Here are five things that if you're trying to work with other family offices or
investors as peers or if you're raising capital or trying to structure joint ventures
like Kevin does, these are ways to get their attention, have people move forward
faster, create a relationship, create trust faster. And these five things cost you
absolutely nothing. Yet almost nobody has them and every single investor wants you to
have these five things. And I bet there's only two or three people in this whole
room that have these five things in their pitch deck. So it's kind of a crime not
to have these things, and we stress a lot of this over many events and masterminds,
but many people just don't get all of these together. So these are core critical
capital raising components. First is a short video, a video that is one,
two, three minutes long of your founder on video. This one took me 13 recordings of
a two to three minute video on why you should subscribe to our YouTube channel and
get really unique content directly from centimillionaires, family offices like you just
saw, billionaires, et cetera, and it took me 13, 14 takes. And I've recorded a lot
of videos, so it might take you 40 takes or even longer, right? But this was with
a $300 webcam. It wasn't a video crew, and the video is good enough quality to be
effective. And so make sure you have a video from your founder on your website, on
your pitch deck in the first three pages, and on your one pager. If you don't have
a one pager, like you heard Mark Halpern comment on stage, he has an investor club
with 62 investors in it, and he only had 42 investors about six months ago. So
he's a person of influence, growing influence. He said he won't even look at a deal
unless you have a one -pager. It doesn't have time to go look through a 42 -page
pitch deck. So make sure you have a video. If you don't have one now, you should
commit to have one in the next week or in the month of October. It doesn't cost
anything to record a video. People want to know that they can trust you. You're
credible. You're an authority. You're an expert. You're someone like them. There's
someone they can relate to. They know how you add value. And they judge all of
that instantly within just a couple of seconds. And if they start not being able to
tell, then they just move on. The answer is no if they can't tell. So that's one
thing. The other thing to realize in general is that the packaging of what you're
presenting imputes value upon the thing. So Steve Jobs knew that the packaging
quality meant that it was respected and valued much higher. So many of you here
have 20 years experience in real estate development or in IP et cetera,
but if you have an AOL email address and you don't have a one -page website even
in your logo's clipart or purple font with an italic slant on it and PowerPoint,
like you're just not doing yourself justice. And it might sound like really basics
101, but when you look at all five or six of these things I'm going to mention,
they're just not in place with many people. This is an example of the first book I
wrote is literally a bunch of hedge fund blog posts about capital raising family
offices and hedge funds. My head is cut off in the picture. It's at a conference I
was speaking at in Monaco. There's no subtitle to the book. In Bank of America, it
tells me there's 6 ,000 Richard C. Wilson's at Bank of America. So not having my
middle initials mistake, not having a subtitle for the book, having the worst design
ever, that all makes me look bad. But despite that, it got some traction, got some
momentum, but it just makes you look not credible, et cetera. The next one us
through Wiley, didn't really like their book design cover either. So when we design
things now, we try to design it for a very specific market niche, very specific
positioning. We try to have a subtitle that de -risks the fact in this case that
they might not know what a centimillionaire is. So we talk about the top six
challenges that $100 million net worth families face. We have it look like blueprints
because we're talking about putting together strategies and plans for family offices
and our URLs on the cover of the book. So the recommendation here is not to go
out and write a book right now. It is that when you put something out, put it out
to be clear, hit some target demographic between the eyes and have it be
professional and institutional quality if you can. On the left, an example of non
-institutional quality. On the right, institutional quality. Waikiki, can you raise your
hand here? Sitting right up front, of So Waikiki is a friend who's been in the
club for, I don't know, four to six years or so, I'd guess. He's probably been to
two dozen of our events. He's had a mastermind this summer. And his company name
was Dynastic Development. And I said, "Hey, look, I don't know if you do personal
development or do you develop ground up senior living. I'm not quite sure. Obviously,
when people meet with you, they can be sure. But it should immediately be obvious
either why they should work with you, what you do and where you do it or something
to make them lean forward. And so we help them rebrand into CRE construction
partners and they help oversee and manage construction projects as like an owner's
rep overseeing those projects to make sure the things stay on time. It's kind of
like almost a GC for a GC, et cetera, which is a unique role. And so that's why
we position that way. And he said it's been amazing that tweak in looking more
institutional quality and more clear. Same with Axis Loans, I was a number two
investor in this company. They were able to sell it to a bank recently. And that
was their logo before we helped them design a more Silicon Valley FinTech feeling
looking logo. And we can't claim that the logo is why they got acquired. But I
think it just helps. Another example here, Moteldo apartment conversions. They were
called Iron Toro Capital. They did explain to me one time what iron toro means, and
I cared, and I listened, and I have no idea today what it means. So that's why we
changed it, right? People email you all the time, and you're like, "What do these
people do again?" I know they told me at the event, but I can't remember. There's
300 people there, right? So motel to apartment conversions, you can probably guess
what they do.
Here's an example of a case study to have in your materials. People need to
visually know what you do. When you say that you do equipment leasing, equipment
leasing, what does the collateral look like? What does the asset look like? When you
say if you invest in multifamily, most people are not buying skyscraper multifamily
assets in city centers, but on pitch decks, I see a lot of clip art gotten photos
of skyscrapers on a multifamily pitch deck, and it doesn't represent what you really
got. It's better to have a grainy picture. It's not quite full HD, but it's
literally you walking the ground, so it's a video of you showing the oil and gas
tech device, or the venture capital deal you did in walking through the manufacturing
floor where your device is at work, et cetera. So make it real, make it tangible,
and it's much more believable, credible, and people will just understand more.
Visuals, like they say, it says a thousand words, and you need to have a visual on
your one page during your pitch deck. Almost nobody has this that says, "What's your
value add in the industry or business?" So they look at the picture, and they know
your value add immediately. You don't need a paragraph and seven bullet points even.
So that's really critical, having key visuals. And this costs almost nothing these
days to do. You can credit yourself. You can go on Fiverr and create it for $20,
or you could hire a more high -end designer and spend less than $1 ,000 if you want
to. These are examples of one -pagers, when we referred to them before. So again,
visual, Show who's on your team, show pictures of the top executives, show the key
visual that we just talked about, show the logo that's institutional quality, et
cetera. Also make sure you show a one -liner. I can't believe how many people do
not have a single sentence that is high conviction, makes people lean forward and is
different than what anybody else is saying or can say in their industry. Saying you
have a best -in -class team doing world -class Projects doesn't really mean anything
because everybody says that those are flimsy words and a cynical busy person that's
a skeptic is going to say well who thinks they don't have a world -class team right
it just means it means almost negative value and so we helped one of our club
members design a one -liner that was over 13 years they closed 475 hard money loans
and only lost money on two of those loans. So that shows like they didn't start
this business yesterday but doing it for a long time, or say you have your 22
-person team, or 192 investors have trusted you with their capital. Something that
other people can't say, or say something so unique that people lean forward and say,
"I need that. I want that. We've been looking for that." Otherwise, they have no
reason to respond to you, and they don't owe you a response. Sometimes people will
meet a family office at one of our events or see them being interviewed on our
YouTube channel and say, oh, I interviewed John or I met him, but when I followed
up, they didn't respond. People aren't responding to me. Many times, deals get done
here in the room, and we've got 100 -plus examples of that, but nobody on planet
Earth really owes you a response to emails and pitches and requests for their time.
There's just too many to physically respond to, even if they're trying to be very
responsive and helpful to everybody. And so it has to be dialed in, and you have
one or two seconds, really, three to five seconds, one sentence to get their
attention. Obviously, like Lisa says, if it comes through a referral, then you know,
you've earned more of their time to identify whether they should be meeting with you
or not. We talked about picking a niche this morning and yesterday and trying to be
number one in the niche throughout learning others. Here's an example of a visual,
shown some hard numbers, how many assets you've purchased, what your track record is,
how many investors have trusted you, just to make it real and practical. Showing a
geographical map of where you're covering your sales territory for an operating
company, et cetera, is important. Having a picture where you don't look like you're
going to eat somebody's young, and it's not a wedding picture with an arm cut off
around you, or six different types of pictures from team members, so you can tell
they were not professionally done. And it makes people start to wonder, are these
board members just someone that they talked to once a year and they got the
permission to put it on their PowerPoint presentation, hopefully, or is this like a
real formalized team that I should be taking seriously because somebody else has
taken this seriously and built a serious company? That's what people are trying to
de -risk. And if they're asking themselves, "Should I trust this person?" the
automatic subconscious answer is, "I'm really busy. Nope. Maybe I'll just move on.
I'll see. Not now. Maybe later." And that happens quite a bit. A timeline diagram
is a great way to tell a story. You could spend the whole meeting with somebody,
just going over the timeline and story of the development of your firm. Most pitch
decks and one -pagers do not have a timeline of major milestones, and that really
tells the story of your business, your evolution, et cetera. So I'd really encourage
you to make this. Again, all of these ideas have shared cost absolutely nothing,
assuming you have a webcam or an iPhone, Or I might have to pay a graphic designer
$1 ,000 or less for all of these ideas combined. And almost nobody has all of these
in this room, in my experience.