Effective Branding Strategies for Your Capital Raising Journey

Richard C Wilson Guest 00:00

So there's four different levels of having a brand. Level one is your brand is so bad it repels people and they run away from you. If your brand literally does not have a logo or it's clip art, or it's a purple slanted font and PowerPoint, go, wake yourself up to modern times and get that taken care of. You know, it just makes it look like you don't take your own business seriously and it's driving people away.

Jonathan Tuttle Host 00:25

Tuttle, the host of the Accredited Investor Podcast, and I'm the founder at Midwest Park Capital, a boutique mobile home park real estate fund, along with Revenue Ascend, a leading digital marketing and fractional CMO agency, and a part of the founding team at Wowipop!, a new Kava and mood enhancing coverage. This episode is sponsored by Prestige, the world's most exclusive social networking app. All website links are in the show notes below. In this high level mini series called the $100 million Rainmaker Insights, Richard C Wilson of the Family Office Club, which is the founder of the world's largest ultra high net worth paid association and owner of billionaires.com, breaks down in short high value strategies in this 19 part mini series on how to grow, think and optimize to get your first $100 million. You will not want to miss any episodes. Enjoy this mini series. Please like, comment and share this podcast with your friends. Thank you.

Richard C Wilson Guest 01:30

Hello everybody, Richard C Wilson here, family Office Club. This is our $100 million dollar Rainmaker series, 17 module mini series on advanced capital raising strategies and secrets. We're now on module number three out of 17. This is not going to be the most popular module, but we have to cover it because it's fundamental to a lot of the other things that will make you more effective when raising capital. If you haven't watched module number one and two and the introduction module yet, I would encourage you to go watch that. This is going to make a lot more sense. If you've watched those Since you probably already have watched those in this series you'll know that you are much more effective if things are dialed into the exact needs, frustrations, headaches and excitement and knowledge and vocab of a specific investor demographic. We know that your language will convert them if it hits them between the eyes with where they are in the three trust curves of understanding and trusting your industry, you as a team and leader, and in the opportunity itself, and so the branding you use is really critical. Obviously, there are people who have raised a billion dollars and they don't use anything we talk about in these 17 modules. If you have an amazing referral base, if you are a partner at Goldman Sachs for 25 years and then roll out your own shop, etc. Then you may not need any of these strategies, right, but if you're watching this, it's because you want to get another 1% edge, another 2% edge and a lot of these things. Once you understand them and do them, they sweat for you for the rest of your career. This is a module that provides you with specialized knowledge that most people raising capital do not have, and in this stack on top of three to five other ideas, we'll give you an unfair advantage in the marketplace.

03:14

So branding is something lots of times people say oh, let me move on to the next module. We already have our brand. We chose our Greek God, or its Wilson capital, or ABC capital, because ABC stands for this, this and this, even though nobody ever asked what they stand for. So we just have a meaningless name, and that's the core of the issue. A lot of people in the investment industry have completely meaningless names. A lot of people use a Greek God and nobody really knows the story behind the Greek God. Nobody really asks, and so it's not very often unless you put a lot of effort into explaining why you chose that name and that might just kind of distract from your core messaging, right? You don't want it to distract, you want it to be sweating for you every time you interact with somebody. They know exactly what you do. A great example of this was a couple of Eagle Scouts I'm an Eagle Scout by chance myself.

04:01

I found that had a really cool strategy in a really crowded niche, which is the multifamily niche apartment buildings and I know 800 different syndicators in the apartment building space. We've written a book in the space. We've had hundreds of them per year at our events, probably, and what they were doing is buying really, really ugly motels that nobody wants and converting them into multifamily apartment studios. And the name of their platform was Iron Toro Capital. And when you hear Iron Toro Capital, you have no clue what they do, right? You don't know if they invest in commodities or biotech or if they're a long short hedge fund or if they're buying ugly motels. So we took a very simple step of converting their brand into Motel to Apartment Conversions LLC. And when you read the name, you know what they do. If you meet them at a coffee meeting for 10 minutes or meet them at a conference and they email you the next week. Just by their domain name and their logo, you know exactly what they do. That's really helpful right To anybody who's interacting with them.

05:03

So there's four different levels of having a brand. Level one is your brand is so bad it repels people and they run away from you. If your brand literally does not have a logo, or it's clip art, or it's a purple, slanted font and PowerPoint, go, wake yourself up to modern times and get that taken care of. It just makes it look like you don't take your own business seriously and it's driving people away. That's not most of you, though. Most of you have a decent looking brand. It's maybe just not dialed in to your investor demographic, to your strengths, to why people invest with you, and that would be a level two brand. It just sits there on the shelf, doesn't help you, doesn't hurt you. It just sits there doing nothing. You could raise a billion dollars with that brand. People have done it. There are many big investment companies where nobody knows what the meaning is behind that company, and that's fine. Level three, though, is that it gives the investor a hint of what you do as a team or what the benefits are of investing with you. This would be something that has some slight benefit to either the investor demographic or why people end up pulling the trigger to give you capital.

06:07

And a level four brand is that it's compelling in itself and it tells someone either exactly what you do or what you do and where you do it, or what you do and why they should invest with you. And an example of that is Motel to Apartment conversions, because you know exactly what they do and people who know the apartment building multi-family space may find that pretty interesting to learn more about right on the surface level. You also want the brand to look institutional quality. You want it to look polished and professional. I was the number two investor in a FinTech company and it was called Access Loans. You can check out their logo at AccessLoans.com Very professional, polished. We helped design that logo. Looks like a FinTech company and they ended up partnering with the bank over time and it's not because they had a great logo, but I think it probably helps on getting taken seriously both by clients and a big bank who ended up investing with them.

07:01

A couple other things to consider we had one real estate group that was starting to focus in on the Harlem area of New York. So we created a brand for them Harlem Real Estate Holdings. They said the deal flow that they got in the Harlem area went through the roof. After they rebranded to that niche Brokers thought of them first because they have a lot of people in their Rolodex that could send a Harlem deal to. But when a deal comes up in Harlem they think, oh yeah, who do I know who's focused on Harlem? Oh, Harlem Real Estate Holdings. Okay, let me send it over there first. Right, that makes it relatively easy to keep you in mind.

07:32

In the earlier module on mindset, I warned some of you that your deal flow is not as good as you think it is. Meaning. You might think, wow, this is a one out of 100 deal, it's a top 1% deal. But a very sophisticated investor might be seeing 10 times the number of deals that you are and a lot of different structures. So if the structure isn't good and the deal isn't amazing to them, they're not gonna care that you think the deal looks good, because they don't owe you a response to your email. And this is where having a really good brand name can attract both the investor and better deal flow and it becomes a virtuous circle and it raises everything. It raises tides for you. And so by having something like medical clinic capital and people know that you invest in multi-location, profitable medical practices as one of our two major platforms, then people know maybe to keep us in mind and send us medical clinic, medical practice deal flow first, and if we get to see those deals more often than others, we'll get better deal flow than others. But also, when we pitch a doctor or a family office on medical clinic capital, they get an idea about what we do just by the name, and clinic capital is an alliteration and so we like that part about it. It's nice and clean and tight, and so that's something to keep in mind is that a great brand name could attract both deal flow and investor capital flow in the door. A bad brand name drives people away and the average brand name in the investment industry just sits there and does nothing for you at all.

09:00

Couple other quick examples we had a client come to us through our investor relations marketing agency called PitchDex.com. It's one of our divisions at the Family Office Club and they wanted to rebrand and so they were having investors put in money and then they would do equipment leases and the investors would get like a 7% to 8% return, I think it was, with the collateral being the equipment. And so they said we said why do people invest with you? And they said because of the collateral. They like the income. So we rebranded them to a name that didn't mean anything, what didn't mean anything before we rebranded them to collateralized income investments. As soon as they did that, they said thanks, picked up, they became easier. People got what they were doing and why they were doing it. We helped them show pieces of their equipment in the pitch deck and in the one pager and everything started moving faster for them.

09:52

For the short-term rental community platform, we have, as of today, equity in 84 assets. It's growing every week. On Tuesday we're acquiring four more units and we call it InvestorResidences.com . When you go to any of our Airbnb guests that go and stay at our houses to get access to Wi-Fi which is just about every single person they have to log in to our Wi-Fi network and they have to type in IvestorResidences.com for the username and InvestorResidences.com for the password. So there's no way they stay at our properties and not know that it's owned by InvestorResidences.com. And I guarantee you, over time we're gonna pick up a strategic relationship or investor or repeat booking, et cetera, through the branding of InvestorResidences.com . You can look at the logo and branding also on DentistInvestors.com . I see how I have dialed that in to the medical world.

10:49

And several years ago probably six years ago we had done so many family office conferences and we were starting to have a private equity slant to some of them. So we said, well, it's not just family offices now, it's private equity, hedge funds, real estate, it's more than just family offices. And we said, what if we called it Wilson conferences? Maybe that's a better name and it was a big mistake. Immediately we felt the airplane is like one of our engines and shut off and things started to come off the rails and people actually being interested in joining our platform. We put it back to family office club and things took off again.

11:21

So people want to be part of a Family Office Club. They don't care at all about Wilson conferences. The only people who care about a brand that has your last name on it are people who are so far up that trust curve in you that they would invest in matter what you called your business. You're not trying to customize your brand to attract people that already like you and do business with you. You're trying to customize your brands and you reach out to a complete stranger who's very busy. They say, oh, that's just for me. Oh, that's interesting, that's related to what I know really well, but that's related to a niche that I've always been interested in getting access to and that sounds unique and valuable. So this was module number three on branding.

11:57

How we've learned this was a few different ways. I run the family office club. I've been running this investor club for 16 years, opposed to the 190 live events as of right now. We host 15 live events per year. In every quarter, we host a big investor summit. This has 400 to 1400 people at every investor summit, 70 to 130 speakers on stage. And then every year, I'm hosting a dozen workshops, and these workshops are on Capital raising best practices, how to structure deals, how to prepare for due diligence on a deal, how to work with private investors more effectively, investor influence and persuasion, and each workshop is five and a half hours long and we have ten different topics that we do five and a half hour workshops on.

12:41

So, between running the Family Office Club, which you can learn more about if you'd like to Join us, and come to some of those live events.

12:49

You can go to family offices calm, but also through pitch decks calm. We have created over 1,000 marketing assets for people who are raising capital and we've done this for over 200 clients, and so we have learned through our own capital raises, through clients, through speakers on stage Well, over a thousand speakers on stage every couple of years honestly, what works when raising capital, what doesn't work. And the people who are struggling do a lot of things in common. The people who raise a lot of money every year do a lot of things in common, but they're not the same things. So we try to identify those golden threads and share them with you through our workshops, through our books, through our YouTube channel, through the 17 module mini series, as I hope you enjoyed module number three here on Branding, and our next module, number four, is going to be on designing and scripting out your Compelling one-liner for your investment offering and your company. So this is Richard Wilson, and thank you for joining us in this mini series and I'll see you on module number four.

Jonathan Tuttle Host 13:50

Hey, it's Jonathan. I get exclusive access to great investment deals, opportunities from my community, my network and just for my loyal listeners We'll give you first access. Go to AccreditedInvestorPodcast.com and sign up for the email list. Also, join the Accredited Investor Podcast Patreon group where we give you additional exclusive interviews, monthly, private Group calls and networking with others in this community. Check out Accredited Investor Podcast on Patreon. Finally, I get a lot of people asking for to help them one-on-one. Yes, I can, but it's very limited. Go to RevenueAscend.com/consulting .For any real estate investing exclusive access go to MidwestParkCapital.com . All links are included below. Please like, comment, share this podcast with other friends. Thanks for listening you.