Follow-Up on Approach

It is important that you follow-up on your communication with prospective investors. You can communicate through the phone or a face-to-face meeting. The main goal is to book a meeting for presentation. It does not matter what you want to do, everything you want are goals, how you get them are plans, and plan’s execution is a game. How you achieve this depends on your strength and desire, and the person you approach. If you have truly captured their interest during first approach, they could call you.

Regardless of if they call you or vice versa, it is extremely important to increase their interest. But first, you need to realize one thing – investor(s) are your friends. But, you have to be a professional when you talk to them. Try to remember that people are not the same! It is possible that you talk to 50 investors before one find your proposal interesting and wants to explore presented opportunities. The golden rule is: your failure to successfully get investors for your company is because you gave up! Don’t give up, and keep trying until you get investors for your business.

Some investors are more excited about financial data than plans and strategies for the business plan. Others rather see strategies you want to use to achieve the objectives. Regardless of interest, discuss both financial data and strategies to achieve the objectives. The strategies that work for one person, might not work for someone else. For it to work, try using different strategies. When you fail with a follow-up, try to find out what you did wrong, and use what you learn to approach another.

However, I don’t recommend that you ask too many questions, because too much information could leave you paralyze. It is when two or more details collide against one another, and you don’t know what to do. It could lead to your knowledge being useless. If your strategies work or not solely depends on you! Strategies are all about communication with objectives’ achievements. The communication should always be in a professional, yet friendly manner.

All your data/research and so on are very important, but don’t discuss all of them yet. Because, they could be extremely boring for investors trying to make use of the information. However, the information could be useful. Success can also depends on them going through the entire data. Most – if not all – investors are financial engineers who like to analyze data.  It helps them to determine and assess if your proposal before making a decision.

Don’t think they are bad people because they say no! It is best to acknowledge and accept that the person whom say no has a reason. The reason will most likely be something not working out. I always belief that a negative result is because the investor and you cannot work together. I belief I am better off with someone saying no in the beginning, than us (he/she and me) working when strategies do not correspond with what is happening on the market.

For example, if my business plan suggests that I only compete against local companies within the state, and has objective to obtain $110 million/year in revenue within the next decade: investors will say no! That negative response is better, because the investor know something I don’t!  He/she knows that when I to start make over $100 million/year, I’ll get new competitors. These new competitors won’t be the local businesses, but national/international that will notice me. These are the big boys & girls. My business will be a threat, and they won’t accommodate it. They will try to stop me! That is a risk very few investors want to take! But, I won’t know that until I ask why I get a negative response.