in life who you decide to spend your time with matters more than what you decide
we're gonna do.
Welcome to the Family Office podcast where we bring you exclusive insights from top
investors, billionaires, and family offices shaping the future of private investing.
So my name is Richard C. Wilson. If you've never been to one of our events before,
welcome. Thanks for being part of the community. But really like a perpetual learning
machine because of the masterminds, we go deeper on a few topics. And then at our
investor summits, you hear from 75 to 100 plus speakers over two, three days. So
really broad perspective. We'll have discussion panels from angel investors, discussion
panels on real estate or billion dollar plus family offices or AI, et cetera, so
you get a broad variety of perspectives. Here are some of the reasons why people
are in the club, the source deals, to learn about new deal structures, to meet with
peers, to figure out where the industry is going, to see what investors are
preferring right now in the marketplace. If you're looking at five different ways to
move forward, maybe after hearing 100 + people speak on stage and talking to your
partner, you might narrow that down to three or four instead of going after all
five or just one. So some questions I like to ask myself is over the last 18
years, who are the people who are raising all the money? What do the people have
in common who are raising $10 million a year, and what do the people have in
common who are struggling to even raise $1 million a year? And they all have things
in common, but it's very different from each other, right? So like what are all
these people doing that none of these people are doing, and pay attention to that?
Also, what are all of the investors on stage saying, but nobody who's raising
capital seems to listen or do what they're saying a year after a year after a year
after a year. And I'm going to point out some examples of that where every investor
wants you to do these things. Like literally nobody does them. And I don't know
why, so we always emphasize it. So we're going to have a slide that says, this is
literally the five things almost every person messes up. I want to start out with
some foundational content. These first two sections are really kind of setting the
stage for the rest of the day And then we're gonna get into the five stages of
raising capital So this first this first one here is just about how people who are
allocating capital the more valuable. They are the busier They are usually they have
a hundred plus LLC's or K ones They might have a thousand plus employees or
hundreds of employees and the person who is raising capital usually has exponentially
more time on their hands than the person allocating the capital. And so the problem
is that the person raising the capital might send an email if they don't hear back
that same afternoon call and say, "Hey, I haven't heard back on that email yet that
I sent you this morning." But they haven't even opened their email yet since that
morning. They've been on an airplane, or they've been in a board meeting, etc. Or
they get hundreds and hundreds of emails and they don't know you yet. So just
keeping that in mind, we've had It happened before and if something follows up very,
very aggressively and doesn't have a sense that someone else is busy, then it makes
it not want to make an introduction for that person or engage because they just
don't respect your time on some level. There's not, they just don't get it yet that
you have lots of other things going on by the minute. Here are a couple mistakes I
always like to cover up front. One is sometimes people launch an investment fund and
then they have a goal of raising this big amount of capital in three months and
then realize it's much harder than they expected for most people who have found out
the hard way that raising capital is harder than you thought it would be. And in
the last two years, it's become harder than it was more than two years ago just
because of high interest rates and some investors having distributions cut down or
losses within real estate deals that have floating rate or other
A couple of other mistakes are related to not investing time into your actual
capital reason efforts. A lot of people are so focused on the real estate
development or building the company they don't really spend the time to meet with
investors and they don't have a full -time head of investor relations and they don't
spend more than two hours a week maybe on focusing on it. But if you're managing
an investment fund, you're not going to have a lot to manage if you don't focus on
getting in the money end to actually manage. It seems like very basic, but you need
the goods to deliver and get the meat on the bun and do an amazing job and
deliver. That is the most important thing, but just making sure you're spending
enough time and dedication to actually get the capital raised to something we're
going to talk about today. One thing that I've heard a lot of 100 million plus net
worth families and billionaires say over the years running this club is that in life
who you decide to spend your time with matters more than what you decide you're
gonna do. So like the spouse you choose matters more than the activities that you
want to get done in your life with whoever you would marry. It's more important to
marry the right person and with business. It's more important to have the right
partner and the right employees and be in the right room with the right investors
then oh I have to have these four bullet points to say. If you're in the right
room and you have the right employees, the right team members, the who will inform
the what, and it will self correct and auto correct. And when I interviewed Tony
Robbins for our platform billionaires .com, one of the three things he said was most
powerful to share is the power of proximity and how he got a $400 million deal
done just by being in the right room with the right people. And then everything
just came together. And I think that is a really important point. A lot of times
people focus on the what, like what should I do? What should I do next? But being
in the right room, in the right who, is like a higher level, more powerful way to
think about it.