Richard C. Wilson shares on the importance of sharing genuine value when raising capital, and communicating credibility to the investors you are working with. Hello, this is Richard Wilson. I’m coming to you from our new office space here in Key Biscayne, Florida. It’s actually sunrise right now so you can see out the window, not a bad view. What I want to talk to you about real quick is just authentic, genuine value in storytelling and positioning when you’re raising capital. I’m sure this video will end up on our YouTube channel, maybe in a couple of our books going forward, but we’re definitely going to put it in our book on capital raising. The reason why I bring it up is that you need to look for ways to communicate to your audience, to the people that you’re serving and working with every day to the niche investors that perhaps you’re targeting, that you are genuinely valuable to work with, and that they know that the way you do one thing is the way you do everything, so you need to do things in a way that show that you’re not taking shortcuts all the time. They are doing things in a high quality way. For example, it’s not an accident I’m recording this video in my office space, because I think the office space is pretty cool and modern. You can’t fake having an office if you don’t have one. It becomes pretty obvious when people ask to meet with you. Another example is writing books. We’ve written a book every year, at least. For the past seven years, actually written about 10, 12 books now. This is our bestselling one in the family office space right now, The Single Family Office. Then we’re actually coming out with a new one tomorrow. I’m pretty excited about. We call that How to Start a Family Office. The reason I bring that up is that it’s pretty hard to fake that. If you open the book, you see there’s real advice. There’s 40 video modules from 10 countries and 30 audio interviews with experts and real single family offices with their real names in the book. They’re not made up interviews. You can go and look these people up on LinkedIn and ask them, “Is this person using your name illegally or did they get your permission? Is this a real interview?” It’s all verifiable, and that’s what the most credible people want to see. They are so busy that they’re not going to return a single voicemail or phone call unless it came from a referral or unless they see there’s verifiable genuine value. They ignore emails that come from a Yahoo email address from someone they’ve never known before, where someone else might reply because they have spare time and they don’t get 400 or 1,000 emails a day. We had, for example, one day, last month was between Friday and Tuesday. We got over 250 debt deals submitted, and in one month, we saw over 700 investment deals come into our office for review, and my head salesperson for our conference division Sophia got over 800 emails, not counting auto replies and your error messages, but 800 real email responses to a single message about our capital raising workshop coming up. I think that what we’ve gotten better and better at and we’re still always trying to get better at is show the genuine value in as many ways as possible, show that we’re not going away within this niche industry. We’re looking to add more value and be aggressively generous over and over and over again in the space. The more things you can put in place, I believe whether you run a hedge fund, a fund-to-fund, a real estate development company or maybe just a service provider like a fund administrator or an accounting firm targeting family offices or targeting a niche in the investment space, the more genuine, unquestionable value you can put out, the better.
Unquestionable Credibility and Authenticity
