Capital Raising: The Skill That Changes Everything : Ep 382

Today, topic wise, I want to talk about capital raising. So now I know a couple of you were at the event. I wanted to share something that I shared on the opening session about circles of influence. Now I'm going to expand a little bit more than I shared last week, but this might be a little bit of review for people that if you were on last week and saw this. But I thought it was pretty great way to do networking and to raise capital. Right now, actually, Lincoln and Ryland are in New York raising for our fund launch partners to fund. We are raising 70, well, 50 million is our target. And then we're raising up to 70 million from there. So that's kind of our stretch goal. We can raise 50 up to 70. What Lincoln shared, I'm going to summarize a few things of capital raising. If that's cool, you guys cool with that? We dive in. Do a little capital raising session. And this is some of the stuff from the event. I'm going to summarize it down. I'll probably, this would be a little bit of a review if you're at the event, but it's always good to have a review and then we'll build upon it. I want to answer questions. I spend time talking with you all. Over the last seven years, I have taught capital raising. And to be frank, it's very hard to teach because one thing that works for somebody will not work for somebody else. So I've used the funnel method because I'm like, okay, what are the actual capital raising models that work for everybody? And then we can use a framework for every single person. Does that aground work the easiest way to raise a lot of capital is to have a great product? I said this over and over again, have a great investment product. Great sales people are great sales people usually when they're selling great products. You put a great salesperson with a bad product and they're like a, you know, oil, you know, snake oil salesman, right? But you put a great salesman with a great product. They are a great salesperson. So making a great product obviously helps immensely. That's what we have the financial formula. Okay, so work on this. How you structure your cat, you know, your frame instructor, your dealing strategy, get capital commands, how you structure your whole firm, makes it way easier to sell. Right now we're selling Funtime's partners. We have, I see me, a very good firm. We're meeting with huge firms out of New York right now that love what we've built. And it makes it much easier to raise. So you guys get that concept now. Let's talk about raising though. We've historically used this funnel as raising. So you got it. There's three stages. You got to get in the room. You got to connect in the room and you got to close the room. Okay. So this has worked well as a model, right? You got to get around more people with money. Once you're around them, you got to connect with them. Once you've connected or warmed them up to the idea of, you know, they like you, you then have the chance to close them. Okay. And I want to go a little step further on this. Um, right. Let's draw it up. I think I drew it up over here. Well, as you can see it already drawn. I'm going to, I'm going to erase some of this. We'll start and we'll build on it pretty. We'll go fast version though because some of you guys heard this. Well, actually, how many people heard this at the event? How many people did not hear this? Couple of people heard it. That's a most probably didn't hear it though. So we'll go through it. But I want to share some new stuff. But we'll do a little bit of review a little bit. So how I would define this, people invest with others that they know, like and trust. Which is pretty self-explanatory, right? Like that's, you always say like, oh, you're going to raise from the three F's family, friends and fools, right? The reason people say that because that's, that's who's going to invest with you on your first or second fund. It's people that already know, like and trust you, that are in your circle of influence. If you don't have people that know, like and trust you, why would a stranger invest with you? So all of us have these type of circles. We have a circle here of people that already know, like and trust us. We call this family and friends. I drew a circle around this. This is how we do things to then engage people we are that already know, like and trust us. But maybe they have no clue that you're running an investment fund. So for example, you can engage and maybe drop in the chat if you guys have ideas. But you would engage this group by taking people, you know, you host a dinner. You take people to golf. You go skiing. You're, hey, we're doing a, you know, a summit day where we're going to share the investment strategy of what we're doing. Okay, that's how you engage people. You ask for advice from this group. These are always that you, I'll change colors here. Can engage people that already know, like and trust you. And this is where you need to start. And hopefully you get a base here. We did this with Follonage Partners. Okay, so our fund one, we went out to people in North Dakota and we raised, we can see right here, we raised about eight point, I think it's about 8.5 million dollars. Okay, of people that knew, liked and trusted us. The problem was we were trying to raise 30 million, which is a big gap. And we had tapped out this group. Anybody in the chat feel like this? I do, I've already tapped out everyone in my rollodex. How do I get other people and other rollodexes to help? Well, what we, this is what worked. I'm just telling you in real time, this what happened for us back, I guess a year and a half ago, raising Follonage Partners Fund one. We had done this. We had one investor who really liked us that we had been introduced by some way, you know, shape or form. This person had a very strong audience of others. I'm going to make it closer here. He had a big circle of influence. Okay, of people and we'll call this guy Bob. Okay, this is Bob here. That's not his name, but that's his fake name. Bob, he had people obviously that know, like, and trust him. And so what happened was, and this is what we've now seen more and more of capraising, Bob, thought we were pretty cool. And we were like, man, if we could get access to Bob's network, that would be huge. And so we started to scheme waterways that we could engage Bob's network to get people that he know that no like and trust him and get Bob to introduce us to them. Does that make sense? So we thought we could dinner and go up, but then we thought, okay, what's in it for Bob? Type in the chat. Any questions, any thoughts? What's in it for Bob? You know, all of us have networks. Why do you sometimes you introduce people to your network? And other times you don't introduce people to your network. Why? What comes out as what's in it for you? Any, like literally type in the chat. What are some things? Why would Bob introduce this? I just somebody put in, let's see, perfect. Ego, that's actually a good point. Let's unpack that ego. Slash status. This is from Dan. Does the introduction make Bob look good? Is it a status increase or decrease Bob introducing you to his friends? Take this, for example, if if Peyton Manning was in town, okay, and everyone loves Peyton Manning, Hall of Fame quarterback, and Peyton Manning knew Bob and, hey, let's, and Bob, Bob might even say, Peyton, you're in town. Let's host a dinner. I'm going to invite all the people around me that know like and trust me. Let's all get together. I would love them to meet you because why? It's a status increase for Bob. It having Peyton Manning, having access to Peyton Manning makes Bob look good. Y'all following makes a lot of sense. So how, so anyways, we'll come back in a second. Somebody else put make him a money raiser. That was from Brendan. So give him, I'll go back to black here. Give Bob economics, you know, put him on the advisory board, give him some shares, give him some upside. That's a great way as well. So Bob has an incentive to introduce people that know like and trust him anything else. What else would you put on this? This increases his exposure and visibility. Yeah, there's a little bit of this reciprocity. Maybe it's, hey, Bob, what does Bob need? Well, Bob's, he's running a business. He needs help in another category. And so by introducing our network to his, you know, we're going to introduce his network to ours. Totally. That's a great reason why Bob might do this because it always comes to what's in it for Bob. Okay. Anything else you guys can think of type in the chat. There's not a wrong answer here. These are all great answers. So if I unpack this, I don't see anymore, but type in the chat if you have them. So when we engaged Bob, this is a true story. Bob liked us. He thought we were cool. He sent us a quote-unquote test person. Kind of one of his smaller guys, a friend. It was like one person. Bob said, oh, me with my friend, because Bob's going to test to see how well we treat that person. Now you might say, oh, this is just a small onesy Tuesday guy. What Bob, Bob's not going to introduce us to his billionaire friend clients. He's going to introduce us to a test person. And he's going to measure how well we take care of that test person. In this case, we took extremely great care of this test person. And that person, you know, but hey, how did it go with me with those fun launch guys? Oh, it was amazing. They're super sharp. Those amazing. Thank you. So like thank you, Bob for introducing them to me. And Bob goes, oh, okay, that made me look good. Maybe I should do this again. And these guys are going to handle my network well. Y'all follow this happens, but it's interesting to draw it out. Okay. We thought Bob was interesting. We actually then gave Bob economics. We gave him a percentage of the fund. I won't say what percent, but we gave him a percentage of the of the fund with some clawbacks. But we said, hey, you get X percentages. of the fund for introduction. Just introduce us to people and also help us sit on our investment committee, help us with planning and just be a board member as well. But you get X percent. Okay. That's what we did for Bob. This obviously helped him with economics. And I don't, I don't think we did much reciprocity. We didn't have many contacts. I don't think we did much with that. But we made Bob look good and there's an economic. So Bob started to introduce us to other of his friends. Okay. What happened was Bob introduced us to now he really only introduced us like a hand like let's call it six people or less, which wasn't that many people. But one of those people was a different guy. Okay. We'll call him. I don't know. We're doing Bob. We'll do bill. Bob and Bill, different names, but real people bill over here had a huge group of people that know, like, and trust him. Bill's network was massive. We did the same thing. He sent us a test person. We made him look good. I mean, Bill brought us, he was a super connector and truly a super connector. This guy had ran a multi billion dollar fund before people really trusted him with their money. We have one family office. This family office is a 1.5 billion dollar family office. Lincoln just flew two weeks ago and Miami to meet with them. And they had one question for Lincoln. Hey, is, is Bill investing? And we said, yeah, Bill's in, how he goes, how much is Bill putting in? And I think, but I don't know, Bill's in for 4.5 million on our next fund. He's also an investor. He wanted to invest money. They said, great. We'll match him. Whatever Bill does, we'll do. And Lincoln's like, do you want to see the deck? No, we're good. We trust Bill so much whatever he does we're in. And what does match what he does? That was, I mean, that's somebody that really has people that know I can trust them. We also gave Bill some economics. Similar to similar to Bob, we matched them up and it made him look good. We went from 8.5 million to 32 million over subscribed in a matter of, I don't know, a handful of months. And it really was from these two connections, Bob and Bill, getting in their circle of influence. We right now are raising fund to our target is 50 million. We have a, and that's our, that's our close. We can extend up to 70 million. Lincoln has gone out. We've met with our previous investors and then Bob and Bill have seen the fruits of what's gone on. They've set up other meetings for us. We already have about 30 million verbally committed to this fund. That's verbal commitments. It's verbal commitments. Lincoln right now is trying to draw, he's in New York. We're trying to drum up another 20 to 30 million in New York right now. A verbal. Now, when I get a verbal commitment, we count this to about half. Now, these are solid verbal commitments. I mean, these are as solid as you can get verbal commitments, but still we do a 50% close. Just when we talked a lot of funds, it's people just throw numbers around sometimes a verbal commitments. I think it's safe. I was, I always want to under bet and over bet. So for us to raise 50 million, we need to go get 100 million in verbals. Okay. Y'all following? Now, if you heard this over the weekend, that's fine. I'm going to now build upon this and share a few other insights. And by the way, drop questions in the chat. Just interrupt me if you'd like. I'd love to, I'd love to share a couple of things. Now, one thing I want to share, this is what Adam Campbell coined. I kind of like the phrase is back to member of the the Peyton Manning example I shared. What is your baseball card? Meaning, why are you someone worth introducing? What makes you or your team unique special? And you're trying to get to other circles of influence. You need to have things that are your quote unquote, baseball card. Now, a couple ways to do this. It literally can be cool things you've done. I knew a guy, he joined the Make a Wish foundation. He get donated a bunch of money and then worked his way to be on the board. And he was on the board of Make a Wish. And that was part of his baseball card that helped him get introduced to high and narrow individuals because he was his core business was he was a capital razor. That's all he did. That was part of his baseball card. I shared last week another guy. He pot LeBron James's old land a Range Rover. So to have a talking point when he met people on his baseball card. What are unique and people sometimes you have to do things that are a little bit crazy to have a talking point. We had another guy. He just flew. He just climbed Kilimanjaro and Artica and other mountains because it's a talking point of like, Oh, man, what's why would buy? Oh, this guy's he's he just went to have an article. He travels the world. He's on the board of Make a Wish. Any runs of fund is what it's it's a guy you should meet. Oh, okay. Instead of just, Oh, I'm trying to introduce to the bridge and Bridger is kind of a nobody and nobody likes him. It's like, why would I want to meet Bridger? Oh, well, Bridger has he runs this company called Fun Launch. He's got 400,000 social media followers. He helps people around the world launch funds. He runs two funds himself. He's a really dynamic person. Someone worth meeting. Oh, okay. I'll give it a shot. Now, he just hit the ink 5000 of fast growing companies in America. This is like this young heart, hot startup. They're building fun launch AI right now. It's someone worth meeting. So he like, so baseball card is interesting. That's it. It's a reason it makes Bob look good when introducing you. Okay. It doesn't make any sense. It's funny. I presented this to Lincoln last week. I did not talked about this. I go to Lincoln's office. Guess what's on his office? His big white board. It has whiteboard are circles like this with people's names and I'm. And I was like, what are these circles? And he goes, Oh, this is, he goes bridge. This is exactly what you just talked about. I have people. I'm targeting that have large circles of influence that I'm trying to win over. And hopefully if we do a good enough job, they will introduce me to their circle of influence. This is how Lincoln is raising all of our capital right now for launch partners. It's like, dang, that's pretty cool. So I wanted to share, I wanted to share that with you now. Let's go to another layer deal. Let's answer a few questions and I want to go a little bit layer, deeper stuff that we did not teach. I did not have time to teach this at the event or weekend. But questions, how can you offer some without giving away too much? You know, it's, we had to, we had to give economics to Bob and Bill to make it worth it to, you know, worth it for them to actually be involved now. So like that's what we had to do. We were only at 8.5 million. And we're like, we have to raise this fund. We're like, we'll look like idiots. Like I'll be for real. We were sitting here like, how have we only raised 8.5 million dollar? We are the fund launch people. We teach people how to run funds like bridge. I've raised 25 million just for a crypto fund for crying on like crypto is so much harder to raise for than other funds. And we just could not raise money. And we said, okay, we got to give this guy some economics because we got to raise this fund. Like we got to do this. So we gave, we gave these guys a good chunk of economics. But guess what happened? We raised our fund. So I was worth it now. This was for economics on fund one. We're now raising fund two. And we can now renegotiate economics on fund two. Now I believe we've done the exact same. We just kept it for the same for fun too. But we could change it. So sometimes like for your funds, you got to just get your fund raised and done and build momentum. Momentum in this business is key. People want to invest with people who are winners. They want to invest with a get stuff done. If you're out to market and no one's investing and no one, there's no traction. Why would someone invest? People want to invest in companies that are hot that are growing momentum that are going to close quickly. You got to have this and we're going to get to this in a second. This urgency about capital racing. For us, we brought these two partners in and within a handful of weeks, we had raised our entire fund closed and oversubscribed. And by the way, we told that we're over subscribed. And we said, Oh crap, we're over subscribed. We actually started to turn away money. We had a big family off. So I want to give us $5 million. We said, Hey, we can only take, I think we took 3.5 million from them. And they're like, dang, we're turning away money. We said, Yeah, we're over subscribed. We're the pretty girl at the dance. Everyone wants to invest with us. We have this great momentum. If you don't get in, you're going to lose your spot. That's how we engineered that and Lincoln talked about this over the weekend. Maybe I'll dive in a second. That's how we did that. So good question. So I would argue, Brendan, it's where you're at. But like, funds are cool too, because you can give away equity. And then on fun too, you, everyone always at the standard is you kind of renegotiate fun too. And then you're going to go, they'll shape fun three. What is a good percentage to offer for fund razor that helps it, that capacity. Do you pay them from the performance? Enter your management and see great question. My dad shared this. He's like, typically on here, he did a little bit smaller here. He did 40% was here of equity 40% was here and 20% was here. And what he says is give them the equity up front. So if you're going to give, let's say you have two capital is you give them 10% each 10% 10%. He said, give the money up front. And then all of us have duties. If they don't fulfill those duties and account or you do clawbacks. So every partner, and this goes for all of them, every partner in your fund is subject to a 50% clawback annually if they don't fulfill their duties. And by the way, this outruns right now like Bridger, I can I could be clawed back 50% out of my equity and fall in partners right now If I don't fulfill my duties in fall in partners. We're all that way holds us all to a standard and so that's how you do it with caprazers Now it's not you're not doing it just for capital raising you're doing it for all of their duties Okay, they're on the advisory board the investment to be the team. They're all everyone's helping every they're all partners And if all the partners come together on a super majority for us. It was like I don't know if there's seven voters six out of seven Had to agree that you did not fulfill your duties this year and we're gonna claw you back 10% Okay, totally answer that question Brendan. That's what we've done. That's my dad's funds did and that's actually turned pretty well And you're asking which entities I think we did they're in both they're part of the GP and they're part of the management company I think that's what we did well actually no, sorry. I correct myself some people were in both And then some people were just in the general partner So just depending on the person Capital raises like advisors. I would probably put just on the GP if they're like an advisory board member like with Bill and Bob I think we just put them on the GP But everyone else's core to the phone launch partners. We kept them in the manager company Hopefully that let ask more questions that doesn't make sense What's Bill's phone number believe me. I'm not telling you got to find your own bill. We got all right. We got our bill Like he's part of a group Bill up here Lincoln's meeting with him this week. It's I won't say the name of the group, but it's you have to have a over a hundred million dollar net worth liquid net worth to be in the group The average net worth is about 600 million dollars of liquid investible assets And bill likes us so much he didn't do something one, but now fun to Lincoln is in New York meeting with a punch people from that group That's a pretty good group like what's cool about what I want to share with us. I'll zoom out for a second You are one connection away From that You are one handshake away from that Like put that in perspective we were sad tears, you know not working out and then we got one connection to another connection and bam our fund was raised Now that happened because we put ourselves out there we flew across the country we were willing to shake hands and meet people and put ourselves out there Also we followed it up we had we were sharp When we met with bill we knew our numbers we had everything organized we looked clean we looked professional We had a good strategy. We had done the fun launch formula It didn't just happen because he thought we were nice guys It happened because we were quote unquote nice guys good people to do business with but we he loved our strategy Got it. It was figured out it was polished it was sharp I think about shark tank that you know the TV show shark tank when people come in and they don't know their numbers They don't they don't know how much revenue growth like the sharks just eat him alive So it's it's a little bit of both right you got to be ready, you know You guys get the cons I won't keep talking about but that's what happened with us But you are one handshake away. You're one meeting away. You're one trip away from figuring that out Which is pretty cool So this is what happened and we're doing this right now We already have good line of sight we might just do one close now I want to share something at Lincoln shared on I'm condensing a few things and we'll go to some nuke and I can answer questions on this So how do you create So these seven principles of persuasion here and I want to get into this in a minute So this is on the close so now we've got people that know like and trust us We've got our circles of influence How do we actually close them now? There's ways that you could obviously the pitch and how you present your materials great We're not talking about that right now. I'm talking about timeline of closing This right here is the biggest thing that you've got to build in your fund scarcity and urgency By the way, these come from the book influence many Psychologist references is there not things that I made up this is from like tried and true tested principles of persuasion I'm not going to go through all them right now But scarcity and urgency is a huge reason why people are persuaded to do something Okay, now they got to make sure you have to have authority on your topic You get micro commitments from these people. It's high five in a second. Social proof. Who else is doing this Rest of prostitutes you give me a gift. I'll I'm more likely to give you a gift back Do I like these people and then also is there a community at sometimes I do things because I want community or I want connection in those communities Okay, that's what persuades people to do things Let's talk about scarcity and urgency for a second. Okay, so this is what Lincoln and this is what we actually we learned this from Bill Bill ran a six billion dollar investment fund His last close they were trying to raise 750 million on his last fund. I believe they raised that in about four weeks And they oversubscribed I think to 1.2 billion dollars And bills like you guys want to know how I did that? We're like yeah teaches how you did that he goes this is what we did And I'll share and we're doing the same thing for launch partners right now. So let me make this a little bit bigger So he goes you have a timeline so I'm telling you in real time what we are doing right now So I'm gonna draw out a time. That's what Lincoln drew and I'll just drop for you again. So let's zoom in for a second All right, so these are months of the year. This is worth we did this as an exercise at the event. So that's December And then I'll do 2026 I even do November and January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December Then that would be 2027. Okay, got a little calendar here for you So we we were targeting our fund to We did the same thing for fund one by the way, but I'm gonna share you in real time what we're doing right now for fun to okay Fun to we are looking to raise 50 million dollars With a stretch to 70 now people don't know about the stretch. That's internal But 50 million is our capital race, okay? So what did we I'm gonna walk you through the actual time lines that we're doing right now This is I think useful for y'all and you guys can start literally build this for this year So end of last year October, November, December we started to Brame out our fun to Do we want to change strategy want to keep strategy We then went in December To our most trusted advisors these are actually this is not Bob or Bill somebody else that we trusted as an advisor and we Asked for advice on this fund We wanted to see if he liked it at all he liked it, okay We then in January, which is just if this is a few weeks ago We went to our highest Conviction investors That are in fund one for you that would be anybody that's already in your circle people that know I can trust you We did zoom calls Lincoln actually flew to Miami a bunch of them are in Miami for some reason so we flew to Miami to meet with them Again, we we were we were gauging interest asking for advice and sizing on fund to Lincoln came back with about 30 million dollars lined up from our highest conviction investors That's pretty good From here, okay, we were like all right our advisor thought it was you know go you should I should do this we got 30 million lined up go From here we said okay, let's set the timeline If we had not gotten good verbals, we probably would have changed the time of but this is the current timeline What we were doing Lincoln right now is going to our second tier in New York And other cities for our let's call it second tier investors second. I'm calling second highest conviction investors To gauge interest what we're telling everybody is the data room opens March 1st What we're doing And sorry, I'm getting I'm gonna draw some lines here clean this up. Okay data room helps it opens March 1st You then have till April 1st To send in a letter of intent Which is a one page non-biting document of your current site sizing of how much allocation You would want for this fund And I'll come back to why we do that in a second. This is all this is for current investors And what we say is whatever you put on the L.O.I. We will Reasonably guarantee that you will get that allocation April 1st We are opening up the data room to the public or broader range, okay? And we're then going to receive L.O.I.s For this for a June close And we're trying to do a one and done close Meaning we're what and what we're telling people is this hey last fund We had a lot of interest in our fund. We have a lot of investors lined up this one so now I'll come back to this We hope to Allocate you the amount that you want to invest but there's a chance we have to parse you back because we have so many investors that want to come in So what you what we should do let's put an L.O.I. of your desired amount So if your desired amount is because for example last fund we had somebody give us a five million dollar L.O.I. And we had to parse it back to 3.5 million But if for previous investors because we love you guys you're with us already whatever your desired amount is we will make sure that is carved out for you, okay? So you guys get first, you guys get first bite at the apple. April first, we're gonna go public with this. And we believe we have a lot of interest lined up. We may fill up and if you don't put your L.O.I. and you might not even be able to get into this fund. Okay. We take all these L.O.I.s, let's say by March, or sorry, May first. Did I miss March? March, April, May, no I miss. Okay, May first, we have taken in all the L.O.I.s and then we will tell you how much you're allowed to put in our fund. You all following on this? Okay, so May first, we'll say, okay, we're gonna give you the allotment and then we're gonna send out sub docs for signing. You already have the data room, data room's open. Sub docs will be signed and we're doing a close and first capital call in June, I think it's, I don't know, it's called June 15th, is the first capital call in close. That's what we're doing. Now, back to this, I talked about engineering, scarcity and urgency. You can kinda see now what we could do is just what most people do. Oh, hey, we're open in the fund. Yeah, we're doing a closing in June, just let us know if you're interested. Okay, that might get some money. What Bill taught us with his closely, he's like, we did this. This is how they raised $1.2 billion in four weeks. People put in L.O.I.s, they had to parse people back and they've created a culture in their fund. People know that it's hard to get an allocation in these funds. And the language is, we actually had an investor that wanted in our first fund, that wanted to write us a $10 million check. And this is when we were at $8.5 million. Anybody would be like, oh my gosh, that's amazing. $10 million, that would put us to $18.5 and that'd be amazing. Our advisor told us, he's like, guys, I mean, he goes, you can take that check. But what you should do, well, first off, that would be, if you're raising $30 million, that's 30% of your investor base is in one investor. He goes, I don't think you want that exposure to one investor. Further, so what you should do is parse them back. I think we parsed them back to five million. And so this, I think this, yeah, this investor put in $5 million. That's what happened. We were, we turned down money. And guess what, this investor now, they remember this. And they're like, man, those guys turned down my money. They obviously have money. And so on fund two, this investor remembers, oh man, these guys, like they turned down, I wanted to give them 10, they only took five and we're saying, hey, datarums opening March 1st, if whatever your allocation amount is, we will accept the full amount. But if you want to wait till April 1st, you might get parsed back. And so it creates, see, remember, we actually followed through with our scarcity and urgency. He, I don't know what he's going to write. We'll see. But they've already had talks, oh yeah, we'll let us know in the datarum, like they're on top of it. They're not going to wait for final close because we've built that into the culture of how people see our fund because we actually, scarcity and urgency only works if you actually follow through with it. You have to follow through with scarcity and urgency. Is this, is that useful at all? We did this for our fund one. We got LOIs and we made sure there, and you're fabricating scarcity and urgency, by the way, you're making stuff up. You're picking deadlines. You're just saying, hey, March 1st of the deadline, you got to get in. We've just picked those dates because we had to pick a date. Nothing happens without a deadline. You have to have deadlines. And so this helped us have a immense amount of, oh, I'm going to die over here. A immense amount of scarcity and urgency that was engineered into our, into our offerings. Is that useful at all? Is that helpful now? Let's say we don't reach our 50 million target by here. What we will do is we're going to hold a first close. And let's say only that 30 million comes in. We can extend, we believe what we would hold a second close in August. So we would hold this close. Everyone comes in and we'd come back either to this previous group and say, hey, we have another round. There's a few allocations to left. Some people left out and maybe these LOIs they get fully filled. Or we just continue to raise from new people. And we say, hey, we've already raised 30 of our 50. We're going to a final close here in September. I mean, we're targeting a fine. You could say targeting a final close. In case you don't hit it, but that gives them scarcity and urgency around, okay, this is the final, final chance to get in your last money in. Come join our final close on September 15th and come on in. As a fund manager, though, you have to set deadlines with investors. Everyone wants to be last money in. Everyone wants to wait. And this I engineer scarcity energy. Any questions on this? I love that I can dive in more. This is what we are currently doing right now. And we did this last year. It worked really well for us last year. Type in the chat or raise your hand and they bring you on. So if I was you, I would sit down with your team for 20, 27, 20, 20, 26. If you're in this and we had to do the frame, the fund, get advice and see if investors liked it, then we graduated all this stuff. If these people would have been, they didn't like it for some reason. Hey, do what we're doing. We wouldn't have had this as of aggressive a timeline. But we had a lot of people lined up. They love our strategy. What we're doing. And so we found we have clear, we're clear to launch. But if you're not clear to launch, figure out why they don't like it and go back to the phone, launch formula and keep working on your deal and strategy, your frame of structure, because your verbal and capital commands weren't good. Okay. That's crossing over validation right here. Yeah, I'm touching a few other things that hopefully useful. We can come back to this if you'd like, but try, drive in the chat if that's useful at all. Down here. So I just mentioned scarcity and urgency. Something that's useful as well is per if you're running a three C one fund, which is most likely most of you. Per the SEC's rules, you can only raise from 99 investors. The SEC has given you a gift of scarcity. When we were raising an open ended vehicle, which is a unicorn, we lean into this heavily, we'd say, Hey, we only had, we're at, we have 75 investors currently. We're going to be capped at 99. We think we're going to fill that up the next few months. So if you want to join, we do a closing at the end of every month. This next month, you know, the February 28th, we have a closing, you should get in because we only have so many spots left. Now it's not as strong for an open and a fund, but it's still there. Urgency for us came around the market. Hey, the, you know, we're in crypto, the clarity act is getting past soon. Certain institutions are adopting crypto. There's urgency or, oh man, the price is a really cheap right now. Crypto has fallen immensely. It's a good entry point right now to come into the market. So that gives urgency to what you're doing and a little bit of scarcity, little harder on close open and funds, but still you can totally do this on open and funds. Now when you speak and these are good, just ways to close, you have to speak with authority. You got to know your stuff better than anybody else. That makes sense. Commitment. If you notice what we did, we gave them L O I's non binding L O I's. They're one pageers that just say, hey, I have interest of investing $3 million. And we say the purpose of these, we're gathering these in to see how much we can allocate to everybody. Because we believe we're going to be over subscribed on this fund. See how we did that? Like a little bit of that's commitment. That's a little bit of social proof in there. Do you see that? And it sets you as an authority, right? Because of all those things. And it gives a little bit of scarcity and urgency just by that alone. Y'all following how genius that is? I would highly recommend doing this strategy for your close. Respiracity, my business partner Dan is amazing at this on most investor calls that we do. So, you know, we hop on, we do a pitch of our fund at the end. He's like, you know, what, sorry, at the beginning, we asked him out their businesses. What do you guys do? What's going on? What's your, what's your blah, blah, blah? By the end, Dan, my partner, he's thought up three to four ways that he can help their business. Oh, I have a buddy in manufacturing. You know, I should connect you to him. You know, I'm going to make a connection for you. Dan, he sells computers. We can help you. I help people with launch investment funds. Hey, oh, you guys are looking to a fund. Oh, great. Well, yeah, it's up on a call. I can help you with that. Respiracity builds a relationship with them. And then being just someone that's likable, you know, cracking jokes, being someone that's actually real and fun in your pitch. I've seen some people, you know, you'd probably all seen somebody pitch and it's kind of robotic. It's not much life to it. I've actually seen a lot of black remembers pitch. And I'm going to say this. I'm going to call this out. I've seen a bunch of black remembers that have Claude or Gemini write your pitch for you. And you read your pitch. I can tell you're reading your pitch. There's no, it's like, what are we doing here? It takes away your authority. It looks like you don't know what you're talking about because you're reading your pitch. He doesn't even know his stuff good enough, he has to read it. And also it makes me like you a lot less. Don't read your pitch. You should know this stuff so well and have passion in your voice as you present and pitch. Furthermore, you should be able to jump around your deck. You should be able to share any insights, questions they answer. You should be dynamic when presenting. This is what Orrin Klaaf talks about in the books, "Pitch Anything" and flip the script. And then liking community. If you can have a community aspect, you know, sometimes funds do, "Hey, once a year we do an investor summit, we play golf for three days, or we do a, we do cars and coin events, we have a dinner with our investors, it's just way to build community, and it's just a little icing on the cake, another reason why to join your fund. I'm going to share two more things on closing here. So again, this is a, this is a, we're doing a crash course on capperizing today, but it's just top of mind because of our event last week. Okay, we got in the room with people that we know, we connect with them when we get them to like and trust us. Closing, we're going to put these seven principles of precision. This is after the pitch. Now, during the pitch, I make sure I always have vehicle internal and external in every single pitch that I do. Now, what do these three things mean? For anyone to buy, I guess not anything, for most people to buy anything, I must say, most, they've got to first be sold on the vehicle. Then they're sold on internal false beliefs. So vehicle false beliefs, internal false beliefs, then external false beliefs. My favorite example is investment funds, because all of you have joined Black Card. So funds, investment funds, joining Black Card. This is, this is, this comes from a bunch of psychology books on how we perceive things. When something is first presented to you, we have what they call the crock brain or like, there's a crocodile or a tiger. We go into fight or flight. Okay. And often, we have to get person out of that into what they call the midbrain. Then they go into the neurocourt text brain, which we were there more analytical. I'm going to make this more simple than that. The vehicle would be the question I'm trying to answer is do funds work? When, when I don't know if you saw maybe my presentation for the first time ever or a video or an ad, what I'm trying to convince you of is funds work just in general. Fund managers make money. Okay. The next question is, okay, bridge, I get that funds make money. I get that fund managers are really rich and they're the best in the fours 100 less blah, blah, blah. Do or would a fund work for me? That's the next question. Yeah, bridge, I get that funds work, but would they work for someone in my situation? Someone that lives in Boise, Idaho or someone that does fix inflips or someone that does manufacturing or someone that does that's the next question. Okay. By the way, if I get someone to solve those two questions, they are quote unquote a, this is when you every like what, that person was a lay down sale. The reason someone's a lay down sales because they're already convinced on vehicle and internal. Because external false places, okay, how much time is it going to take? How much money is it going to cost? How much resources do I need to accomplish this thing? If someone believes a fund funds work and a fund would work for them, how much money are they willing to spend? Well, it doesn't matter. Money doesn't, if the fund's going to work for me, dude, who cares with the prices? How much time? I don't care because I will commit the time. I will find the resources. Think about anything you're selling, right? That's how that's how we work. So generally, if someone asks me a question, Bridger, a black card is too expensive. I go, okay, that's fine. It is expensive. First off, though, do you believe funds work? Yes or no? And do you believe a fund would work for you? Yes or no? More times than not, they don't believe one of these two things. Well, I don't know if it would work for me. Okay, let's talk about that. Money doesn't matter. Money's not the issue. The issue is you don't believe a fund would even work for you. So is that y'all following? Now, it's applies to funds. All these different colors. Use like this weird one is a salmon color. Nice salmon. Okay, vehicle would be your asset class. Does crypto work? Do I want it a part of my port? You know, actually, sorry, just just just cripple work in general. Now secondly, does it work for me slash us? Okay, so part of your pitch, I'm changing this a little bit, but hey, crypto, I'm using crypto because it's an extreme example. A lot of people don't like crypto. Hey, crypto works in general. This is how it works. That's a ledger with blockchain, et cetera. This is how we approach crypto. And this is why you should have it in your portfolio. That would be internal false beliefs. Y'all following? And then finally, okay, terms. This is performance rates, fees. That's external. Okay, I'll do this again. Real estate. And this is where you gauge at the beginning, you know, multi-family real estate. I'm just using a very generic one. Does multi-family real estate work? Like, yes, obviously. And there's a bunch of data, but you need to make sure they are sold on the vehicle first. Don't just skip that. You and now you can ask questions. And they will tell you, I write the mean, I, my first questions I ask when I hop on with somebody. Hey, tell me your background in crypto or multi tell me your background in multi-family. If you guys invested into before, do you like multi-family? Oh, we love multi-family. We got a bunch of properties. Great. Awesome. They are convinced on the vehicle. They don't need to learn about the vehicle. I can skip those slides because they get it. Let's just talk about how multi-family would work for us, me and you, the fund, how we approach it, et cetera. Now, in other cases, they might say, nah, we don't, we don't have multi-family yet. We like it, but we're not, we're not there yet. Okay, they like it, but they're not fully, they haven't done it yet. So they're obviously not fully convinced of vehicles. So I'm going to spend a little bit of time on multi-family, you know, on the vehicle. And then I'll talk about us. And then if they're like, you know what, we don't like multi-family. I got to spend the majority of the call just on vehicle. Do not graduate from vehicle until it's done. So another extreme example is crypto. Hey, what do you guys think of crypto? Everyone gives you these crazy answers. But let's say, I don't like crypto. I think it's a scam. I don't, Jeffery Epstein's involved in it. It's just a scam. Okay, let's talk about that for a little bit. I will spend a majority of my pictures on vehicle. And I, hey, does that make sense? Why people like crypto? I share some data. Did it, did it, did it, did it? You fall along. Do you see why others really like this vehicle? And they, oh, I get, I get that. Okay, I finally, I get why people like crypto. Awesome. Then and only then I will graduate to internal. I will stay on vehicle all day until they're convinced there's no reason to move to internal and external because they will not close. They will listen. They will smile. They'll tell you, yeah, send me over some docs. They will not close if they are not sold on your vehicle in my experience. So that's how, by the way, my pitch deck is organized this way. Vehicle slides are the beginning. Internal slides are here and external slides are at the end. That's how I structure my pitch. So I structure my landing pages, my emails. I structure most things that we do, vehicle, internal, my webinars, our three day events are structured this way.