Well the answer, of course, is both. Being great at the elevator pitch is not much use if you can’t back it up with a real understanding of your business model and financials; and no weight of business plan ever caught the eye of a busy business angel investor.
So how to do both? The answer is at hand. Investment readiness specialists, Finance Tree, and leading business support organisation, Entrust, have come together to provide the route map to take ambitious businesses looking for equity finance into the “Dragons’ Den”.
But this is “Dragons’ Den…with manners” and with some serious investors and wealth managers who have money to invest and who are looking for returns. They may ask questions about your cash flow, your pricing, or your sales projections, but they will also be looking for that “edge”, the glint in the eye, the drive, the ambitious management team behind the figures, that will give them the feel that this is a pitch they can do business with. No business plan alone can deliver this.
Entrust’s Investor Forum brings together the investment community in the region every two months to hear pitches from four or five businesses (or from ideas looking to become businesses), and who need to find external funds to take them to the next stage of their growth.
Entrust Chairman, David Bowles, reflects, “Almost two-thirds of presenting companies at Investor Forum are accessing external investment for their business for the first time. You wouldn’t sit behind the controls of a plane and expect to get it right first time – so why take the risk at a critical time in your business. We all can benefit from a bit of instruction and direction.”
And that’s where Finance Tree comes in.
Guidance on pitch development is not about forcing entrepreneurs to follow templates or deliver their story in a way that may not set their business proposition in its best light, but it is about making sure that the right information gets to the right audience in the right way – and in a way that uniquely captures what the idea, the team, the business plan, the ambition is all about.
Working with Finance Tree entrepreneurs learn about business growth models; what venture investors are really looking for; that there are both angels and demons out there; how the process actually works; and, crucially, what you are signing up to.
Jonathan Gold, Managing Director of Finance Tree, commented, “The key challenge is the disconnect between the entrepreneur’s requirements and their understanding of the investment process and the investor’s requirements. We need to develop the capacity of the entrepreneur to present their proposition and to anticipate what the investors will be looking for on the day.”
“The next Investor Forum takes place on 13 May 2010; Finance Tree’s next investment readiness workshop is scheduled for Monday 19 April – we still have one or two places available but they’re filling up fast.”
David Bowles summed up, “Not everyone who signs up will be ready for the 13 May event. But some will, and we want to give those propositions the best chance for success so we would encourage anyone interested to get in touch with us today. The plan or the pitch? Yes, it really does have to be both.”