Funding Your Business – Greg Writer – Business Black Belt Podcast
Priorities to prepare for investors
Greg Writer, founder and CEO of the Angel Network. Greg has over 31 years experience in corporate finance, capital formation.
At 21, he was the youngest owner / operator of a full service investment banking firm in the history of the US — directly involved in over $100 million in financings, IPO’s and acquisitions for early stage companies.
In this interview we discuss how he responds to entrepreneurs, business plans and investor presentations — how entrepreneurs demonstrate commitment to their business (“I’m committed…” isn’t enough!)
Highlights:
What he sees as the priorities for financing a business these days
What are the first 3 things you want to know about a business?
What is it about the entrepreneur him/herself that is important?
How do I grab your interest with my “elevator” pitch?
What do you look for in a business plan?
What kind of returns can I/should I provide/offer an investors?
What type of investors do I need or should I look for?
Where can I find investors?
Valuation what is and what is an easy way to understand how investors look at this.
What is the most common mistake Entrepreneur makes, that is like shooting themselves in the head with potential check writers. Real deal killers!
Biggest causes of failure and what to do about them.
What are we missing success-wise, that we should be including?
I‘ve been helping entrepreneurs and business owners like you for more than 40 years — mostly from within our Business Power Tools software apps and templates, and thru my blogs and book, "Business Black Belt."
My “Hero’s Journey” started In the early ’80s, I was the electronics buyer and a copywriter for the Sharper Image catalog. Later, I also sold some really cool word-processors in Silicon Valley. After Macs and PCs became popular, I started my own business creating sales literature for tech companies.
A friend had a deal going to sell his engineering software to Apple. They wanted to see his business plan to be sure his company would stay in business to provide future upgrades and support. At the time, I viewed a business plan as an elaborate brochure that sold his concept to people at all levels, and responsibilities with various perceptions, biases, and interests. (I learned that from selling word-processors.)
We Got the Deal.
Over the next year, people came to me with some brilliant ideas, but their plans weren’t getting funded. I helped them fill in the missing parts to succeed. Along the way, I saw that business plans have a fundamentally universal structure. Hmmm…
What if I took all the content I’d developed, redacted everything proprietary, but filled in the blanks with a variety of customizable multiple-choice options, and offered it as a software template that many people could use?
This became BizPlanBuilder, the first of its kind, and my new company took off!
Inspired to help others build businesses that would make our world a better place, we became our own Guinea pigs seeking to remove as many common mistakes and as much unnecessary BS as possible, and crafted tools for others building businesses to make our world a better place.
We followed-up with MarketingBuilder, which picked-up where BizPlanBuilder left off, then we went even further with PRBuilder which included sample press release templates… In another direction, we added EmployeeManualBuilder and SafetyPlanBuilder full of actual policies and procedures.
Altogether, we had 10 products in about 3,500 retail stores and built a $12 million company with 30 employees… (All that to say, I've been down the road you're on. I didn't just make this stuff up!)
Today, all of our products have been integrated into a streamlined and unified online toolbox/dashboard. And we’re the leader in business development software templates that help you build your business.
I also like dogs, kick-boxing, flying airplanes, writing, walking on the beach at sunset, candlelight dinners, and red wine... :-)
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