6 WAYS TO FIND INVESTMENT
CAPITAL FOR YOUR IDEA
EPISODE 155 of a Daily Dose of Greatness Quest with Trevor Crane
SUMMARY
How do you get people to invest in your business idea?
Today, I share the 6 WAYS TO FIND INVESTMENT CAPITAL FOR YOUR IDEA.
- You can get them through the loan SHARKS or the professional investors.
- You can get them through the DOLPHINS or traditional financial institutions like banks.
- You can borrow from the FISH or people that you know, your friends and your family.
- You can SELL a portion of your company to investors, either the SHARKS, DOLPHINS or FISH.
- Look for CREDIT CARD companies that are willing to give you money on your personal or business credit.
- HAVE YOUR CLIENTS FUND your project.. Nowadays, you can pre-sell anything. You can go out and sell your services, sell the result and collect the money first.
DAILY QUESTION
How do you get people to invest in your business idea?
DAILY QUOTE
“If you’re not willing to go ALL IN, why should anybody else?” – Robyn Crane
DAILY CHALLENGE
Check out the book, Media Secrets by Jess Todtfeld. Read it. Apply it. Review it.
HERE’S WHAT YOU SHOULD DO NEXT:
Get a FREE COPY of my book, HIGH PAYING CLIENTS at: trevorcrane.com/freebook
ABOUT TREVOR CRANE
Trevor Crane is best known for 2 bestselling books, High Paying Clients and Big Money With Your Book… without selling a single copy.
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TRANSCRIPT
How do you get people to fund your awesomeness? To invest in your awesomeness? And what I mean by that is, how do you get them to invest in your business idea?
You want to launch something, you know, you need some capital, whether it’s 100 bucks, or 100,000 or 100 million, where are you going to find your money?
That’s the subject of today’s show. We’ve got five places that you can look at. People find your great idea, i.e. your awesomeness.
(INTRO – AUDIO)
Okay, so I’ve been doing this for a long time, as far as been in business of one of the things that one of the challenges I’ve had in life, or one of the challenges I have not had is to take action on an idea to start a business.
When I was four years old, I started a business. And I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. I mean, I didn’t go get an LLC or anything, but my dad inspired me by saying, Trevor, I’m going to be gone for a couple of weeks. You’re the man of the house now and you got to take care of your family. I just thought that that was important enough that I should actually do it.
And so that day I started a business and I started the business that didn’t need any capital. So we’re going to talk about some strategies you can go ahead and use if you don’t want to use can find you need capital we’re going to one of the strategies and to share with that with you what I did is I grabbed rocks from my yard and I tried to sell them to the neighbor like I like drop.
So I figured that my neighbor would like them to and I created something that day and as an entrepreneur that most people spend their a lot of time searching for number fine and that is a profit a day assuming that I sold a rock and to my recollection, I did you know, I, I took a rock from my yard, I sold it to the neighbor for a quarter or $1, I made a profit.
So let’s go ahead and get into the ways that you can find money for your deals. And I’m going to tell you some personal stories about each of these, but one of them was kind of cool. It’s the one that you might think of like finding investors in you. And so you might call these going after, like professional investors, you’re going after people, you might call them sharks.
So there’s obviously caught the, the show called Shark Tank. And you have an idea that there’s people there that have a lot of money. And there’s not just Shark Tank, by the way, although that’s really cool. One of my neighbors actually went to shark tank and pitch their idea and then got accepted by shark and partnered with them and then made a made much it was a it was a phenomenal plan for them.
But the challenge with sharks is they’re going to look at you they’re going to look at your business and they’re going to go ahead and say, you know, what do you have now if you have not already launched your business you’re not already started it you’re not already creating a profit. Good luck getting somebody to bet on you.
Like I have a lot of people coming to me from time to time and they asked me to invest in their deal and when it comes down to it I I need to know that I don’t want to invest my money in anything except a sure thing. So what I’m looking for and what sharks are looking for is they’re looking for your business acumen.
Like imagine if you were gonna bet on a horse like in you’re going to get a horse race like if I’m going to put my money down on a horse racing was going to be random and just go pick the skinny horse that has never raced before and that’s what I’m going to put all my money is just like on the gambling track, or what do I want to go ahead and put my money on the horse that wins all the damn time.
Both of those are gambling and I don’t know that’s the greatest example here but when the challenge when you go to a an investor it is that it is a gamble. Actually, when you’re asking somebody for money for your thing. You know, the the world could not go in your favor. A lot of ideas never pan out.
So you’ve got to make sure you understand that investors like sharks are going to want to take a big share of the business so even if you do have a great plan they’re gonna look at your track record and say okay, have you had successful businesses businesses in the past you’re having a habit of creating multi million dollar billion dollar businesses.
It’s probably not going to be hard to find a shark, the challenges shark who comes in is going to want to keep most of the kill. They’re going to want a big chunk of your business.
So this isn’t always the best place to go. Although it can be like I shared with you, my friend, my next door neighbor, when they own honeyfund, others be straight up about what the company is, and they went to Shark Tank.
And you can go ahead and probably do some YouTube research or whatnot and find the episode of other was pretty cool. They got a big deal. And they made a deal with Huffington Post. They did this co promotion, they have just scaled their business and grown and grown and grown all from the relationship that they got when they got a shark investor.
And the biggest thing that they got from the shark investor wasn’t just his money, but it was his business acumen. And just recently they did a big partnership with target so actually if you are getting married or know someone getting married, and they are you know going to register at Target department store.
And then you will be prompted on there if somebody wants to as a bridal registry to have people invest in their honeymoon and it you it’s it’s linked directly with honey fund so what the first place that you can find money or sharks.
The second place are called, I called dolphins. And another like a new mentor of mine actually gave me these names and I thought they were cute so I’m going to keep using them. And dolphins are basically your traditional financial institutions like banks. And the nice thing about that is you go to the bank to find money and they can loan you money. I’ve gotten money from banks a few different times.
But it seems the banks, the challenge with banks is that they definitely again, they’re not going to just gamble their money on just anything and banks tend to only loan you money when you don’t need it. Like the few times in my life that I actually borrowed money from a bank. It was when I had plenty of money and then they were begging to borrow money for loans money so it’s always been crazy like that. I don’t know why that’s the case.
And you might think that banks are all happy Pappy and it’s nicer than the shark because sharks are mean and dolphins are not and that’s not the case at all. It’s just you know a dolphin can still bite you in each you and kill you and whatnot I think dolphins kill like killer whales so you know the the don’t be mistaken banks are not happy, happy fluffy little bunnies they are here to make a profit as well and they can be very cutthroat about that.
So the challenge with going to a bank you know to the dolphins is that you again you just got to have a really good pitch. If you don’t have a really good business plan and history you’re going to have a challenge.
So the third place and this might be for where a lot of you make this happen. And this is the first place that I went to when I was borrowing money is for my ideas is I call them fish and fish or people that you know they’re your friends and your family. They’re the people that are going to love you and in and decide to invest in you because they believe in you or they’re just frickin crossing their fingers hopeful that finally you’re really nearly crazy idea is going to work out.
So I’ve done this a lot my life I borrowed when I first started my first stub watersports business I bought a pair sailboat and that was like almost $80,000 we needed to truck we needed some insurance we needed to buy all kinds of stuff I took all my money and I borrowed some money from friends and some from family and an uncle and things like that.
Now they either ask for very low interest or no interest and they there was almost no collateral like in these situations. It was just like a little written agreement and then I brought the money and I paid him back. Also in college, I borrowed money from my mom because I wanted the launch of business I called campus vision. And we create this really created this really cool campus calendar and whatnot.
And it took me a while to pay my mom back. It took me a while to pay back these loans. But I did and that was really cool. I actually helped a friend of mine.
There’s another version of this and I would call us another number in my five that I just want you to think of this, you have the option to sell part of your business at the very beginning, like a friend of mine came to me and he he just grabbed like a quarter of a million dollars from investors in the business and he borrowed it and he promised to pay it back.
And what happened is his business idea flop. So he wasted all the money or spent all the money and he had nothing left over zero nothing. And so then he came to me and he’s like, dude, I got a new plan. I’m going to borrow money again this summer, I’m going to get a half a million dollars and start a new business. It’s going to be about this.
And I said, Okay, dude, you totally can do that. But what if you find instead of just people to borrow money from what have you made them investors in your business, so you don’t actually have to pay them the money back that they’re buying equity in your company. And this was a really cool strategy for him.
And he went out and to be honest, most of his investors were fish. They weren’t really professional investors. They were just friends and family and friends. Isn’t people that knew him and they believed in him and his passion is what sold this. He actually shared with me his business plan and I and we got in.
I was trying to help him write his proposal and write the whole thing was very confusing. I was I didn’t think it was a good pitch. And so I just stopped. I stopped the madness. I was like, dude, hold on, you raise quarter million dollars last time just because of your passion. Why don’t you do the same thing here and it really doesn’t matter what you have in a piece of paper. Nobody cared anyway.
These people gave you money because they believed in you. Go after the fish and and instead of borrowing the money and paying back sell them 10% of your business or 5% of your company. And the very beginning it was the coolest decision he ever made because he went out and got to half a million dollars I can a month he’s freaking amazing, this guy.
And then guess what? The next day he could pay himself a salary out of that 500 grand he got because that was now seed capital to start his next company. It was not money that he now owed and had to pay back. In fact that deserves a whole number.
I said there’s five ways to go ahead and generate money for your business or capital for your idea and that’s a really cool one at selling a portion of your company to investors and you don’t have to go to banks although you can you don’t have to go to sharks other you can you can also go to your fish and that’s a really cool way to come up with money.
Okay, so let me give you the next two because I think these are really key. This one is a strategy I think is really awesome. I use it in college after I graduated college for the first time in my life that the bank’s started sending the credit cards like Trevor we want to give you a credit cards. I got like my first credit card out of college and then they gave me another one. They gave me another one, they gave me another one.
So what you can do and I have several people that are in my organization like if someone wants to invest in what I do and in something that they want to get their book down if they want some coaching and mentoring help if they’re launching a business that oftentimes help people and have a financial option.
In one of those financing options is I’ve got a friend and a business that I work with and they actually fund like up to 50 to $100,000 on nothing but a good business plan in like decent credit you can have shitty credit you gotta have some decent credit but he works with you on figuring that out.
And it’s been a phenomenal resource because he goes out and he finds all of the credit card companies that can loan you money that are willing to loan you money on your on your on your business plan on on your personal credit on a variety of different things. And this is scary but I’ve done this time and time and time again.
I’ve oftentimes had to fund a business if my cash flow wasn’t good. I’m not telling you that this is the way to do it but I am telling you it’s a place I found money I had all these credit cards that I was able to find and negotiate the right rates and whatnot.
And it’s a really cool. It can be very complicated and hard to do and hard to get good rates and hard to qualify and make it work with your credit so I’ve got a company actually does this for me with myself. clients with Wi Fi find some funding to go ahead and launch their venture to not just pay for myself but to pay for all the marketing and extra things that they’re going to need in their business to launch.
It’s a phenomenal strategy if you’ve never used it before it’s a place that you can go ahead and find money and if you’re thinking well I don’t know if I want to use credit cards that would be I don’t know if I trust myself I don’t know if that’s appropriate you know I don’t know if I’m if I if it gets too risky honestly like okay I get it like you don’t necessarily want to go in debt.
I love using other people’s money and so his purse or credit cards but if you’re not willing to invest in you Why should your why should the fish the dolphins are the sharks and I this I think separates the men from the from the the boys at some stage the ladies from the from the little girls are just talking about stuff is like, if you’re not willing to go into debt, why should anybody else? If you’re not willing to risk it all, why would anybody else?
So this is really important thing if you’re looking to borrow money for your idea, like how old are you? When I went to my fish, I went all in, I invested everything. I took everything I had to go in. So when I went to my friends and family, and the people that cared about me, believed in me, they didn’t necessarily believe in in business idea. They believed in me.
I can’t tell you how many times that people give me 10, 50 hundred thousand dollars to God and fun things. I know people that will loan a million bucks on nothing but a word in idea and a hope and a prayer on the love that they have for someone. So don’t don’t discount. This is a viable option. But you gotta make sure that you’re all in and you’re not just stealing from somebody.
That you’re not just if you’re not all laying man. Don’t ask for money in the first place. Okay, let me give you the fifth 161. I can’t remember which one run it because I changed the numbers. It’s called the sixth one. The sixth way that you can go ahead and get money and this is one of my favorites.
This is my new favorite. I’ve been doing this for a while.couple of decades or at least a decade, my favorite place to find money, wait for your new idea. And to fund your awesomeness is from your clients. And this is a great place to be like the world that we live in these days, you can actually pre sell just about anything.
You can go out and sell your services, sell the result, collect the money first, uh, my wife has a client and their names are faith, faith and hope. And they’re architects and you might be thinking, well, I can’t take the money up front. I you know, we were supposed to be paid after we do the work well, who creates those rules, you know, you can go in as a marketer, you can go out and sell your marketing services and you take a fee, take $1,000, take $10,000, whatever it is, I mean.
Now you can go do the work. You can go buy breakfast, you can go buy all the things that you need to go do like ads and run it do all the hard work and whatever it is, but you accept the money up front. Like right now. I don’t work with any client at any stage unless they pay me up front you pay for the services that I show up, you pay for the doctor, then you show up and you’re thinking, well, in my industry, you know, I’m a doctor, I’m a chiropractor. I have to do it first. And then I get paid.
Okay, fine. You can choose that belief. And then this will work for you. Or you can do what my friends faith and hope did is they worked with my wife, they hired her to help them in her business. And my wife asked them about her better building your building. And she they decided to start taking their money upfront. They got paid up front for their blueprint that they would do for someone’s house.
And that’s the most beautiful thing in the world. Because now they are incentivized at the very beginning to do their best. Not that they weren’t doing their best before, but now they’re not broke for weeks or months while they do the work. And so you don’t have to go out and borrow money.
Oftentimes the best place for you to prove your concept is with people who pay and by the way, if you collect new clients and they buy your new course they buy new programs. buy your book. I use this in strategies for my clients around promoting their books.
We start talking about their books promote their products and services behind that sell some of that stuff. They make a whole bunch of money and now they gotten paid to write their book. Like it’s completely that ass to get your investment capital from your clients who already believe in you.
And if you’re thinking, well, I don’t know how to do that, and I can’t do that, then you need help. You know, we all need help with stuff you’ve never done before. And you can figure it out yourself, which is trial and error and crashing and hurting yourself and skin and your knees if you’re trying to ride a bike for the first time.
But that’s not what happened. I was trying to train my daughter to ride a bike and I gave her instruction and coaching and help and support and I and I ran beside the bike for a long time. And I told her what to do and what not to do and where to hold her eyes and how to balance and whatnot.
And within a day, like one or two lessons she was being riding that bike and then yes, she fell eventually. And I wasn’t there to catch her at some stage, but we don’t talk about that as well. So when it happened, she was able to pick herself back up and jump on that bike.
And we’ve already talked about the potential failure that could come up in fact it was guaranteed so when you work with someone to help you through this you don’t have to go it alone that’s my first and always my best advice is to find someone to give you some help and not just help he’ll give me money I’ll give you money but like help you do these things and implement them.
I work with my clients and giving them strategies to get paid and and in the finance their ideas with making sales when I cleansing just top felt that this and we were launching his new book and he was all excited about it because the book was finally coming out and he was working on finishing the book and I said, Dude, you need to stop working on the book and you need to go back to my instruction.
I gave you the very first and and and go to some do some marketing tell people that the book is coming out and then make some sales and he said, Well, dude, if I make a sale is going to distract me. I’m like, dude, you gotta make some sales.
Like how about this? How about we stop working on your book and we pre sell it and you become a number one bestseller before it’s written?. Let’s do do that before you finish it. He’s like, dude, I don’t know. He’s all scared. We did it. By the way, he did it in 24 hours. We ran his number one campaign.
And then we went ahead and while he was running with his number one campaign for his book, and he became a bestseller. He stated bestseller for like 60 or 90 days in a row. And, and it was this really positive experience. He didn’t make hardly any money because it was just the book or I knew he wouldn’t make money from that book sales.
The book is only like, $1. Let’s say you sold 1000 books. Great. That’s $1,000. That’s like, not much, right? That’s kind of sucks. It’s good. I wouldn’t throw $1,000 away but it’s not. It’s not much. So what we did is we had him sell a course he goes, Trevor, I’m not. Of course. I can’t sell a course on a time to make a course.
And like don’t you don’t have time to make it Why don’t we pre sell it? He’s like, holy shit. You want me to pre sell a book and then on the back of that pre sell a course your friggin crazy. I’m like, dude, I’m helped most of my clients get more speaking gigs. Get me to Yeah Do new marketing whether it’s free marketing or paid advertising I hope you lunch courses launch programs launched new coaching consulting thing like we’d let’s just do this just follow my frickin instruction.
And he’s a friend of mine so I had to actually sat them around a little bit because he wasn’t ready to listen at first it go Don’t stop stop working on your book and like just do this pre sell this he went out and he may I think he sold 45 pre sales of his course that he now sells for $22,000 over $2,000 I think he gave a discount speak only paid like 100, 200, 300 bucks because depending on what porn point of the process they bought, because it got more expensive as things move forward.
But how cool is that within the first 30 days of his book launch didn’t pre sold he pre sold 45 people if my numbers are right into his brand new course that he hadn’t created either he wrote a book he sold a book he didn’t have any sort of course he didn’t have yet created.
And then that course he did create over the next five six weeks with his clients online and he didn’t lie to him he didn’t say this is already created he goes I’m going to create this every week from you when we get a time I’m gonna ask you a bunch of questions I’m going to do this with you as we go along it’s a five it’s a six week course whatever it is it’s going to be phenomenal.
I’m going to coach you I’m gonna throw in this bonus and that bonus it’s going to be epic and I’m eventually going to sell this for two $3,000 but you guys are getting in for x 1234 or $500 whatever it is and you won’t find out about that you got immediate secrets hold on media secret No That one’s called mediasecretsbook.com. Go to mediasecretsbook.com.
That’s my challenge for you guys. Do that because I didn’t know what my challenge is going to be for you until this very second. If you made it this far and you’re waiting for the challenge, go check out Jess Todtfeld’s book, Media Secrets book that mediasecretsbook.com you will see he’s still as a link for you to go ahead and get his book and potentially get his course or program whatever he’s now charging for it and you should stupid up he is a freakin genius.
We have a little private program that we teach inside of our epic author publishing piece and we give away as a bonus to all of our clients that guarantees they will get booked on media and PR guaranteed that’s the program that people that join our epic either mentoring ox using your epic author accelerator program we’ve changed the name just recently it’s not called the epic author accelerator and what that one of the things that get is mentoring.
The other thing they get is this get booked and it’s all media secrets tip media secrets for authors and getting media and getting press and getting PR is guaranteed if people come in through our program alright so my challenge for you today is go get this book.
Check out his funnel because what he did and by the way, the way the funnel hacks somebody to buy their stuff this is the ethical way to look at what they’re doing and then model it and you can you can rip it off the rip it off in an ethical way where you modeling you model the color the field the look and style of the thing and then you make it yours. You’re going to sell marshmallows or whatever you’re going to sell and be different. But you can do that.
And you should check out Jess Todtfeld. He’s an amazing guy. He teaches a lot of different stuff. And if you’ve ever wanted to get on Good Morning America, or like any media, TV, radio and print or whatnot, he has some amazing programs and you can be introduced to him if you join our epic author Academy or epic author accelerator.
You can just reach out to me or find them on social media. Find me you have any questions about media, I didn’t have any cross promoting just Todd felt today. But he is an awesome dude. And that was the story I wrapped up with today. So that’s it. Those are six ways to go ahead and raise money for one of your new ideas. And hopefully you found that valuable.
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I’ll see you tomorrow on another daily dose of greatness quest.
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