You Can Easily Get Your Investor’s
Signature on That Dotted Line Right NOW!
AND, be totally sure
YOU Don’t Get Hosed When You Raise $$$$$ for Your Business…
Dear Friend:
Raising money for a business is not like playing golf. In golf you get to take as many swings as you need to get that little white ball in the hole!
When you are out seeing prospective investors, you don’t get an unlimited number of swings. In fact, the future of your business, and your personal future with it, may depend on just one swing. At most you’ll get a few more swings (meetings).
Finding people who will make investments is not easy. Sure, there are websites that promise to show your deal to thousands of investors. Sure. But in the real world you have to find someone with the extra cash, who is willing to listen, and to whom you can be introduced on friendly terms.
When you get to that meeting, you don’t want to screw it up. You need every tool that you can get on your side, and you need to be skilled at using them. If not, you might as well stay home and dream of what your business would be like if you had that capital, and how much better your life would be.
This is crunch time.
Have you ever had a salesman come to your home selling you a water filtration system or a vacuum cleaner? They beat you up pretty good and they close a lot of deals with people who, at the beginning, had very little interest in what they were selling.
Know the big difference between them and you?
- OK, maybe they are high pressure and you aren’t.
- Maybe they can afford to fail 10 times a day, as long as they succeed once
- They have a limitless supply of leads and prospects
All those are true, but they’re not what I was thinking about.
The Big Difference
Here is the difference I want to make you aware of:
When the homeowner says yes, when they finally cave in and agree to purchase the water filtration system for $5,000 that they could get someplace else for $1000 or less, or when the precious moment arrives and the deal is seconds away from happening, (like the first time the first girl said, “Yes”),
Do you know what that salesman has that you don’t?
He has a piece of paper that can be signed to record the agreement!!
Do you have a place for your investor to sign that says to everyone, “We have agreed he is investing?” This piece of paper is what seals the deal. A document that you can point to and say, “Bob, we have a deal.” This document that goes nicely with the check attached on can change your life.
Without the place to sign when they say “yes,” what is your next step?
I have been part of many of these deals and usually the next step is: “Super, I want to invest, I will get my lawyer to draw up the papers.” Or, “I want a piece of that, how do I go about doing it, do you have the paperwork with you?”
In either case you have spent all the time getting in front of that investor and have little to no chance of closing them at that meeting.
In football, whenever a quarterback throws the ball, five things can happen. Four of them are BAD and only one of them is good. In any sales process, not getting written evidence of an agreement at the earliest possible moment is bad.
Think back to that first time, when that first girl said, “Yes.” What would have happened if you had told her that you wanted to wait a week? Tell me, would that “deal” have closed? This really isn’t that much different.
After your guy says yes and doesn’t sign, the following things can happen
1) He forces his attorney to draft an agreement and the deal
closes… touchdown! Sure.
2) The attorney tells the guy that the deal has too much risk in it; it dies.
3) The attorney drags his feet until the investor loses interest or finds
another deal that’s prettier.
4) The attorney starts negotiating and does so until you walk away. This is
just a polite way of saying “No” while the attorney is running up his fees.
5) The attorney tells your investor that the fee to put this agreement together
will likely be $10,000 (pretty typical) and your investor thinks that’s a lot
of money. The deal dies.
6) It’s vacation season, or some other excuse, and by the time everyone
comes back, the air is out of that balloon, especially if you used urgency in your sales pitch, like, “This deal won’t last long” to convince your investor to move forward.
7) The attorney knows it’s his job to kill the deal to save face for his client, so you guys can still play golf together (very common.) You have lost a lot of time. Your investor blames the attorney but keeps his checkbook closed. He wonders why you don’t call him for golf anymore.
Time is the Enemy, not the Lawyer
There are a dozen more things that can go wrong once you add a lot of time between the point where he nods his head “yes” and the time to sign.
The quarterback has much better odds than you do, and he makes hundreds of passes a year. You have to score this goal. Maybe this one deal is your entire career. Maybe the future of your business hangs in the balance.
I want you to imagine a different result…
Please go with me for a moment, because we all know that most businesses DIE from lack of what?
It’s not blood or sweat or tears. No, small business have tons of blood, sweat and tears and late nights and fights with the spouse… lots of that stuff.
What kills small businesses is the lack of capital. The very thing you are after.
The way most people go about raising capital is the reason they don’t win. They are betting their life on a single throw of the football. Bad odds, especially for an amateur football player. Better off keeping that ball on the ground.
You don’t even have the same tools as the water filtration salesman, and what you are selling is a lot more important.
But back to my request for you to imagine a different result; please go with me on this just for a moment…
Imagine you meet with your investor just like before, you finish your pitch and he nods “yes,” you guys discuss and maybe negotiate the transaction- who puts in what, who gets out what and when, compensation, ownership and so forth, he nods again, and you have in your hands, ready to go in an instant, with all those deal terms that you just negotiated seconds before, ready to sign… the paper that says he will invest and is committed to it!
MULTIPLE CHOICE QUIZ
Q. In the above situation which will give you a better result:
a) Having something to sign now
b) Waiting several weeks for his attorney to come up with something
9 times out of 10 the correct answer is “a.”
Do you think your investor is going to be even more impressed that you are prepared?
Do you think that he is going to be more convinced and ready to write that check?
Would you, if you were in the investor’s shoes, be more likely to commit to someone who was ready, prepared and had the ability to close the deal, regardless of what came up in the negotiations?
I think, yes.
The problem with the quarterback throwing that ball is that while it’s in the air its out of his CONTROL. I want you to be in control from the start of the game until the very end, because this is probably a pretty important game to you. Am I right?
Way more important than the Superbowl, it’s likely to be the ONLY bowl.
The Easy Solution
Hi, I am Charlie Stoll, your Combat Business Wizard. What I do is figure out how to do business in smarter and more efficient ways. In this case, it’s all about how to avoid massive amounts of front-end costs and time involved in reaching a deal to get your business the money it needs.
I have seen this happen time after time. The first time it happened to me was way back in 1995. I was starting a business with a bunch of friends and we were buying an advertising company. There was a lot of money involved, multiple corporations, and a highly compensated executive who needed to be controlled…. all the usual stuff. I was the investor and wanted to get the deal closed, ASAP.
Don’t ever count on your investor being as proactive as I was on this deal; I saw something there I wanted and was more proactive than most.
I called by best friend, an attorney, and described the deal to him and he said sure, he would write up the agreement. I gave him my American Express number and off to work he went. Or so I thought.
Drafting the agreement was a custom job, and the sections that needed to be written to keep the executive under control were complicated. Days became a week, weeks became a month, and suddenly six weeks had passed. We had to close on this business, but the agreement was a mess. Things were happening in the world that could reduce the value of the business, and as a result, my profit.
Finally, I got on a plane and flew to the attorney’s office, where we sat together on the floor and hammered it out. It was grueling. Fortunately, the deal closed and it all turned out OK, especially when we sold out to a public company a few years later. That was a very GOOD day!
In the interim years though, that agreement we wrote saved the day a couple of times…. when we had a disagreement with one of the shareholders because he didn’t understand the need for a lobbyist, and once again when we needed to control that CEO. It saved the day and without it, the deal would have blown apart before we sold it to one of the largest advertising companies in America.
That agreement cost about $9,000 to draw up. “That’s a lot of money for some stupid agreement,” as one of my co-investors said, in the beginning!
He later had to eat those words.
As the years have come and gone, I have seen a lot of deals die a slow death because they could not take the strain of time delays or the legal fees or they didn’t have someone like me who could drop everything, get on a plane and “make it happen.” Or they didn’t have someone like me, whose best friend was an attorney and who was also the investor. If I had been the one trying to raise the money, the deal never would have closed. I would not have the leverage over the attorney or an AMEX card that could handle the attorney’s fees while we fussed over the agreement.
Most people (maybe you) who are starting or building a business, have the skills, energy, and enthusiasm to make that magic happen and create or grow something from nothing, but have no patience and no energy when it comes to “killing trees” (as we in the trade call “writing an agreement.”)
I have solved this problem for you. I call it the Fill-in-the-Blank Investor Agreement Kit, but it’s much more than just a form with blanks in it.
I call it a kit because when you buy a model airplane “kit” you end up with a model airplane; with my “Fill-in-the-Blank Investor Agreement Kit” you end up with not a model airplane, of course, but an agreement! You’ll have something like the water conditioner salesman has, that can be SIGNED today, right now, and evidences an agreement, a commitment.
This can happen without lawyers, and
without days turning into weeks and months.
Model airplane kits can take weeks before your model is ready; this kit can produce your agreement in MINUTES!
You will get two copies of this kit, (it comes in twos, one for you and one for your investor), and retails for $249.00 (plus S+H).
For the Next 50 who invest, I will give it to you at ½ price; that’s 50% off. And to make the deal even better, if you invest in it today I will toss for FREE a copy of my book, Which LLC is Best for You?, a guide to choosing the right type of LLC (there are 13 different types in each of the 50 states) that is best for your situation. Retail price of the book is normally $29.95.
The book, Which LLC is Best for You? will do what it suggests. The Fill-in-the-Blank Investor Agreement Kit will do what it says, too, and you will end up with both a solid business agreement and the right LLC structure for your enterprise!
If you find an investor who is willing to cut you a check and you guys shake on it, do you know what he will say next? I do. He will say,
“I will call my lawyer to write this up.”
And guess what? You just lost your investor. You lost control of the game because you didn’t have the right tool. You couldn’t say, “I have an agreement right here, lets go over it and then you can show it to your attorney.”
If you play this game without the right tools, it will usually end with your bank account empty and the investor and his cash gone elsewhere.
The Fill-in-the-Blank Investor Agreement Kit discusses this and shows how to get around it, so that the agreement gets done quickly and isn’t shot down by a stranger.
Commitment is a signature on a piece of paper.
An important note here: By no means is this kit a way to take advantage of your investor; rather, it is a way to speed up the process and get the deal done.
A way of getting “hosed” on a deal is the DELAY. While your investor is checking with his lawyer, you assume everything will get finalized, and therefore you are not out trying to find other investors. Then when the deal does blow up, predictably, you are out the money and the TIME and have to start all over again-if you can.
I wrote the Fill-in-the-Blank Investor Agreement Kit to put you back in charge of the deal, and to enable you to maneuver and avoid the loss of control when your investor, inevitably, wants to have his lawyer write it up from scratch.
Take advantage of the 50% off order today and get a copy of my book, Which LLC is Best for You? tossed in for free. You want this to be handy when the time comes to get the investment cash for your business!
In summary, order now so you can receive the kit and take advantage of the benefits I described as soon as possible:
- Save time; avoid wasteful delays
- Get Investors to say YES, by being prepared and being a take charge person!
- Have a paper to SIGN that describes what you have agreed to.
- Protect yourself; don’t let others waste your time and hose you.
- Get a working agreement simply by filling in the blanks.
Remember, fortune favors the prepared!
Charles Stoll CPA, CFP™, PFS
PS: Not long ago a friend of mine needed to raise a few dollars to get half of an already successful enterprise that was in need of money. It was he who suggested that I put together this Fill-in-the-Blanks Investor Agreement Kit. Delays kill business deals. By having this agreement ready to go at a moment’s notice you can save the day! We did his deal (total of $15,000,000 involved) at the Tampa Airport. As it was a lot of money and a little complicated, it took about 3 hours (sorry). Imagine how long an attorney would have taken to prepare the paperwork on a deal that size. Whether the deal is $10,000 or $15,000,000 it’s all about commitment and having a place to sign.
PSS: Put yourself in your investor’s shoes again, just for a second. Would you want to invest your money with someone who is slow to take charge and hesitant to make things happen? Taking charge and making things happen is what the Fill-in-the-Blank Investor Agreement Kit does for you. Please give yourself the tool that is necessary to get that signature.
PSSS: It’s your Superbowl and maybe the first of many that you get to play in, if you win. Are you going to throw the ball and hope that it ends up in friendly hands? Or will you run it in, keeping control of the process and that priceless football, all the time? Given a choice, I know which option I would take. But it’s time for you to make your choice. Tell me- do you regret the choice you made that fateful day, with that first girl, that first time?
