The Secrets of a successful financing campaign (Part 1) - Be crystal clear!

Whether it is to jump-start your company, scale-up, diversify, or help bridge over a difficult period, virtually all companies will have to get financing at some time in their lifetime.

Your company’s numbers are naturally essential to obtain such, however, the requirement for a successful financing goes way further than just presenting your situation and plans in an accounting style!

Indeed, if lenders and/or investors need to be convinced, they also need to be “seduced“.

In that sense, raising funds is actually a “selling“ process and it is public knowledge that technicians are rarely the best salesmen! In other words, use your accountant when needed, BUT don’t let him/her lead the process.

Lenders and investors are presented hundreds of projects per week and, unless you have a specific relationship with them, your will compete with many other solicitors. Thus, you need to stand-out from the mass.

In the same fashion than the cheapest vendors doesn’t always get the order, the project proposing the highest return will not necessary be the one that will get the funding.

For those who have watched the NBC series “SHARK TANK“, you have seen that even Kevin O’Leary (a.k.a Mr Wonderful - the ultimate financial shark), is regularly investing in projects that are making-sense from a business standpoint, but also because he has been enthralled (for as much as a financial shark can be “enthralled “…) by the presentation!

Thus, the first “secret“ of a successful financing campaign is to prepare a smashing presentation… and as indicated above, this goes way beyond the numbers … your presentation must therefore, first and foremost, be “captivating“.

This starts with setting-up the context in a clear and easy to understand fashion. The primary reason a financing campaign will fail is because people DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU ARE PICHING THEM!... or because it’s done in a “boring“ manner, which leads them to “disconnect“ from the subject matter.

We were once hired by a company working in the wastewater treatment to conceive a strategy and create all the required documentations to start a financing roadshow.

To make it short, the company had conceived a revolutionary system to move the black water (meaning the “water“ coming from your toilets) from the productions sites to the water treatment plants (how less sexy can a business be?!!!).

The first time they presented us their system, we didn’t understand any of the principle, let alone the gained benefits for the users. The guys were good engineers, but poor sales rep., especially to people having no clue about their business… which is likely going to be the case of ALL the lenders and investors your project will be presented to.

In order to address this issue, we came-up with a whiteboard explanatory video presenting the industry, the problem to be solved, their product and its benefits, which we put on the first slide of the Pitch Deck.

We wrote the script in a way that anyone, starting with ourselves could understand it.

You can see the video here:

Thanks to this video lenders and investors could understand, within a few minutes and in a rather entertaining way, exactly what we were going to talk about.

Thus, the first milestone was reached, anyone could understand the business, the benefit of the product and what was the company that was seeking funding.

There is much more than this, but for sure, your primarily duty, when going on a financing campaign, is to ensure what you are doing is clear, and as the saying goes, could be understood by a 5 years old (so to say)...

Stay tuned for more tips, or contact Fred by mail, write a comment here-below, or just click on the Chat button to further discuss this topic... or any other 😉