Practice Makes… Not Bad

I have a survey out for entrepreneurs, asking questions about raising capital for their startups. It’s intended to find out more about what advice and help is really useful, but also to get a better sense about how entrepreneurs feel about capital raising.

Anecdotally, I hear a lot of groans and see a lot of eyes rolling when the subject of capital raising comes up. And some of the feedback from the survey echoed this.

“It is a necessary ‘evil’.”

“Onerous, time consuming, confusing.” (I asked, “Describe capital raising in three words.”)

My favourite answer to that last question was, “Lose your mind.”

Fortunately, so far, no one has responded saying that they hate capital raising. Few love it. Most people don’t mind it or they simply don’t think about it much and just get on with it. (If you’d like to add your two cents, you can answer the questions here).

I’m curious about whether and how entrepreneurs could come to love capital raising. Afterall, it’s the CEO’s job to ensure that her or his company is properly capitalized — and by that I mean, ensuring her or his company has enough capital or money in the kitty to spend on or invest in the things needed for the company to sustain itself and grow. William Thorndike wrote about outsider CEOs that led their companies to outperform their peers. The Investors Podcast has a great executive summary of Thorndike’s book The Outsiders. The difference maker was that the outsider CEOs thought like owners, behaved like investors, and were excellent capital allocators.

Reflecting upon my own experiences, there are some things I love to do and some things that I learned to love. I have an aptitude for finance and decision-making and I love everything that is related including negotiations and entrepreneurship. There are things that come part and parcel with what I do as an investor — such as dealing with conflict — that I embraced and dove head first into learning and developing the skills needed to succeed at what I do.

Then there is the thing I was allergic to, but that I’ve come to love — marketing. I am not a natural born marketer. I avoided it, I was bad at it, I’d even go as far as saying I hated it. Those phrases I mentioned above, that some people ascribed to capital raising, were exactly how I felt about marketing. But I learned the skill of marketing as well, and on some days I even enjoy it. What if the same change was experienced by an entrepreneur who disliked the activity of capital raising? What does it take?

1. Willingness to learn.
2. Desire to succeed at it.
3. Acquisition of the knowledge and skills.
4. Practice — and lots of it.

I’m not sure what comes first — the desire to get better at something or the willingness and open mind to whatever it may take. Maybe the two go hand-in-hand, simultaneously, and are the things to which we have to keep going back if and when we stumble or experience a set-back along the way.

But it’s the last point that is most important — practice — because entrepreneurs, particularly entrepreneurs raising capital for the first time, are at a disadvantage. Most investors see hundreds of pitches from entrepreneurs before investing in 1–2% of those seen. Active investors are consistently reviewing and evaluating opportunities and have had lots of practice doing it. The most experienced investors have years of practice of meeting with and evaluating entrepreneurs and their startups. Entrepreneurs on the other hand begin to get their practice when they make their first pitch and might have met with a couple hundred people before finding their investor fit.

As a consequence of this, some people will say that capital raising is entirely a numbers game. There is a capital raising funnel so to speak: the more investors you contact, the more investors you might get to meet, and the more that may be willing to invest in you and your startup. But it’s not just odds. It’s practice.

The more you practice…

• the more feedback you get,
• the more information you get about investors, what they are looking for, and how they make decisions,
• the more you start to understanding the process,
• the more you start to see patterns, and
• the better you get at capital raising.

This assumes that you have the willingness to learn, the desire to succeed at capital raising, and that you have acquired or are acquiring the knowledge and skills needed to make contact with investors, meet them, and influence their decisions to invest.

Whilst there is no such thing as perfect capital raising, practice makes… not bad. You start to get not bad at capital raising and you might even learn to love it.

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In the meantime, you can check out some of my other answers on Quora about entrepreneurship.