by Steve Livingston on March 29, 2011
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Bill Morrow, founder of the Angel Network, outlines 5 top tips for entrepreneurs seeking funding from VCs:
- Make sure you can explain your business quickly and succinctly. If it takes you more than 5 minutes, then you’ve yet to get it nailed. Back to the drawing-board for you!
- Outline the pain that your product or service will solve.
- Explain how your business will solve this pain.
- Enthuse investors with the opportunity for growth and how you will achieve this – how will your business scale to achieve the 5x + return on investment for your investors?
- Set out clearly how you will spend the money that you are requesting.
Morrow also explains how it helps for entrepreneurs to “humanise” interactions with potential investors, where possible. If you can build rapport by indulging in a bit of chit-chat about the cricket or football etc then this helps build relationships beyond business. After all, you may have to work with each other over a number of years, so its important that you can get on outside of business-talk.
Good advice. Listen to this podcast in full over at Smallbiz pod.
by Steve Livingston on February 9, 2011
Richard North, Managing Director of Wow! Stuff, provides some great advice for entrepreneurs:
“You are either an employee and you are prepared not to take risks and end up with a bonus or you become an employer, you take risks but you also end up with the rewards”
Despite selling his first business for a 7 figure sum is next venture (boystuff.co.uk) came back to bite by heading into administration in 2005. His explanation for the business downfall sounds counter-intuitive yet it is a common reason for many business failures:
“We ended up with too many people on board and too many ideas on strategy. We tried to do too many things in a short period of time”
He goes on to say:
“I had become remote from the business as there were so many people running it, so I wasn’t feeling that emotional, but what did feel emotional was that I had lost huge amounts of money”
This is where the power of leverage can go horribly wrong – leverage of people and money. In an effort to grow a business fast, it can start to lose direction and when more and more (external) strategic heads get onboard then the founding entrepreneur can start to feel disempowered and disconnected from their ‘baby’ – this can be acutely common in VC backed businesses. Often resulting in lights out.
North appears to be growing his latest business more gradually with a focus on a handful of products that will succeed and best of all, he appears to have rediscovered his passion for his latest venture.
Good stuff. Read more at Director
