How to raise money every day (and still have time to run your company)

After yesterday’s poll, I’ve learned three important things about our community…

1. Too many lost chances to get easy wins: Many of you are missing out on a great opportunity raise money from small balance check writers of 25k - 100k because you don't have a scalable capital raising system…
   

2. No system in place: We had 63 people respond to the “smallest check you would take” survey, but so far, but only 17 people have answered “how many hours are you actually working on raising capital?” survey. #notsurprised. Just one more red flag many of you don’t have a scalable system for getting money in the door.
   

3. Wrong strategy: Based on some of the comments, I see a lot of founders suffering from the worst capital raising sin there is –– “feast or famine” capital raising cycles.

Look. We’re entrepreneurs. Truth is never raise money at exactly the right time. But that’s EXACTLY the reason why we have to always be raising capital.

So today is an Open Letter to all of the Capital Raising CEOs out in the arena, keeping your dream alive, and setting your company up for success.

Ready to rock and roll? Let’s go.

-Oren

When is the right time to be raising capital? ALWAYS!

But not everyone agrees with me, here’s a quick look at yesterday’s poll…

Notice how there is a very “fat tail” distribution to effort?

In other words, either people are putting in NO effort to raise capital… or it’s taking ALL of their time and effort to raise it.

That. Sucks. *#$&^.

That’s why the #1 piece of advice I give to every CEO in growth mode: Do something every single day to build your capital base.

To be clear, I don’t mean “networking” at the country club and hoping you stumble your way into an investment.

I mean “warm up the market” so there is a general buzz about you and the company. Do this by creating assets, relationships and pitch material that connects you with fresh sources of capital on an ongoing basis.

This could mean…

• Hosting a technology demo to local-area CEO’s - they’ll tell their investors about you.

• Securing a credit line from a local bank - they’ll introduce you to the real players once they see you perform.
  

• Neogitating with your vendors and suppliers for lines of credit - once they see you perform, they’ll tell their financial partners about you.
  

• Meeting a crazy rich guy at your kids hockey game and see what he’s up to in life - everyone i.s looking for places to park excess capital and beat the market (and help local entrepreneurs.)
  

• Hire speciality lawyers for small tasks, they ALWAYS want to introduce sweet deals to their rich clients - and make themselves look good by doing so.

Think those are “small fry” time-wasters
that lead no-where?

Ha! No way.

I have to do more demeaning tasks than these everyday, yet as a result I can put my hands on $100m when I need to.

As CEO, your single most important job is getting the fuel your company needs to live and grow big.

That doesn’t mean “writing a pitchdeck” and sending it to a bunch of PE firms for automatic rejection.

WHAT I’VE LEARNED DOING THIS FOR 20+ YEARS

Everyone wants the big multi-million dollar checks. But the truth is, there are smaller sources of capital which will serve as the “mini track record” you need to show bigger check writers you can manage your cap table.

Look. You don’t need an Oren Klaff double-diamond black magic-level pitch to get these people to write checks.

But if they haven’t been pitched well by you, hey, they can’t effectively pitch you upstream to the bigger players where the real money is.

And these small check writers will be as far as you can go. FOREVER!

That’s why you need to learn something I called NARRATIVE TRANSPORT in Pitch Anything.

Here’s what I mean…

You can bamboozle people with your enthusiasm and get them excited to invest… but if they can’t explain to their committee (or even their wife) what they invested in… get ready to issue a refund.

When you have your pitch materials organized into a format that can be easily shared with other people… and they can quickly explain what the hell it is you do without making it sound completely complicated …

That’s how you “level up” and unlock access to higher tiers of capital.

Now that you know how valuable it is to run game with small checkwriters … the question is: HOW?

If you’d like to learn how to run an effective “small balance checkwriter” campaign in Q2…

I’m putting together a small working group where my team will run a 30-day campaign for you. If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, do me a solid and answer the poll below so I know where you guys are.

Want my team to set you up with 5+ meetings PER WEEK with small balance check writers?

If you’re an operating company who is interested in raising your next round from small balance investors, we’d like to get you in front of 5-10 investors PER WEEK who can write AT LEAST $25k-100k checks…

But we’ll only do this if we have confidence you can close them (with our guidance of course).

Next steps: Give me a better idea of the biggest check writer you’ve closed …