CLIP: An ex-investor reveals why your cold DMs get ignored | Elevate, £1m Smoothie Firm

0:00Like a lot of people, you know, would tell me, oh, yeah, you should start like doing a pop up. And the thing is that it doesn't really work that way. And I knew what was required in terms of like investment to make it happen. And I was like, OK, listen, if I'm doing it, I'm doing it like all the way. I'm not just going to do a pop up on, you know, on weekends. Like I rather focus my time and energy on like getting everything rather than doing something halfway. way. So I knew that I needed the cash. So it's when I decided to reach out to over like 450 investors on LinkedIn, just like call emailing them.

0:36Because again, I, you know, it's hard to raise money, but I think it's even harder when you don't have like an actual business in the sense that the business was not open. It was not trading, not generating any like income whatsoever. So that was definitely like a numbers game when it comes to like finding investors.

0:56Olly Fawcett:Is there an art to that? Because I feel like we've had people on the show, I've had many conversations like, when were you doing this as well? Was this 2023? 24. 24. Harder time to raise as well, right? The market was a little bit all over the place as it's been for the last five years. But like, you know, not as good as 2020 and 21 where money was free, basically. Do you have some strong advice with your two sides of the experience, you know, being family office, private XP, then going out and raising from angels? What is your best guidance you would give someone who's going down that route? Because I felt like a lot of people just go like, if I email a thousand people, one will reply.

1:32Olly Fawcett:Or they'll go like, very strong on the deal and maybe screw themselves over later down. There's so many things that go wrong at this point what is your best guidance there i would say first of all don't message like you know hundreds or thousands of people just like copy pasting the same like email and just hoping that one would reply yeah um you know when you're an investor and i was doing like um angel investment before right so you know i would have people like reaching out like every day i would get like 10 messages of hey like i'm launching this business whatever and you know it was not like personalized or sometimes it was like the wrong name or saying oh you're an expert in you know technology like i'm not so i think like i would really advise not to send like generic messages which lead me to like what i would advise doing is really craft some very very personal like messages for investors um you need to understand like when you're asking money to someone they won't like give it to you just like to be nice with you the sense that you know it's not to make you a favor, like as an investor, your goal is to make money.

2:36So when you're approaching like an investor, you need to show them how they can make a return on their investment and why it's interesting for them specifically. Because obviously like investors are specialized in like different sectors. So I would say that's the biggest piece of advice. Like think about like what you're bringing to the table for this investor, because a lot of people, you know, are just like emailing or like messaging saying, oh, can I please get like you know like 100k you're an angel investor like i'm not you know you know what i mean like it's it's not something you need to really spend the time and that's something that you know now again like with claude or chat gpt you can get much of it right it's it's yeah but now i think you know like you can also like of course it takes time to just like go through the profile see what they have invested in and like what's the sector but i think that now it's so much easier also to get like this background information on the investor that, you know, you get things in bullet point and you just have to spend maybe like 15 or 10 minutes thinking, okay, like knowing this information on the specific investor, why would it make sense for them?

3:42And you just like write a message that again, you can write it yourself and say, hey, you've invested in that investment. I'm launching something, you know, in the same sector. so that's that's the way I would I would approach it being very kind of like specific and like take the time because again it's there is no shortcut to receiving investment you need to put the work

4:05Olly Fawcett:in what were some of the biggest doubts that the investors had outside of I mean you fixed one of them straight away with knowing the operational side but the fact that you wanted a brick and mortar space like you obviously were you always aiming to be in London to start with I imagine so So outside of that, was there any other big concerns from that? I think the brick and mortar piece is definitely, you know, I would say maybe a blocking point for some investors because obviously it's a very different type of business. It's not like you can scale, you know, from like zero to 100 million in 18 months because it takes time to open like those physical locations.

4:42So I would say it's definitely one point that maybe, you know, is kind of like a blocking point for investors. but again I think I was lucky enough to find like my investors that also understand like the retail space and so I don't have to educate them to explain saying oh retail is and brick and mortar is a bit of like a longer game than you know investing in D2C where you know we've seen companies like literally being sold for like a billion dollars in you know three years or five years which is which is crazy but I know it's not the route that I'm taking and that's also something and very clear with my investors.

5:19Olly Fawcett:Do you think a red flag when bringing investors in is they can they've got the check and they want to invest the check but they clearly don't understand the vision. Do you think that's a big red flag? I would say so and you know I would also assume that if they don't get the vision they would not invest in the first place and that's always something you know I've kind of like noticed you know when I was doing like investor calls and like pitching the idea, if I had to explain to them the wellness market and explain to them that, you know, it was a growing market, I knew 100 % of the time that they would not invest.

5:54Yeah. But which makes sense. Yeah. Because, you know, if you don't understand the market specifically, or you don't have like a strong enough conviction on the wellness market, then it means it's not your type of investment. So that's definitely, that would be a red flag.

6:09Olly Fawcett:Yeah, definitely. So you managed to raise the funds. step two is find a location. I mean I know how it went. Tell me how it went. Yeah it was you know again it was a journey and nothing was kind of like easy. It was a journey, it's such an understatement. And linear. Because you know once you have the money it's one thing because it gives you the kind of like ability to you know put down an offer and just hope that you can pay the lease and go through. But the thing is like, you know, London is a very competitive market. There are a lot of like amazing brands out there that are also scaling and looking for the same type of locations that we were looking at.

6:52So there is a lot of competition. And again, once you're in a business that essentially doesn't exist and you don't have like a proof of concept or something to show to the landlord, You know, I don't blame them for deciding to go for, you know, with a more established brand or like a more established like coffee chain. So it was again, a lot of like back and forth. I've seen, honestly, I've stopped like counting the amount of locations that I've seen. There was one that I really liked that we didn't get. And, you know, it's just like, it feels like you're kind of like wasting time.

7:26Olly Fawcett:Where did you want to be? Initially, I wanted to open West. I wanted to be in like Chelsea or Nothing Hill because I thought it's really where the kind of like wellness crowd is. And I was very focused on that area, which is one of the most competitive markets at the moment because everyone wants to be there.