Are You Ready To Face Your Investors?

Are we ready to face our investor’s questions? Is our new start-up ready for fundraising? Many of us struggle with this question as we develop our product, services and grow our business. Somewhere inside us we think that we should take this forward.

Pitching to investors is one of the most important and difficult tasks we ever face in building and growing our business. We diligently prepare ourselves to face the investor’s and answer their queries but many times despite our expertise we fail to comprehend and anticipate what kind of salvos will be fired at us in the form of questions. We should always bear this in mind, an investor is a person with whom we are going to have a long term dealing so integrity and honesty is absolutely essential and should be an important ingredient of our presentation.

These could be few of the questions which we may be asked by the investors and to be on the safer side, we (Entrepreneurs) should always be prepared with an appropriate response.

1. Why should I believe you?
2. Who believes you and how can I connect with them?
3. What is your start-up all about?
4. What problem does it solve? How big is the market?
5. There are lot of business similar to yours, so how is yours different and why should I put my money on it?
6. How much have you and others (if any) have invested in this? Have they got any return, has it started giving back, what is the turnover?
7. Can I know more about your team? Are they trustworthy?
8. Is this your first business or you have done before, if yes what happened to that?
9. Can your business adopt “The change with time “policy?
10. Any milestones achieved? Please share it.
11. Do you have access to the various resources you need to launch or grow a business?
12. How many specific benefits for your product or idea can you list?
13. Can you get paying customers from your target market to pre-order based on a blueprint or mock-up?
14. What will it take to break even or make a profit?
15. How can investors in your idea make a profit?

The investor will want to scan your business to the minutest extent. His set of questions will never come to a halt. He would always want to know more for example – How much do you need and how will you utilize. Based on his assessment he would wish to take a call on the valuation of the company and finally if he would like to invest in your business or not. This final fire-shot may give us a feeling that he liked the presentation and the concept of this start-up and possibly interested in investing.

The final version what we hear could be “it was really nice meeting you, we will be surely looking into your idea and business, we liked it”. They will request you for another meeting to take the conversation forward. Or the version could be to the contrary ending with we are not ready to invest in your idea now. Maybe will look into this after some time, good luck!

Don’t worry and let this not dishearten you. Go to the next investor. Clean up what went wrong with the previous investor, sharpen your answers and eventually success with knock at your door.  Persistence and belief in yourself is the key.

Please remember that at the end of the day, investors want to invest in leaders who are movers and shakers and have the ability to win in every situation.

I would love to hear your experience with investors. Please feel free to share it on the comments section below.

Originally Published at – BolteRaho

Follow me on twitter – https://twitter.com/ijeetujain

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