There you are with a business idea of a lifetime and
you’re in front of a room full of investors…
Although there are many of the usual things you must get right in your initial presentation to investors,
here are my top 3 must-do’s to include.
More and more investors these days are “Betting on the jockey, not the horse.”
As you probably know, horse races are often “won by a nose.”
The difference between gold and silver in the Olympics can be as little as a 1/100th of a second.
Details matter.
# 1 – What’s Driving Your Motivation…
After you’ve established the problem you solve, you must introduce how it is you came upon the solution
and why you (and your team) are the best people to pursue it.
My version, “What’s a nice person like you doing in a business like this?”
Why this question?
First of all, it establishes a solid foundation for your motivation to create and deliver the
product or service that solves the problem you’ve experienced or seen first-hand.
Why is this business important to you — not just financially, but personally.
And why you’ll get back on the horse after you’ve fallen off 100 times!
Second, it establishes your credibility.
You must build trust in yourself as a trustworthy person, and you must be convincing
that YOU are the one who can pull it off!
As a teenager, I read Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines.
Even then I wondered how all those inventions would someday emerge as successful businesses.
The one that really grabbed my attention was a “200 mpg carburetor!”
Where did that go I often wonder.
(Conspiracy theories, etc. not withstanding…)
And why aren’t we getting 200 mpg today?
Anyway, I made it my mission to help the good products win and become successful businesses with solutions to real problems.
A while back, about 10 years into my career, I had a client with a potential deal with Apple to buy his engineering software.
This was a big deal at stake and my client couldn’t afford to lose it.
At the time, an SBA study of 26,000 businesses that failed,
revealed that 67% had no business plan.
Not just start-ups, ALL businesses!
Apple wanted to see his business plan to be sure his company would survive to develop and support the software.
But he didn’t have one and was at risk of losing his biggest deal ever.
Using everything I learned from selling electronic components for Texas Instruments,
as the electronics buyer and a copywriter for the Sharper Image® Catalog,
and my experience in Silicon Valley selling word-processors to enterprises,
I created the business plan he needed.
This was more than a typical business coach business plan.
Think of it as a “catalog of answers” to Apple management’s inevitable questions…
It worked and we won the deal!
Over the next year, I helped a dozen or so clients who needed to raise capital to launch their companies.
They had some great ideas!
Maybe not 200 mpg carburetors, but they were definitely worthy of becoming thriving businesses.
Some were growing companies needing money, others were turned down by venture capitalists and needed help.
I consulted on their plans, fixed their financial models, and coached them to pitch successfully.
A year on, I was extremely busy with my clients yet I could see other businesses
losing deals because of the plans they were using.
It occurred to me that I could create easy-to-follow templates so you could do it yourself.
This evolved into our BizPlanBuilder® strategic business funding & growth planning system.
This is NO time to try and BS your way through it like you may have done with a school paper.
Investors want to know what you know and how you think.
(Current AI just makes them worse.)
It’s worked for venture capital for medical devices, SBA loans for manufacturing companies…
One client even used it to acquire 2 Learjets without costing a dime!
These are among many quantifiable stories…
It’s grown…
We expanded from the Business Plan, to HR Policies & Procedures, Financial Models,
Sample Contracts in plain-English, Press Releases, and more.
At one point, we had 10 products in 3,500 stores, generating $13 million with 30 people.
In 1999, I sold 2 HR products to ADP for $3.25 million.
Today, everything is integrated into an on-demand subscription to a secure online dashboard.
BusinessPowerTools.com
How’s that for a story? You can tell something like that too.
You had a problem (like your customers)…
You figured it out (while they’re still struggling)…
You came up with a solution others could use (your Ah-Ha! moment!)
We even prompt you to tell your story, like mine above, in our BizPlanBuilder business planning system
See also my post on “Missionaries vs. Mercenaries”
Tell your brief story like that and investors will understand exactly,
“What a nice person like you is doing in a business like yours.”
# 2 – Reveal the Risks
This may seem counter-intuitive, but…
Most investors are more worried about losing their investment
than the millions they hope to gain with it.
There are two kinds of ROI: Return OF Investment and Return ON Investment.
This concept goes beyond your initial pitch and pitch deck.
Far too often entrepreneurs are a bit cavalier with their expectations for using investors’ money.
Some think, “They’ve got so much money, they don’t care.”
BIG MISTAKE!
You must keep in mind and come up with innovative ways you can protect and return their investment safely.
And soon.
More often than not, investors know more about your industry than you do.
They’ve likely invested in other companies in your space and are painfully aware of what goes wrong.
Are you?
Revealing certain risks demonstrates 2 things to investors:
A) You are aware of the risks and that you are doing something to mitigate them.
(Even if it requires $$ to do so — but better to be innovative!)
B) Being forthcoming by revealing the risks shows/tells them they can trust you.
You’re not afraid or hiding anything from them! We include several sections within
BizPlanBuilder and go into more detail how to accomplish this successfully.
And there’s no shame in asking for help.
# 3 – How You Generate Revenue
The 3 statements that I love to hate are:
- “It’s a 10 Billion dollar market… All we need to get get is 1% and we’re a $100 million company!”
- “We’re going to do a Million dollars in our first year!
- “Oh… And these numbers are conservative!”
☠️☠️☠️
There is a much better, more believable and more realistic approach:
(It will be easier to understand using this financial model.)
Watch this Brief Video Illustrating this Concept →
I hope you found this post useful.
The Better Job You Do On Your Business Plan, the Better Deals You’ll Make
Creating a successful business of enduring value isn’t necessarily hard, but it does require doing a lot of right things in the right way. We can show you a smarter way to go about it. Business Power Tools truly redefines the paradigm for building a successful business. We support start-up teams, business owners, non-profits, and consultants to successfully organize, finance and grow their companies by leveraging an online platform loaded with a highly-evolved and integrated collection of done-for-you apps and templates…
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