4 Important Ways To Prepare Before Meeting Investors
There are 2 things you need to start a business; a great idea and some money. If you’re thinking about starting your own company, you probably have the first one. However, if it’s the second one, the money, that trips a lot of people up and it may require meeting investors.
Starting a traditional business costs a lot of money and most people aren’t lucky enough to have that kind of money lying around. That’s where investors come in.
They’ll be able to give you the money that you need in return for a small portion of the profits. But people aren’t just going to hand over their money to anybody, they need to be confident that you’re not going to lose it all.
That means you really need to impress them when you pitch the business idea to them and you only get one shot at it. If you get it wrong, you won’t get another chance to win them over.
That’s why you need to make sure that you’re fully prepared before you start contacting and meeting with investors. Always do these things before you meet an investor.
Build A List Of Potential Customers
As you start your business you’ll want to begin with building a list of potential customers. Having a solid flow of leads coming into your business can help put investors at ease.
This is also a great place to start to promote your business idea and to determine if there is even a market for it. Start off with providing value based content to solve your ideal target markets problems.
After your content, send your audience to some form of capture page and lead magnet to start building your email list. Building your email list is something you’ll want to do forever with your business, but it’s especially important in the beginning.
If investors see you have a steady stream of interested people coming in, that can help solidify their decision to invest in your business. If you’d like to learn more about setting up a high converting lead magnet for your business, check out this post.
You’ll also want to invest in an email autoresponder to automate this process and set up the email marketing campaigns for your business. If you’re just getting started in email marketing, I’d recommend Aweber. It’s a low cost email autoresponder to get started with as a new business owner.
You can even get your first 30 days of Aweber for free HERE!
Sell Something Prior To Meeting With Investors
Now that you are building your email list of potential customers, you may want to start taking pre-orders for your business.
People often get the wrong idea about investors and think that they should go to them right away to get the money they need to start manufacturing products and selling them.
If you’ve got a really solid idea, you might be able to convince an investor to part with their money right at the beginning but it’s not likely. You need to prove the idea actually has potential first and the easiest way to do that is to start making sales. You can save a bit of money yourself and get some small loans to get yourself off the ground.
Then, once you’ve made a few sales, you can go to investors and get the money that you need to expand the business. Nobody is going to part with their money if you can’t prove that there is a market for your products first.
Plan How You’ll Spend The Money
This is another big thing that investors need from you. If you just go in and say that you need money for general business costs without a plan for how you’re going to spend that money.
They’ll just assume that you’re going to waste it all and they won’t see any returns from their investment. Work out what your marketing goals are, get a solid pricing structure for manufacturing and shipping, and find out how much you’ll need to spend on an office space and some staff members to get the business going.
You’ll also want a solid marketing plan in place to generate leads and sales for your business. Your plan should include a content marketing strategy, monetization strategy and traffic strategy at the very least.
If you don’t already have one I’d recommend checking out this post on a simple 5 step marketing strategy to grow any business.
Check Your Online Presence Before Meeting Investors
Investors won’t just be interested in the business idea, they’ll be interested in you as well. They need to know whether you’re a trustworthy person. One of the easiest ways to check somebody out is to put their name into Google.
That could be a real problem for you so check out your online presence. If you’ve got anything on social media that makes you look unprofessional, you need to get rid of it.
There are also sites like the dirty where people will post slanderous information about people that they hold grudges against. It’s not likely that you appear on these sites but if you’ve had a feud with somebody in the past, they can post things on there without you knowing and it’ll pop up when an investor searches your name.
There are services that can help you delete thedirty.com posts so if people are spreading negative things about you online, you can get rid of it. It only takes a couple of small things to put an investor off so be careful about what you put online.
Develop a strong social media presence to improve credibility of your business
Building your online presence through social media is another essential step can help you get new investors for your business. The more of a following you have on social media the more credible your business is to the outside world.
Building your social media audience doesn’t have to be difficult, and in many cases you can do it at little to no investment.
Having a large audience on social media can help you bring in sales and sign ups for your business on autopilot. It also makes it easy to drive traffic to your website and offers.
If you’d like to learn more about building your audience on social media, I’d recommend going through my Audience Building Workshop. You can sign up for the workshop HERE.
Do your research before meeting with investors
When somebody invests in your company, they’re not just giving you their money, they’re giving you their expertise as well. That’s why it’s important that you pick the right investor that has good experience in your industry, rather than the one that has the most money.
Before you start contacting people, do a bit of research into each investor and look at the other businesses that they’ve put money into. Have they been successful or not? If the answer is no, they’re probably not the right person for you.
Doing research into an investor also helps you to find out what they like and don’t like in a business so you can tailor your presentation to them personally. This is going to impress them and you’ll be far more likely to get the money that you need.
If you go into a meeting with an investor without doing these things first, you’ll be unprepared and you won’t be successful.
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P.S. If you aren’t generating leads for your business it’s because you don’t have a system in place to do it. CLICK HERE to set up the exact system I use to Rake In Quality Targeted Leads Daily
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