9 - Fund-Raising

Summary

Start small, but think tall!

Robert H. Schuller

Entrepreneur’s Diary

Raising money is hard work. You have to be prepared. Anytime a potential investor senses that you have not properly prepared for a meeting, you instantly will have lost any chance of landing this person as an investor. When I was raising some stage 2 financing for Fingerlakes Aquaculture, I had a meeting with a group of potential investors in Boston, friends and acquaintances of my angel investor, Peter (I think I’ve mentioned him before). We met in the high-rent financial district. Big buildings … marble hallways … all that type of stuff. I had spent many hours refining my presentation down to about twenty minutes to cover selected details so they would ask for more information that I could tell them was covered in the full business plan and that I had copies with me for them if interested. Part of my presentation was to actually prepare some tilapia fillets from my farm so the guests could really “get a taste of what it was all about.” (This was back in 1999, when most people had no idea what a tilapia fillet tasted like or even what a tilapia was!) The meeting was to start at 11:00 a.m. I was getting ready to start my presentation, including the cooking arrangements for the fillets. The invitees (there were five in total) got there about ten to fifteen minutes early and started chatting with my angel investor Peter. It didn’t take long before they became so curious about the product and what it tasted like that I had no choice (in my opinion) but to go ahead with that segment of the presentation, even though it was supposed to be at the end of my planned presentation right about lunch time (I thought this would be perfect timing). They all loved the product. Two of the people in attendance became investors in my company. I never did get to show them my PowerPoint presentation. But if I had, it was a good one. I was prepared.