 2 years with a dozen or more interactions. Is
there another product opportunity here?
b. Pitch Deck
i. How is the language throughout the deck? Do Adam and Rich
‘oversell’ or is the language too hyperbolic at points?
ii. What do you think of the value of having a product demo is? See
slide 6
iii. Are there issues that Gravyty seems to claim or care about that you
think may not really matter with their potential clients?
iv. See slide 10. How useful are these testimonials?
v. On slide 13 Gravyty speaks to “Value to non–profits.” Ask your
students what this might mean. It is vague on this slide as Gravyty is
not clear what value means here?
vi. Gravyty has a number of “back–up slides” – starting on slide 19 –
ready to use if investors asked questions about things they did not
cover in the main pitch. Did they cover the ‘right’ issues? Are there
slides they held back in the appendices you would suggest using? Is
there anything missing?
D. Debrief