Raising Capital: Graduating from Friends & Family to Institutional-Levels on Your Terms
Most people who raise money do so by virtue of playing favor cards with the relationships they’ve cultivated to “know, like, and trust” status supported by little more than a plausible story and a set of professional-looking offering docs.
If enough traction has been gained with this approach, asset managers may earn the privilege of dancing for intuitional money—as long as they are sufficiently deferential on terms, compensation, or to any other whim demanded by the potential allocator. The trade-off between an institutional allocation and loss of control is often not worth the trouble.
Raising capital at institutional levels via private capital markets while avoiding subjugation to allocating institutions requires a true merit-based approach delivered with control of the frame. You have to not only offer and communicate objectively better performance than what’s otherwise available, but you must do so with an irrefutably better structure—from the perspective of all parties involved—than potential allocators could devise themselves. This requires a level of unavoidable complexity that is typically the sole domain of the most sophisticated asset management firms in the world.
When an asset manager has only observed the conventional capital raising experience, the underwriting and financial engineering required to affect capital formation at institutional scale while preserving autonomy can often seem dauntingly complex and potentially demotivating. The desire for the goal can get lost in feelings of overwhelm.
That is why we have stripped the process down into two palatable steps…
We measure the risk, return, and liquidity of your strategy.
We introduce you with the risk, return, and liquidity measures of your strategy to the over 100,000 accredited investors and 10,000 financial institutions in our ecosystem.
From there, whatever incremental steps—if any—that are required to raise the capital you need to reach your goals will present themselves at the appropriate time and with the context required to understand why those steps need to be taken. The ultimate solution is necessarily bespoke per each firm’s circumstances, and we’ll do the heavy lifting.
Alternatively, the process could simply end with capital introductions.
The one commonality I’ve seen in all the asset managers I’ve spoken with—without exception—is that to have a productive conversation, they must have first either read The Shadow Banker’s Secrets: Investment Banking for Alternatives or watched the book’s companion masterclass. Those who have tend to wrap their minds around the ostensible complexity with relative ease, and the discussion progresses to individual-specific solutions rather quickly. Those who haven’t tend to force the conversation into frustrating dead-ends characterized by conventional questions seeking conventional answers with an inability and unwillingness to recognize anything that deviates. This is the reason I insist that asset managers get through The Shadow Banker’s Secrets before scheduling a call with me: it protects my time and yours.
To get introduced to the 100,000+ accredited investors and 10,000+ financial institutions in our ecosystem and scale to institutional-level AUM, take The Shadow Banker’s Secrets: Investment Banking for Alternatives Masterclass (upgrade your free book order) to learn the technical fundamentals you’ll need, then schedule your free private consultation.