A Brand New Approach to Raise Capital

I think a lot of new syndicators fall into this trap of focusing on acquisitions. They go out there, and they learn how to underwrite, and they make all those broker connections, and they go out and look at these properties, and they find one. They get it under contract, and then they say, “Okay. Now, what?” “Oh. Now, we have to raise the money. Okay, let’s go out and call everyone we know. Okay, 50,000 here. Okay, we got 25,000 there.” By that time, it’s too late. They put all those work into finding a good property, which is really hard, especially in today's market to find a deal that pencils. Then a lot of them sort of fall short or they have to give away a lot of their deal, because then they're not able to raise the capital in the short amount of time that's required. So, the way that we approach it is we have always focused on capital raising first and foremost, because it takes a lot of time to get people to plunk down 50,000, $100,000 with you over a period of five years. That takes a lot of trust, and trust doesn’t happen overnight. So that's why we always tell people, if you're getting into syndication, really consider focusing on capital raising first. Build up your investor base, and then you have the power is in the money, and if you know that you can then raise 500,000 or a million dollars, that gives you a different feeling. You can go in and talk to a broker, and you know that you can bring a million dollars to the table. You know that when you get that deal under contract, you know you can close it. That’s a completely different ballgame.

Listen to full episode:https://lifebridgecapital.com/2019/10/ws360-a-new-approach-to-raising-capital-with-annie-dickerson-and-julie-lam/

So I started raising capital about two years ago for my first deal, and I was one of those people. I thought, “Oh, yeah, I can raise half a million dollars, and this will be really easy.” It was hard. All of the folks that you thought were going to invest were the folks who didn’t invest. Then all the folks you thought weren’t going to invest were the ones who did. So when I first jumped into it, this was before Annie and I had partnered up together, I don’t really know what I was doing. It was more coming from a place of just sharing my story and then hoping that would resonate with people and that they would want to invest. So I did my first deal, I did my second deal, by the time I got to my third deal, I started to understand that there were certain things that I needed to have in place systems-wise, because I was spending a ton of time just even trying to get somebody on my calendar only for them to not show up for the call. So in the academy, it basically takes everything that we've done over the last two years together with Annie and then on my own all of the trial and error, all of the things that we’ve kind of said, “Okay, this works, this doesn't work.” I wake up now, people are on my calendar, I don't do anything, when I do talk to them, they are primed and ready to go. So everything that we teach in the academy is how do we get an investor onto our calendar and get them to invest in a deal with as much information as possible before they even get to the point of having a conversation with you so that it decreases the amount of simple questions that can otherwise be answered through videos and tutorials and blog posts and things like that. So the academy is really going to take you from a place of maybe you've already raised some of the capital, maybe you haven’t. We’re going to basically open up our entire business, which is something that I feel like so many people have asked us about, “Hey, I want to talk to you about your business. How are you doing this? How are you doing that? What systems have worked? What hasn’t worked? How are you guys doing this?” So we just open everything up, we share all of the applications that we use that allows us to get an investor from an investor lead to getting them on to our calendar, to getting them to fund. What does that funnel look like? What does that process look like? So, we teach you all of the systems. We will actually write blog posts for you. I think this is huge value. Before I partnered up with Annie, one of the big problems that I had was not wanting to write blog posts. I’d sit there in front of my computer with my head down, thinking, “Okay, what can I talk about today? How can I talk about it in a way that’s engaging and a way that's going to basically persuade and sell?” So that’s another aspect of it is that we’re doing done-for-you blog posts.

When I was first going through this, I didn’t have anyone to talk about capital raising with, over time, we made connections. But that’s the other big piece of this is that there’s going to be a mastermind element. So getting to be around other people who want to do what you do or who are already doing what you do. We already have people in the program right now who have raised a million or more, and they just want to accelerate that. Now, if you can imagine, if you’re someone who’s a newbie and you're getting to mastermind with somebody who’s already raised already raised a million dollars, that in and of itself is a huge value.

Listen to full episode: https://lifebridgecapital.com/2019/10/ws360-a-new-approach-to-raising-capital-with-annie-dickerson-and-julie-lam/