This is Bad News: There is NO Magic Bullet

Bad News



The bad news is there is no magic bullet to raising capital. I spoke with at least a dozen managers this past week at our Hedge Fund Premium networking event in Chicago. Most were looking for capital raising help of some type and we discussed many roadblocks that managers are seeing between them and the AUM levels they are trying to achieve.

Our firm provides some capital raising tools, but I believe that daily action and discipline is the best thing that a fund can do to raise capital. They must take responsibility for marketing their fund and have someone reaching out to new investors on a daily basis, if they do not they will forever remain in the bottom 20% of the industry in terms of assets. Very few funds gain their initial assets through a super powerful third party marketing firms, third party marketers like to typically work with managers which have some AUM momentum or foundation underneath them.

To raise capital I believe that managers need to have superior tools and processes when compared to their competitors. This means superior investor cultivation processes in place, superior investor relationships management, superior marketing materials, superior outreach efforts, superior email marketing, and superior focus on investors which actually have the potential of making an investment. Each of those topics mentioned above could be discussed for a whole conference and all of these moving parts need to be in place to compete in today’s industry. While this does not mean you need to out-spend others you do need to strategically plan your marketing campaign.

There is a good quote that I heard which goes something like “If you want to have what others don’t you have to do what others won’t” In other words if you want to grow assets you must put in the extra work, planning, and strategy that others skip over.

Every morning I try to listen to a 45 minute custom MP3 audio session of business lessons, marketing tips and positive thinking notes. One great quote I hear every morning by our friend Brian Tracy, “Successful people dislike to do the same things that unsuccessful people dislike to do, but successful people get them done anyways because that is what they know is the price of success.” This is connected to an interview Brian conducts in which a multi-millionaire says that success is easy, “you must decide exactly what it is you want, and then pay the price to get to that point.”

All of this may sound wishy washy or non-exact but I think it is very important to realize that there is no one single magic bullet for raising capital. It takes hard work, trial and a superior effort on all fronts to stand out from your competition.

Read dozens of additional articles like this within our Marketing & Sales Guide.

- Richard

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