Attracting investors can be a challenging, time consuming and often relentless task. Moreover, It can be tricky to know what to say and how. Today, I explore what to look for in this deep dive episode when pitching to investors as an audience. This fundamentally takes a strategic communication approach and a very specialist one. However, at its heart, it’s still about connecting with an audience and making them act.

I wanted to bring someone onto the podcast who knows all about this, so I am thrilled to be joined by Andrea Cockerton, award-winning social entrepreneur, founder of DIUO (the new Smart TV platform for musicians just closing its first investment round), and – under her Mudhut brand – a pitch consultant for more than 15 years to a staggering 2000 plus entrepreneurs & CEOs delivering investor & business-critical pitches, including Dragon’s Den record breakers The Wand Company, and direct pitches to Bill Gates.

We cover what to say, how to create ‘magic moments’ and what investors are now looking for post-pandemic.

So let’s dive in!

Useful links:

Discover more about Andrea:

Fundraising links:

What to do next:

Get my FREE roadmap to get more strategic with communication activity in your business (also here: https://bit.ly/SevenSteps2Success )

If you’re new to marketing your business or need a refresher on audience insight, checkout How to find customers and help them buy from you’

Follow me on LinkedIn

 

PS – Did you know? Communication Strategy That Works is in the top 90 UK Small Business Podcasts you must listen to in 2021, by Feedspot.

Full Transcript (unedited)

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So welcome, Andrea, to the podcast. Thank you so much for agreeing to give up some of your time to come and talk to us about all things communications and investors today.

Andrea (00:14):
Very happy to.

Speaker 1 (00:16):
I know you have a wealth of experience, as listeners would’ve heard in the intro about how you’ve helped more than 2,000 entrepreneurs, is it, and CEOs with their investor and business pitches over the years?

Andrea (00:28):
Well I’ve been doing this since around 2005, so it’s been a fairly long time now. And I’ve worked with a lot of very, very smart people.

Speaker 1 (00:39):
I should probably say to listeners, Andrea and I are from a similar part of the world, in this Cambridge technology cluster world. So Andrea, you have access to a great pool of people here, don’t you?

Andrea (00:52):
Cambridge is really interesting, I think, in terms of the entrepreneurial community, and there’s… Well, I’ve been involved in it, the dates work out, for about 15 to 20 years, and it’s just the ideas and the creativity and the talent that exists in this small part of the UK is really impressive. And there’s such a big ecosystem as well for supporting those entrepreneurs.,So it’s a great place to be if you are looking to start a business, definitely.

Speaker 1 (01:21):
Absolutely. Why don’t you elaborate on that a little bit? Just tell us a bit more about yourself, because I’ve done a short intro, but how did you get into your area of work and what exactly is the work you’re doing at the moment?

Andrea (01:33):
So I got into doing what I’m doing by running a business angel network in around 2003, 2004, that was in Cambridge. And I got into that because I’d been working on the management team of a dot com that was in a company that was kind of a precursor to LinkedIn, really. It was a little bit too early. It didn’t quite make it. Yeah, it was really exciting time. And I left that and went onto this investment forum and worked with a lot of entrepreneurs there in introducing them to investors, selecting them, and helping them get their pictures right. And it was that that really got me excited because what I could see was that there were a whole lot of smart people with brilliant businesses, but actually if they couldn’t get that moment of communication right to the investor, that business was worthless.

Andrea (02:22):
So I went off on my own to set up, Mud Hut, which is the pitch consultancy that I’m, I’m still doing. And I’ve gone on to work with entrepreneurs pitching for funding, so it’s carried on in that environment, but it’s also broadened out into working with crisis comms and investor management and working on global keynote speeches as well. So the way I tend to think about it is when you literally can’t afford to get it wrong, when there’s a cost to that moment and you really need to de-risk that moment of communication. So that’s where I come in as the content expert, if you like, and work with clients to make sure those moments deliver what they want them to.

Speaker 1 (03:04):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you’re a strategic communicator, which is why I thought it would be really interesting to get you on the podcast today. And it is a really interesting skill, isn’t it? As you say, taking the skills that we’ve got can be really beneficial in these instances.

Andrea (03:21):
I completely agree, but I think it’s even more different in the entrepreneurial space because entrepreneurs are a really wonderful bag of conflicts and contradictions and they have to be resilient and confident, but if they’re too cocky, it puts investors off, so there has to be humility in there. It’s a really unique set set of skills that you need when you’re pitching to investors. It’s just so fascinating how you work with people that have to make that moment of high pressure getting to the money in the pocket work.

Speaker 1 (03:58):
Yeah, that’s really interesting, isn’t it? Because you don’t start a business, I don’t think any entrepreneur starts a business because they think, “Oh, I’m really, really good at getting money from investors.” It’s usually about the idea or the product or the service, isn’t it?

Andrea (04:10):
It is. And that’s wonderful because you’ve got to have that passion and that passion has to come over when you’re communicating to try and get funding into your business, but it can work against you because essentially these businesses are your children, they’re your babies. It’s so hard to be objective. It’s almost impossible, actually, because you’re so invested in it and it’s time and your own money. So trying to come out of that and be very, very clear in what you are communicating to your investor audience, it’s a skill that I think CEOs of young businesses really struggle with because they’re tied for time and also they can’t be objective.

Speaker 1 (04:51):
Absolutely. I mean, you’ve got firsthand experience as well, we should probably tell people, that you’ve also been through this yourself, and not just in an advisory role, is that right?

Andrea (04:59):
That’s right. I’m actually in it at the minutes. So I’m with a bit of luck closing our investment round. I’ve got a startup that I’ve been working on in the last year and we are talking now to four angel investors and just hopefully closing that round this week. It’s very exciting time. And I have proved all the things I’ve said to entrepreneurs over the last 15 years or so, which is that, just as I’ve just said, it’s impossible to be objective. And luckily I know it, so I could tell that I couldn’t step outside my business, and I got some really good feedback from friends and from business colleagues on what I was saying and what I was missing out. But I do know firsthand the journey and the difficulty and the excitement and the adrenaline and every different aspect of it.

Speaker 1 (05:45):
That’s fantastic. I mean, that must be a huge, huge asset when you’re advising clients as well. I know it helps me in my business when I can say, “Look, I’ve been in your position.” I don’t do what you do, but in the terms of my context, if I’m helping a marketing team or a head of comms with a challenge, I say, “Look, I’ve been in-house. I know how time pressured you are. I get it.” I think that does really help when you’re trying to build relationships with clients and trying to also help them make those critical decisions, doesn’t it?

Andrea (06:17):
It really does. And particularly going back to the entrepreneurial small startup community, where you are doing everything to try and get this business off the ground, it’s almost a rarefied environment. Everything is so fine tuned, A knocks onto B, which knocks onto C, you are juggling so many balls and speaking to somebody’s that’s actually going through that the same time or has been through it is very valuable. It’s a peer network, and peer networks in the startup community are so valuable and so strong because we all go through the same experiences. We all have the same struggles, even if we’re working in different sectors. So there’s so much to learn from people that know your experience.

Speaker 1 (06:57):
Let’s talk a bit about this communication aspect. So in terms of… One of the things I reflect on, I work with growing business, I call them scale-ups, I suppose, a lot of the time, where they are funded to grow and in that ongoing funding cycle, but also growing at a huge pace, adding people to the business. And I think one of the things that I see is the lack of ability, I suppose, in some ways to see investors as a different audience and treating them differently to how you would be doing your product communications or your service led communications with customers.

Speaker 1 (07:38):
You got to take time out and really focus on that and it not be the strategy, but also how does it fit in, I suppose, is my question, and what are your experiences? I know what mine are, and I think people struggle with that is what we need to is always pressure to attract ongoing investors, but actually the focus around audience and all of the website and everything is pointing at customers, because that’s obviously the bread and butter and the sales need to come in at the same time. What were your thoughts on that?

Andrea (08:09):
I think there are two thoughts. The first is the process. What I found… I knew this to be the case anyway, from talking to investors over the years, but what I’ve definitely found with my own investment search is that the amount of investor decks I’ve created is huge. So I’ve probably, and this isn’t an exaggeration. I’ve probably got 60 versions of my deck, and it has… As a communicator, that’s a bit of a nightmare because how do you manage that? And that number has resulted because I’ve learned so much as I’ve been going through the process of pitching to investors. So you do get a lot of feedback, which perhaps you don’t get so much in other elements of comms. Obviously you’re trying to talk to an audience or clients regarding your product or service, and sometimes you do get feedback, sometimes you don’t.

Andrea (09:02):
With investors, it’s the same, but when you do get feedback, it’s very critical and very useful, and you can adapt what you’re saying. So my deck has firstly adapted because I’ve had some fantastic feedback from investors saying, “I don’t understand it. I’m not getting this. What about this?” And secondly, it’s also changed because perhaps more so than in a business that has got an established product line, my business is changing because it’s so young and it’s growing quickly, it’s changing all the time. So I’ve got to make sure that my deck reflect the latest achievements, if you like. And that presents a communication challenge, because it can quickly get out of control. So you need a strategy to manage the iterations you’ve got, and I use a tool called Canva, which has worked really well, and I’ve got naming protocol that I’ve used, which has provided some sanity for me when I’m trying to manage this mass of data. So I think be prepared that it’s going to be quite a logistically challenging process in terms of comms. You need to manage it.

Speaker 1 (10:09):
I hadn’t really considered that, actually, but the version control must be insane.

Andrea (10:15):
It is a bit insane. It is, you’re right. And the second thing I think is that as communicators, as strategic communicators, we are thinking incredibly creatively all the time about how to reach our audiences. And I’m not sure that people necessarily apply the same creativity to investors. They tend to go, “Here’s my deck. Thank God, I’ve done it. It was hard work. I’ve created it. Great. I can fly with it.” And as I’ve just said, you will have multiple versions. But also people, I think, default to the standard 10 slides that you should include, and it’s a little bit prosaic, and even now in 2021, people are still creating the world’s shoddiest slides using PowerPoint that overrun with data and million figures on a slide, and it’s just unforgivable, really in today’s age.

Andrea (11:06):
So of course you can sort that out, but I think there’s even a way to be even smarter, and it’s thinking about those investors as a customer, and you’re selling to them, and you need to have that same quality of communication that you would with a very high value customer. What I end up doing, because I’m a semi geek, so I do do quite a lot with different aspects of technology, and essentially I built a landing page. So I had two versions of my deck. A short one, which was an intro that people could read without needing anything else. And then a long one that really would be if they were already interested in the business and wanted quite a lot more detail. But then I put both of those within a landing page, where on that landing page I had links, really clearly designed links to the numbers, to the team, to the market growth. So if somebody was… And a whole bunch of other things.

Andrea (12:06):
So if an investor just wanted to cut to the chase and say, “Right, I don’t want to sit and look through a deck. I don’t want to even look to a deck. I just want to get the facts straight away. So how do I find those?” And essentially, it was a kind of hub, and I had some really good feedback on that, which was, “Nobody’s done this.” And it took a mixture of design and copywriting to make it look smart and work, but I took the time, and I think that’s paid dividends. So don’t just do what everybody else does. Stand out. I mean, that’s a golden rule of business.

Speaker 1 (12:42):
That’s really good advice, Andrea, actually, and yeah, you’re absolutely right, that’s what we would be doing for a customer campaign, isn’t it? We would be focusing all our efforts and what’s going to convert that person as soon as they land on your material. And it’s interesting that there’s still some old practices in the area of investor relations. And I wonder if people think that there’s still this image conjured up of dusty people sitting behind a desk ready to say yes or no. I mean, we’re all familiar with Dragon’s Den now, which I love that program. And there’s a real diverse mix of people on there all with their own opinions and successful businesses behind them. But not every pitch is like that, right?

Andrea (13:28):
And of course Dragon’s Den is brilliant, but it is TV at the end of the day, it’s entertainment, and they carefully edit what goes out. So I worked with one of the companies that pitched a number of years ago, broke all the records at that time, and they were in there for three hours being questioned. What you saw was three minutes. So it’s carefully edited. And of course they want characters both as the investors and as the entrepreneurs because it’s more engaging. But there is definitely truth in there, and does that reflect real life? In my experience, actually, it pretty much does. There is ego in a room full of investors. There are people that are trying to outsmart other investors, trying to outsmart themselves. That does exist. But there are also, and I think in the main, in my experience, there are also just really interested people, certainly in the angel community, really interested people asking genuine questions and wanting to find out about your business. And that can be a really lovely discussion.

Andrea (14:34):
There’s nothing better than getting questioned on the thing that you’ve invested all your time into. You can talk about it. In the VC community, so I’ve spoken to quite a few pre-seed VCs and seed VCs, they’re harder to communicate with. It feels their time is tighter. I think they’re probably approached a lot more. But I think the environment has changed a little bit. So I was reading an article that said around 20 years ago there are about 30 funds. I’m not sure if that’s true. But the article went on to say that now there’s about 800. Now that crazy. And certainly when pulling together a list of investors to approach, it was like, “Blimey, where do you start?” There are so many investors out there and there’s a shift also towards… There’s big pushes towards diversity, so towards diverse founders or female founders, and also towards impact businesses. So there’s so much choice in terms of who you approach and try and reach, and you’ve really got to get a handle on that. So you need to segment your audience, a term we’re all familiar with in terms of strategic marketing, segmenting your investors.

Speaker 1 (15:49):
That’s, again, something I’ve not really considered. It’s a interesting point around… I was just thinking that when you were saying it, that there are clearly lots of different… A, lots of different types of investors. When you’re a bigger organization and you’re more corporate, let’s for listeners benefit call you a more corporate kind of organization, more people on board, you may have a fancy investor relations agency on board to do lots of work for you, but actually there’s… So what we are talking about here today is growing businesses and this sort of… You mentioned a number of different… The types of funders, types of funding. I mean, what are they. You just read through a couple, I was like, “Okay, I need you to explain those, please. Yeah, let’s do that.

Andrea (16:36):
So the two I mentioned there were angel investors and then VCs, which stands for venture capitalists. And angel investors invest their own money and venture capitalists invest other people’s money. And typically angels will be investing smaller amounts and VCs will be investing more and much more. So if you are… As you are starting a business, often you’ll put your own money into it, and you may then move on to get some family and friends supporting the business. And then perhaps when you’re needing… The figures are very broad, but let’s say anywhere between 100 and maybe 500, you might be looking for angel investments. So these are the people who invest their own money and they may have it because they’ve been successful themselves, either as an entrepreneur or as just being really well paid, or it may be family money. There’s lots of different ways that people can have that kind of capital. But they’re putting their own money into you.

Andrea (17:37):
And then the next step beyond that is typically to go into the VC space where they’re investing other people’s money and that’s higher levels. Different stages, I think I mentioned in the last answer, pre-seed, seed, and then there’s after that, there’s various things called series A, series B. So pre-seed is the lowest that a VC would get involved, probably, maybe even alongside some angels, but certainly just after. And then seed is the next stage. And then series A gets up into the millions and series B more millions. And then you go on. There’s quite a structured universe, investment ecosystem, and there’s loads and loads of information about all of this online. And most of it’s pretty good as well, because all of this community is at the cutting edge of business, so it’s always changing and always learning.

Speaker 1 (18:34):
Well we’ll definitely put some links in the show notes for people today, I think, around some of that information, understanding some of the terminology. I mean, there’s some of it obviously I was aware of, but perhaps didn’t really understand the levels involved there, so that was a really helpful summary. I mean, what about timing as well? Someone like you, when do you typically… What’s the best time for you to get involved in terms of helping? Is it a bit like bringing in communicators in any other sense, “Oh, we need to do something, let’s get someone who knows how to do this.” Have they already done a lot of thinking and then you end up unpicking or is it… How’s the timing?

Andrea (19:09):
It’s interesting. So a lot of my work with entrepreneurs is done via workshops that I do for institutions like business schools. I am actually going to be launching some myself, thanks to the last year and a half, it’s been great to jump into what is possible online. So I’ll be launching those probably within the next month or so. So if they’re are in a workshop program, it’s generally part of their structured learning. So typically entrepreneurs are going through staged learning with an incubator or an accelerator where how to pitch is part of it. So I think a lot of the people I’m working with are still forming their ideas. When I’m working one to one with clients, if I’m really honest, most of them come to me when they’ve left it too late, and they’ve realized that they really need some help because their pitches aren’t working for them.

Andrea (20:06):
In any case, what I’m going to do with a client is listen to what they’ve got, and then there’s generally a process of deconstruction. So we take its pieces, which is a little bit soul destroying. I often use a sports analogy. If you are playing tennis, you’ve got certain grip. If you change your grip, it all goes wrong before it all goes right. And that’s the same with pitch work, that we take something that’s been created, we change it, and then it feels wrong. And then you have to test it and stretch it before it starts to feel right. And I typically work on a number of different elements, so I’m looking at the structure, looking at the proof within, so the logic, the data, the compelling facts. I’m looking at language and intent and understanding of the audience.

Andrea (20:57):
But I think perhaps the main thing that has to wrap around all of this is enchantment. Ultimately investors are looking for business builders, and it doesn’t mean that you have to be the best presenter, but you have to get them to go, “Oh my goodness, this is incredible.” And that falling in love with the possibility of a business is what can really make a pitch sing. People come to me a little bit late, I go through that process with them, and then on a one to one basis, it’s typically a couple of sessions. There’s a first one where we pull it to pieces and start to reconstruct it. The client goes away, thinks a little bit more, and then comes back for a sanity check. But just a word here, in terms of when you should go funding, just don’t leave it too late till you’re desperate because this is a bit of a funny example, but it’s like dating, that if you’re desperate, people can spot it a mile off. Honestly, it’s a real turn off. Be because what it says is they’ve left it too late, they’re not good business planners. End of.

Speaker 1 (22:09):
Right, they can see that they’ve not come about. That’s complex, isn’t it? You’ve got to be on it on a lot of levels with this type of communication. I can see why it is a one in a however many chance of getting it right. It’s not something you get right every day, is it?

Andrea (22:29):
Some people of course do. Some people, all the stars align and it all works, and their business is at the right stage and they do a fantastic pitch and the investors have got money and it just works. But that’s generally not the case. It is something you have to work at, keep working at to find the right investors, make sure your pitch is perfect, or as perfect as it can be, and get at the messages across.

Speaker 1 (22:53):
There must be some companies that you know of that have gone on to be more known names now.

Andrea (22:58):
There are two. They may not remember this, but as part of an accelerator program back in possibly 2007, maybe 2008, I worked with Zoopla, Who obviously have gone on to do really well. The record breaking company that I mentioned a few minutes ago is called The Wand Company. They were on Dragon’s Den in 2010 and they got offers from all the investors, chose one, and in the end they didn’t need the investment because they were doing so well. They’re not so much a household name, but they make very clever tech geek products like a wand, for example, that can control your infrared… Uses infrared to control TVs and lights, and they’ve done Star Trek devices and Star Wars devices. So it’s really playing into the fantasy community, but using super, super cool products that sync with phones and all sorts of stuff. So they’ve been very, very successful.

Speaker 1 (24:03):
So what would you say… I mean, because I see a few things around people’s approaches to getting more… I’m using inverted commas, but you can’t see, because we haven’t got videos on today for those who don’t know. People try and have that magic touch with, “Oh, we’re doing lots of awareness raising activity.” And I see people go for media relations quite a lot in terms of what they think they need and what will work. And I’m always a little on the fence with it. I mean obviously a really well placed story in exactly the right publication absolutely hits the nail on the head and you always get a spike in website traffic when you’re in the media. Absolutely you do. But as a strategy, what’s your feelings about that?

Speaker 1 (24:50):
In my experience, when people have gone for that strategy as an awareness campaign, without having the backend sorted so that, like you say, the website, you have a very clear proposition on your website and that’s really important because if you’re going to drive a whole load of people to your website, you want to make sure that they can do the right thing when they get there. And there’s a lot of things you’ve got to have checks and balances in the background. It’s not just about that story being placed. So what are your feelings around that and what experiences have you had there in terms of perhaps what people could be doing or should be doing in that space?

Andrea (25:26):
Well, I think the majority of my experience in that area is about where people arrive. So I bizarrely have an absolute love of building websites. I don’t know quite where that’s come from.

Speaker 1 (25:37):
Do you?

Andrea (25:37):
I do. And I think it’s because I’ve had a number of businesses of my own and I’ve just ended up creating the websites for them, and I love it. But I think I’ve probably fallen into the trap that you’ve just mentioned where often you’re trying to do something in terms of your PR or your media relations and the websites don’t stack up behind them. And I would hear points to the technology that exists now to very quickly change and adapt what your website is saying. And I use landing pages, and I’ve used them for the last year and a half for a number of different purposes, including actually the investment campaign.

Andrea (26:20):
So the technology out there allows you to have landing pages that adapt to where the user is looking at your page from. So if they’re looking at it from Cambridge, it will say one thing, if they’re looking at it from Madrid, it’ll say another. You can even do that in languages, so you can have an English speaking page for Cambridge and a Spanish speaking for Madrid. You can tailor these pages so that depending on what ad or story they’ve clicked on, they come to this page or that page. You can also then tailor it using landing page tech, so that A/B testing. So say you’ve got a campaign and it’s pointing people to a page, let’s say, campaign.com, on that page itself, it could have 3, 5, 10 different versions if you want, and you can use AI to figure out which page is working best for you.

Andrea (27:22):
That kind of technology means that there’s no excuse for being lazy. When you’re going out and speaking to the world, and you’ve got something that’s got traction in the media, what you do with them and how you capture them and how you interact with that, it should be delightful. It should be playful and adaptive. It’s not the brass plaque on thing. “Hi everyone, come here,” and it’s just the same old story.

Speaker 1 (27:48):
Yeah, exactly. I think a lot of people fall down there and don’t think that through, in their… I’m not talking about you here obviously, but some of the companies I’ve worked with and there’s need to build awareness, but actually what you end up with is either a lot of tire kickers on your website, a high bounce rate, which equals a high bounce rate, or a lot of people on your list that are tire kickers as I would call them. So they’re not going to convert to sales ever, because it’s not been… Like you say, the customer experience or the experience of someone when they get back to your website and start to interact with your company just isn’t there. So they either lose interest, they sign up for the wrong thing, or it’s usually one of those two things.

Speaker 1 (28:33):
The problem is they don’t come back. So you’ve got this one opportunity, and I think this is where I get the bit between my teeth a bit with these things, is making sure that that whole customer journey is lined up from a communication perspective and what they read and then the next step they take with you, they hear or read a similar story and they go a bit deeper and they can do one or two things that they need to do to act, whether that is finding out more information, downloading the thing, or signing up. So it’s so important, and I think a much overlooked step in particular with companies that are growing super fast and are just going at this rate of knots.

Andrea (29:16):
Rate of knots. You’re absolutely right. I completely agree. I worked with a company on some of their investor comms, so not invested, pitching, but investor… Just communication about [crosstalk 00:29:28].

Speaker 1 (29:28):
I think that’s probably more what I’m talking about in that instance.

Andrea (29:33):
Honestly, the website was just a disaster and they would not hear it. Sometimes that is the case. Sometimes people cannot change. And as a service provider, at that point, you have to know when to walk away, sadly. And there are those moments where somebody is so wedded to what they do and how they’ve said it, that they won’t change. But it’s the way of the world.

Speaker 1 (30:00):It is the way of the world and nothing is perfect. You can only talk about what the best case scenario is for people with some of these things. On that, if people are going to take three things away from today, whether that’s pitching or if your campaign is around generating interest in getting funding.

Andrea (30:21):
The first is be really astute about who to reach out to. Because it is a very busy marketplace now, there’s so many investors out there, and they’re different and they want different things. maybe they’re interested in different sectors or different stages, or they are looking at female founders only. So make sure you research them properly. It’s not a [inaudible 00:30:44] kind of approach, because you are asking for trouble. So think, really target who you’re sending your details to is the first thing. I guess the second would be that even if you’re a first class communicator, if this is your business, you won’t be able to be fully objective. So sanity check your pitch with people that will be really honest with you. And an important tip here is make sure that when they give you feedback, they give you feedback. It’s not a discussion. They actually give you the feedback and you sit quietly and listen, and then you can discuss.

Andrea (31:15):
But if you start debating and arguing even before the end of the feedback, you’re never going to hear all the story and you need to hear all the story, because you won’t be able to see that story as they do. So I think that’s the second one. The third one, a typical problem that I’ve seen with entrepreneurs over the years is that if you imagine a pitch… A pitch is 100% long. Typically investors… Typically entrepreneurs will have a default of wanting to speak about their product or service for the majority of that time. They’ll want to speak about it for about 80% of the time, because that’s where they’re comfortable. But as a general rule, investors want to know how you’re going to make money from the idea.

Andrea (32:00):
So I would say no more than 25% of a pitch should be on what the business is, as in the product or service, and the rest should be on how you’re going to make money, what you know about the market, what challenges you’ve already overcome and what lies ahead. So make sure you’ve got the split of the pitch really well balanced. And a fourth one is, and this often gets missed out. People often speak about their business as it is today, which is great, but I have no idea of how long it’s taken you to get there and what you’ve achieved in the road so far. So those things are givens in your own head, but they’re not given to your audience. So explain what you’ve achieved, because if you’ve achieved it in six months, that’s very impressive compared to if you’d achieved it in nine years, for example. And what you’ve achieved already is the greatest indicator of what you’ll be able to achieve. So that’s really important.

Speaker 1 (33:02):
Yeah, I think they’re all really, really good points actually. So thanks for sharing those with us. I like to give people three big takeaways and I’ll highlight those in the show notes for people today as well. Andrea’s got so much experience in this area. I think this has been… It’s been a really rich, rich conversation today, so thank you so much for giving us your time and I’ll put those links in the show notes that you want to share with people today. I think there’s one final thing maybe I would ask before we part company today, which is just because I… It seems to be a feature of most of my podcast, but has the investment network been affected at all post-pandemic, do you think? Are there any upsides or downsides? What are you seeing in that sense?

Andrea (33:50):I think with all these things, some people I’ve spoken to have said it’s been a bit tough in the investment community and other people have had a fantastic time. So maybe the answer to that is that there’s more competition, so I think the amount of people that have, through necessity, probably, started businesses has gone up. Or maybe it’s given them the nudge to do that thing they’ve always been dreaming of. So the number of founders and entrepreneurs out there in my experience in the conversations I’m having seems to have gone own. Which is a good thing, but also it makes it a more competitive market. But the whole moving online for me has freed up who you can reach out to. So it’s much, much easier to reach and speak to and pitch to investors now. And everybody is really familiar with Zoom or the equivalents, and that works really well. It’s been a leveling in some ways.

Andrea (34:46):
I’ve reached out and spoken to more people as a result of this COVID situation than I would’ve been able to before. I think it’s a robust marketplace. I think there’s a lot of movement, there’s a lot of money, a lot of competition, a lot of fantastic conversations to be had. People are hungry for solutions and also while we’ve all been dealing with COVID, of course the climate situation is getting worse and worse and worse and getting more and more coverage, and the investment community is moving definitely towards, “Okay, what can make the future better?” So I think that’s a big trend in investment. It was already happening, but I think the pandemic has accelerated that.

Speaker 1 (35:40):
Yeah, perhaps those funds and those people may have been in a minority and now that balance is shifting, do you think?
Andrea (35:46):

Yeah. It’s impact investment, tech for good, all of these things are growing and growing and growing, and it’s brilliant.
Speaker 1 (35:53):

Which is a fantastic place to be, and probably an excellent place to finish today, looking forward to the future and possibilities. So thank you so much for your time today, Andrea.
Andrea (36:05):
Pleasure.

Speaker 1 (36:06):
And no doubt. We’ll talk to you again soon, hopefully.

Andrea (36:10):Thanks so much for having me.