$100m Investing Lessons from Elite Fighter Jet Units

If you’re like me, you love the movie Top Gun (both of them). That’s why when I was invited to visit Fightertown USA with my son last Friday, I jumped at the chance!

If you’ve seen Top Gun, we were literally INSIDE the Fightertown USA Airhanger.

The jets you saw and loved in Top Gun #1 were F-14 Tomcat. Take a look, there’s no green screen here, you can see a Tomcat in the background. My son and I felt honored to stand on that exact spot just 24 hours ago:

For those of you who don’t follow what’s going on in the defense industry, an air squadron that been training pilots to fly F/A-18 Hornets for 50 years was decommissioned at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar during a “sundowner ceremony” last Friday, marking the end of an era for the Department of the Navy.

What’s replacing the F-18? The new $1.7 TRILLION F-35 platform developed by Lockheed Martin.

Not only were we treated to a full access base tour to see how America really trains and defends itself …

The biggest moment of the day was getting to see the F35 up close. But no photos! Since there are pilots and ground crew around the planes, we couldn’t take photos

As you can see, I’m very patriotic about defense!

And even though the prospect of trillion dollar government contracts sounds like a “your margin is my opportunity” kind of opportunity to go after…

The only way you can go after those massive TAMs in defense is to have an ecosystem specifically designed to support those deal sizes.

That’s why I’ve never done an financial deal in the defense industry. I just don’t have enough money to enter the fighter aircraft business, I hate how long and slow of a process of selling to the government can become, and I’m 3,000 miles away from Washington.

But outside of the defense network …

I’ve done deals in every single other financial ecosystem.

Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Civilian Aviation, MedTech, Genetics, Biotech, Real Estate, Agriculture, Oil and Gas and even Hollywood … I’ve taken all the lessons I’ve learned from these trillion-dollar ecosystems…

And turned that into what I call the Pitch Anything Playbook.

Just like the military spends trillions of dollars developing a “platform” aircraft to ensure America maintains air superiority…

Although smaller, a lot smaller… I developed a platform called the West Coast Finance Ecosystem as part of my personal wealth-building strategy!

For those who aren’t up to date, two years ago, I knew there was going to be a massive opportunity “after the 2019-2021 bubble” to make a LOT of money quickly.

So in 2021, I set an ambitious goal of adding $100m to my personal networth in the next five years. But in order to hit that goal, I knew I would need to make a major upgrade in the way I think about money.

I could keep doing deals from the advisor position and be happy with the ~7-figure income I can generate from advisor fees alone… but for every $500K fee I earned, I left tens of millions of dollars in transaction value on the table for someone else to take…

Or, option 2, put together my own deals – and take all the upside for myself and my investors.

Just one problem: At the time, I didn’t own any companies and I’m not good at “inventing new products”.

No only am I not-good at inventing new products, I’m not going to take on a huge amount of risk to try to enter a new industry with a new “untested” business model – so any kind of startup is out.

So what does that leave? Leveraged buyout … Hedge Fund …. High Frequency Trading?

Sure, I CAN and HAVE raised capital for those kind of deals …

But if I wanted to target probability 5-10x opportunities that I’d put my PERSONAL money into, none of those would make sense.

After all, my investment thesis is to find “well run companies with messy balance sheets and weak ability to raise capital.”

And that’s why there’s only one logical place to go hunting for deals: the <$100m middle market.

This is exactly where private equity goes to find their alpha, and that’s where I’m going to find mine.

So, I started looking for companies that had already figured out their business model, had product market fit, and ideally, already have the management team in place (or I can quickly snap one in).

Does that sound like hard work? Yes, it is. But that’s exactly the work I know how to do! Raise Capital, run Financial Modeling, Grow Revenue and Recruit Management Teams.

Now I had an easy button: Find a good company, then come in and do what I’m good at – the banking stuff.

I don’t want to build the plane, train the pilots, or fly the plane… and trust me, you don’t want me doing any of that stuff either.

My job is to create the ecosystem that has all the resources it needs to pursue the companies I’m interested in – then snap the company into it.

My only job: building the stock of the company into a highly marketable security that I can take public in the the next 18-36 months, with a target return of 5-10x in 5 years or less.

If you look at this graphic below, I am taking “Zero X” companies that can’t find any money …

And putting them into my ecosystem which, with a lot of work and effort, turns them into 10X deals.

I call this playbook the “IPO Factory”

Two years in, this strategy is paying off for me in a big way

I’ve invested something like $1m of my own personal money in my first two “IPO FACTORY” deals.

Between those two deals, I’m probably up (on paper) $10m - $15m. If things go well from here, I could be looking at another $30m - $60m in upside from here.

At least one of the IPO Factory deals I’ve been working on for 3 years ….

So It’s not like these deals just fell out of the sky and require zero work on my part. Quite the opposite – they’ve all required a LOT of my time, money, and repetitions to get done.

And one of the reasons I’ve been able to acquire these deals is I’m confident I can get them access to all the capital they’ll ever need by using what could be the greatest “cheat code” I’ve ever discovered in capital markets…

I call it the Reverse Roadshow.

In case you’re not familiar with what a roadshow is, this is what happens in investment banking when you’re taking a client out to market.

Typically it’s an exhausting two week marathon zig zagging from coast to coast and back again, where you go meet with every single banker you can meet across every ecosystem you’re allowed inside of.

Whenever you see the stories in my books, usually I’m in some sort of process like that.

I’ve been raising capital this way – the OLD WAY – for 15+ years.

But at this point in my life, I absolutely DO NOT want to be back on the road doing 5-10 pitches a day.

So what do I do instead? I do what every great auction house does instead:

• Put a great story into the market to build interest and excitement around the asset I have…

• Invite all the interested buyers in one room at the same time, and then…

• Create an atmosphere that investors love and can’t help but write a check.

Tomorrow, I’ll drop you an email about how I learned this from my friend and business partner Elias who created an ecosystem to buy and sell some of the most valuable cars and motorcycles in the world.

Elias thought me how powerless and wasteful it is to zig zag the country on a “roadshow.”

That’s why I will never do a single investor deal again!

Most people raising capital scoff at the idea of working with dozens of small checkwriters instead of a single large one.

But just like having a diversified portfolio of investments is supposed to provide you with better risk-adjusted returns…

Having a diverse group of small-to-medium sized checkwriters actually lets you a deal raise capital FASTER, on BETTER TERMS, and with LESS RISK of not being able to close on time

And instead of having to be so reliant on a tiny group of large checkwriters – who will almost certainly try to retrade me during closing, create constant stress and uncertainty for me, and otherwise be NOT fun…

I can open up my rounds to a larger pool of small-to-medium investors, invite them all to my 10,000 sq foot facility I’ve already put $2 million into, and capture the fun of the auction experience in a one-of-a-kind, investor-focused event.

And if you’d like to have the opportunity to invest in my next deal.

I’m building a $200m+ high-tech precision-manufacturing facility in Texas to go after a $6bn home goods market with virtually ZERO competition.

I’ve got ~$1m of my own capital in this deal, raised another $5m in equity capital, and have a line of sight on another $15m in equity and ~$100m-$150m of debt.

The last piece of the puzzle is 400 small – but important – investors to meet the listing requirements for the Nasdaq/NYSE… and I’ll show you how you can get one of those 400 spots.

If you’d like to be one of those 400 investors, I’d like to invite you to a private investor-only event I’m hosting on Nov 9th-10th at the West Coast Finance Center here in Carlsbad, California…

Manufacturing Tech 2023: Investing in High Tech Manufacturing in America

For investors seeking 3-5x returns on capital who are frustrated by the current market full of exotic, high-risk technologies that may take decades to pay off, Manufacturing Tech 2023 is the first event focused on domestic US-based manufacturing companies that can effectively compete from within our borders to dominate billion dollar industries in both the US and abroad.

This event – and investment opportunity – is open to both accredited and non-accredited investors.

If you’re interested in attending the event, all you need to do is click here to email my event services team.

Once you do, they’ll ask you a couple of quick questions to make sure you’re a good fit to become

If you are, they’ll send you more details on the event.

If you can either attend online or in person. However, we will be limited in person attendance to 100 people.

-Oren Klaff.

P.S. If you’re interested in coming to the Manufacturing Tech 2023 event – and you want to invest in my upcoming deal – you will need to become a member of my investor syndication program called IPO Factory.

To get started, all you need to do is click here and send an email to my member services team.