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CRE Insights Blog

The Under Valuation of Investor Relations Best Practices and Tools

Hello. This is Richard Wilson, CEO of The Family Office Club. I’m coming to you from Downtown London today, so you can see behind me here and here, actually getting ready to host our Family Office Deal Flow Summit tomorrow, and we’ve got a couple of hundred people registered to attend that. I want to record this short video on the importance of investor relations effectiveness, investor relations iteration of strategies and improvement of processes, and just how critical it is to have excellent models that you’re implementing to manage investors, attract investors and do well when you get that first meeting with an investor. This is so undervalued in the space. What I found is that consistently, everyone overvalues trying to get a referral, trying to get an introduction, or, “Oh, if you just know three investors that might be interested or if you know five investors that might be interested in what I’m doing, we have a good hit rate, and I’m sure we can close them.” That’s what everybody says, and the interesting thing is that very few people are seeking, proactively and aggressively, investor relations best practices, how to position themselves for investors, how to do very well at every investor introduction they get or every investor meeting that they secure, and I just find that so backwards. It’s a little bit frustrating because it doesn’t matter if you go to someone and they give you an investor if you’re not sure what to say to that investor, if you’re not sure in what context you’re even relevant to that potential investor, if you should know if you should even should take that investor meeting or not, or whether the goal is just to earn a word of mouth referral or whether they actually could invest in any practical way or work with you in some way. There’s so much that goes into the powerful positioning you can have, how well the first meeting goes, getting to the next stage, moving through all the stages, moving up the three trust curves, making sure that you’re structuring the deal well, aligning yourself, having the right types of fees, working with the right types of investors, getting the right type of deal flow, and maximizing your deal flow to make it even easier to raise capital, positioning yourself geographically and competitively within your landscape. There’s so much we can go over within 100 slides in our investor relation series workshops at our Family Office Club events, and there’s so much more potential value in those lessons and those strategies being applied consistently over the next two years or consistently over the next decade that it dwarfs getting even a hundred referrals to investors because that is a tangible, short thing that it comes, it goes, but it’s discreet where strategies and best practices and models to use and positioning and those things that can sweat for you every day, once you know them and use them, I think it’s just so much more powerful. So, I want to make sure we get that message across to people in The Family Office Club and to anyone who works in capital raising or investor relations, is that you can have a competitive advantage over others if you start to value investor relations best practices, capital raising, models to emulate, et cetera, and actually implement and follow those rather than doing what most people do, which is overvaluing that just introduction or referral or just getting face-to-face with an investor and trying to go for that shortcut route of raising capital. It seems like that’s how people have raised capital in the past. In many people, that’s their comment.

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Richard Wilson