Raising Capital Requires a Strong Brand

Pitching is the art of articulating your brand (value proposition) in 15 seconds, so that your audiences — customers, investors, and media — will find it unique, compelling, memorable, and repeatable.

NOTE: If they don’t get your reason for being immediately, you’re sunk! So, DON’T waste the opportunity to pitch your company — CORRECTLY.

Successful pitching is particularly critical for a startup company: without funding, sales, and buzz, it may never grow past an idea.

Many argue that a pitch to each of these three audiences should be different. I disagree. Completely.

Read Chapter 16 in Brand Is Destiny to learn more.

Your brand is your brand is your brand: you have one value proposition, period. Consistency, uniformity, and simplicity are crucial to success.

Depending on the stage of your company and the amount of capital required, you will be pitching to angel investors, equity-crowdfunding investors, venture capitalists, private-equity firms, or investment banks.

Whether pitching to a few or few-hundred investors, your company must have a strong, crisp, memorable, customer-validated brand.

To pitch effectively, create your brand BEFORE doing anything else.

If you pitch with no brand or a weak one, prepare yourself for a long grind. Your cost of raising capital will grow geometrically — as will your probability of failure. 

Reinforcing that point, as the green block in the figure below indicates, don’t attempt to raise capital until qualified to do so. Alas, most CEOs would rather get a colonoscopy than heed this admonition.

NOTE: Violate this protocol, and your chances of success will plummet

The key to quick capital-raising is answering, with ease, the fundamental investor question: What is your business, what makes it unique, is it scalable, and why should we capitalize it — versus other investment options?

The murkier your reply, the more protracted, difficult, and costly the capital-raising process.

Pitching to investors is, obviously, a time to prove strength of brand. When investors hear a pitch, when they read your private-placement memorandum (PPM), term sheet, or S-3, they want to know how much money you’re going to make them and how you’re going to do it: Why will customers buy your product? The facts do not speak for themselves.

Note: If your PPM is impotent (investors don’t “get” why your company exists and why it’s unique — i.e., the brand is weak), it’s the equivalent of a very expensive paperweight!

I’ll Help You Create/Improve Your Investor Pitch

  • Value proposition (brand)
  • Verbal pitch + media prep
  • Powerpoint presentation
  • Executive summary, usable anywhere
  • PPM, S-3, or term sheet

Final Note: Generally speaking, investors will sit on your board of directors. Choose them carefully. Reject any investor or venture-capital firm that wants you to jargonize your pitch. Jargon, ambrosia for the untalented, is the deathknell of branding.

Brush Up on Branding Basics

Be Unique or Be Ignored™

 

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