Scale By Numbers

Working With Venture Capitalists to Raise Business Funding With Brett Sharenow

Guest: Brett Sharenow of Broadscope Consulting

💡 Who is Brett Sharenow?

Brett is a trusted advisor in the world of raising venture capital, making him a true fundraising specialist. He focuses on raising capital for startups, as well as high growth companies. With three decades of experience under his belt, he has raised upwards of $800 million for his clients.

You can learn more about Brett via his website: https://www.broadscope.com/

And you can follow him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/broadscopeconsulting 

💡 Brett is back for a second episode as we kick off season two of the Scale By Numbers podcast. With his expertise in fundraising, he’s the perfect guest to share smart strategies to raise capital for your business. This is part two of Brett’s value-packed interview, so be sure to listen to the previous episode with the first half of our conversation. 

In this second part, we discuss:

•   What venture capitalists are looking for from business owners pitching them for funding

•   Advice for finding the right investors to present to so you can get money as quickly as possible

•   How venture capitalists really view a company’s valuation and handle negotiations

•   How to present yourself in every pitch meeting you attend on behalf of your business 

💡 Highlights From This Episode

How does a venture capitalist know if they want to entertain a meeting with a founder to potentially invest? First, they’re looking for warm introductions to the founder of the business. Oftentimes, someone the venture capitalist knows will either recommend or pre-screen the business, sometimes because they have insider knowledge on the product or service. Having systems in place and screening businesses beforehand helps this process go smoothly.

Is there a way to research potential investors to go after? Yes! There are databases you can buy into that will allow you to look up their previous investments. In doing this, you’ll be able to see which venture capitalists stepped up as leads and which ones were simply follows. Founders need to look for the venture capitalist who is going to lead the round, so make sure to pitch to a number of potential leads.

How should a founder present themselves during a presentation to potential investors? They should have a confident and grounded presence but never come off as arrogant. Instead, know the solution your product or service offers so you can clearly communicate the value it has to offer.

Finally, If you want expert support with your next capital raising efforts or business strategies Brett Sharenow with Broad Scope Consulting should be your next call.    In the last three decades, he’s raised more than $780 million for his clients. He’s worked in the U.S., Europe, and India and has deep experience with Venture Capital and Private

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💡Guest: Alex Low Head of Enterprise Strategy and Sales at Lately.

💡Who is Alex Low?

Alex has been in sales for quite a while, around 15 years, to be exact. He's recently joined Team Lately to help launch them into the stratosphere.

💡You can find him on:

• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexanderlow/
• Twitter: @Alexander_Low
• Instagram: @digital_alexanderlow
• Tik Tok: @digital_Alexander

And take a look at Lately, at Lately.ai. 

🚀What is Lately? Lately is a social media management platform that creates content for you using A.I. Lately's A.I. takes your long-form content and turns it into dozens of social posts that drive engagement and use keywords that are proven to work well with your audience. 

Creating and then distributing social posts across ALL social platforms takes forever, so using A.I. to turn content like blogs, podcasts, video, etc., into social posts and then distributing 

💡What is the best piece of advice to give people on their marketing efforts? The biggest thing? Talk to your customers in a way that is meaningful to them. Go talk to your existing customer base, and give them your 30-second elevator pitch to get them to tell YOU what they think you do for them. If you asked 10 clients, you would get 10 very different answers because everything is based on how they interpret things. 

💡Paid content versus unpaid?

• Paid or unpaid, if a post is put in front of you, you're going to react the same way.
•  If you are looking at a paid post, you will react the same way you are organically viewing it. 
• Your brain can't differentiate between paid and not paid at that point. 
• Each platform uses paid content. Differently, some platforms like Linkedin do not rely heavily on ad revenue, unlike Facebook. 

💡Linkedin :  Being constantly visible is big on Linkedin; that is something that Lately can help with. Leaving digital breadcrumbs for your audience to never completely forget about you. 

💡How do you keep learning? Marketing shifts every month, so staying on top of what's going on in the industry is not easy. Alex recommends listening to podcasts about this specific topic and coming out regularly so you will always stay on top of the trends. Websites like Social Media Today and a Facebook group called My First Million are also helpful. 

💡How do you view partnerships?  You can not be too rigid in partnerships. In the recent Lately partnerships with UpContent and

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R&D For You and Me – The R&D Tax Credit and Why You Should Care About it.

Guest: Tyler Kem Co-Founder & Vice President of Strike R&D Tax Advisory, tax consultant, and entrepreneur

Who is Tyler Kem?

Tyler Kem is a tax consultant and an entrepreneur. He is the Co-Founder and Vice President of Strike R&D Tax Advisory,

What is Strike R&D Tax Advisory?

Strike R&D Tax Advisory is a consulting firm that helps customers gain insight into the world of R&D tax law and aids in re-fueling their innovation. 

R&D Tax Credit
R&D Tax Credit is “a permanent federal tax credit in 2015, as part of the Path Act, which is really what opened up an immense amount of opportunities for startups, specifically, but also allowed for many other industries to start claiming that tax credit.”

The qualifications are very broad, with a basic rule of thumb: everything fundamentally relies on hard science. This applies to:

• Computer science
• Engineering
• Biology
• Physics
• Chemistry 

So if you’re a company in these industries, you probably qualify.

• Technology
• Engineering
• Food & Beverage
• Consumer Goods
• And tons more

The R&D Tax Credit is a U.S. labor-based incentive. Instead of outsourcing, you can qualify if you keep your labor inside the U.S., which comes with paying higher wages. 

Starting the Process 

Many people who qualify for the R&D Tax Credit aren’t willing to pay the upfront fees, the retainers, and the monthly billings to claim the credits. And some companies are 10, 20, 30, even $40,000 out of pocket before they even know the size of the credits they’re going to be getting. 

How Strike Can Help

So Tyler’s company Strike does a few things that make the process a whole lot easier:

• Aligned their interests with the interests of the client from day 1
• No out of pocket costs
• No retainers
• No monthly billing OR fixed fees
• Success based fee structure (so they don’t get paid until the company is able to use their credits)
• Offer unlimited audit support (in terms of hours… So if something gets challenged, they’ve got your back)
• They EVEN give a fee guarantee on their claims, so if the IRS decides to claw back on 10% of the credits, 10% of their fees go back to the client.

If you want to go back in time and apply for these benefits before becoming aware of this credit, you can! The federal statute of limitations is three years from the filing date, so you can go back to the 2018 tax credits and see what cash refunds you have waiting for you!

How Does the R&D Tax Credit and the R&D Tax Provisioning Play into Financial Audits?

There are a few steps:

1. The Document Gathering Phase
2. The Calculation Process
3. The Deep Dive Phase

During the first phase, they c

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E12 Scale by Numbers Podcast

Guest: Jonna Mooney| Founder | Affogato HR Consulting

Topic: HR is never black and white; it "always" depends.

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💡 What do they do? Affogato Consulting partners help clients to implement practical, appropriate, and compliant solutions to HR issues. They work with small to medium size companies in many different industries across the United States. They understand that business people want to run their businesses, that employees are critical to the business, and that some parts of HR are intimidating. They use this understanding to create actionable steps so that your HR function runs smoothly. 

💡 How can an HR consultant help a small team?  Whether you have one employee or 700, having a consultant or team outside to help be a guide on the side is an excellent idea early on. There is a common misconception that HR is black and white, but its not. It's very gray with a lot of variations. HR consultants understand those gray areas, so it is essential to have a trusted advisor in your back pocket from day 1.

💡 Can an HR Consultant help build Culture:  Your company culture happens whether you make it happen or not. Having intention around each decision you make, each hire you bring in, every policy you create is an even better idea. How you engage with your employees depends on the people in the organization, what they value or what they say they value, and what this business is and what it intends to be. 

💡 How can an HR consultant help you scale? One of the things that HR is known for and what people look is help with compliance. Compliance is almost related to headcount. As investment increases, the headcount increases. On the one hand, you get involved in the black and white compliance, then in the gray areas, then as you grow your headcount, you start to think about how you protect the seed the heart of what the company is. HR outsourcing is a great way to grow, recruiting outside of just referrals because they aren't always the perfect fit. Outsourcing can give your company a global net spread and allow for more.  

💡 Noteworthy Advice: . Hiring in any country outside of the US without engaging with an international HR consulting firm or a PEO in your back pocket is an expensive mistake. Both will have a network of consultants around the globe that can help ensure compl

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Topic: Preventing Bad Actors from Getting in the way of Good Business.

Guest: Candice Tal| CEO & Founder| Infortal

💡 Who is Infortal and what do they do? 

Candace Tal is the CEO of Infortal Worldwide, a global risk management, and investigations firm. Infortal Worldwide works in 160 countries, has done over 2 million investigations and works with companies from Start-Ups all the way up to Fortune 100 companies. Their goal is to "prevent bad actors from getting in the way of good business."

💡What type of investigations does Infortal do? 

Each investigation has different end purposes but similar goals. They focus on adding integrity to a growing business, help them grow with like-minded people on their team, and allowing them to flourish with honest employees with the same ethics and values. Infortal focusses on running corporate investigation due diligence checks in the following areas:

• Executive/C-Suite
• Business Partner Checks
• 3rd Party Supply chains checks
• Adding Board/ Advisory Members

💡How does Infortal mitigate risk? 

Firstly, reputation management is a priority. In Candice's experience, at least 20% of executives have serious issues that could cause serious business issues. Executive due diligence will enable you to prevent very serious issues from happening that you cannot find in a regular back ground check. Infortal looks for information that answers questions like.

• Does this executive have a nefarious background?
• Litigious behavior or conflict of interests?
• History of misconduct?

💡What type of investigations should a company engage?  

Maybe add in brief descriptions of each check (federal, business, real estate etc.) In a routine cheap background check, you do not find some of the deeper layers of an individual, so they can minimize the risk of a company looking for a new CEO by really peeling back the layers of the individual and making sure that they are 100% sure they have the right individual

💡What is the Infortal background check structure?

 Infortal uses a 3 tier structure. 

• Tier 1 is a more advanced standard background check that can still find quite a bit more information than a standard check you would find on google. 
• Tier 2 is all public records, including all criminal history, civil level, county level, federal, and statewide databases; it looks at the department of corporations conflicts of interests, anti-competitive behaviors. For example, if a candidate is working for a competitor or had federal crimes.
• Tier 3- This is the deep dive of the candidate's entire worldwide web history, including everything in Tier 1 and Tier 2 and even real estate transactions. '

💡How to get in touch with Candice?

Email

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E10: Scale by Numbers Podcast 

Guest: Tim Kachuriak| Chief Innovation Officer | NextAfter 

Topic: What moves and inspires people to donate

💡 Who is NextAfter? They have a simple yet extensive mission. They focus on learning how to maximize digital fundraising for Non-Profits, understanding what inspires people to give, and teach non-profits how to experiment to run campaigns from the donors' point of view.

💡What is the donor's journey? NextAfter supports Non-profits by providing a gap analysis of non-profit organizations from the donors' point of view. Non Profits must understand one thing "what inspires others to give." NextAfter gathers data from non-profit donation funnels and then runs actual scientific experiments and tests to figure out what works. They use forensic research to analyze large amounts of data in the non-profit sector. They are searching for patterns that lead to opportunities that lead to greater digital fundraising performance. 

💡How do they help Non-Profits? NextAfter learns how people give, and then they perfect the non-profits' fundraising efforts to maximize their donations. They have run over 2,700 online fundraising experiments and discovered that the more you humanize communications with donors, the more effective and successful your fundraising would be. A huge part of fundraising is giving donors a sense of community. People give to people, not to websites, making as many human-to-human interactions throughout the timeline of becoming a donor. It should feel like you are part of a club by giving the organization a sense of community.

💡Do you know what moves people to give? To get into the heart and soul of what drives people to give to an organization, you must answer these three questions. 

1. What is your appeal?
2. Is your value proposition exclusive and unique to the organization?
3. Is your value proposition being communicated clearly-is it credible?

💡Noteworthy Advice:

-Foster a culture of innovations and testing

-Create space for people in your organization to take risks, 

💡When should a non-profit reach out to NextAfter: Right away! If you have unsuccessful fundraising attempts and have not figured out what went wrong, they can tell you, guide you and help you through the process. They offer many free resources on their website, not to mention years of research and results to help optimize non-profits' fundraising efforts. 

💡How to reach out to NextAfter? LinkedIn | Website 

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💡WHO WAS OUR GUEST: Craig Zingerline | Founder of Growth University

💡WHAT IS GROWTH UNIVERSITY? Growth University was developed to offer founders the strategy and the playbook needed to make it through the startup stage and eventually scale. This is a live cohort-based program that teaches founders to " go after customers holistically." Growth University offers hundreds of hours of courses, masterclasses, and resources that "focus on actionable skills that can be implemented right away and have been tried and tested to help your company grow."

💡BE WILLING TO EXPERIMENT:  When you are just starting a company, you don't have a customer base, so making more personal relationships with your customers is essential, and then once you start gaining traction and doing something that works, you can sort of rinse and repeat to gain more customers. The early stages of demand are critical. You must learn quickly and early what works and what doesn't work. Experiments allow you to nail down your process, know where your customers are and, most importantly, where they are not, and how they value your product. 

💡FINDING YOUR CUSTOMERS: As a founder, you need to recognize the sequence of growth; a founder needs to be self-reflective and ask themselves, "what are my strengths and weaknesses" in the relevancy of the content shared with customers. It is essential to find the proper channels for your specific audience. Not all channels are created equal, and they will differ for each business. You have to find out if your audience has low intent or high intent. If you have some high intent customers willing to buy your product and interact with your content, you have to find out what is working for them. The hard part is figuring out how to convert the low intent customers to have a higher intention with your content.

🚀HOW CAN GROWTH UNIVERSITY HELP STARTUPS SCALE: Craig helps founders with product-market fit and understanding the market they are in, getting the first bit of traction, and acquiring the first few customers. Growth University has courses that support many other areas of marketing (Facebook ads, Google Ads, Social Media engagement, Finding initial customers) to continue the momentum and move your company to the next stage-and ultimately scale.

💡HOW TO CONTACT CRAIG:  Website | LinkedIn 

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💡WHO WAS OUR GUEST: 

Nathan Beckford | CEO and Founder | FounderSuite

💡ABOUT OUR GUEST: 

This week's guest is an exciting addition to the Vanreusel Ventures Startup Stack; We had the pleasure of chatting with Nathan Beckford, the founder and CEO of Foundersuite. Their mission is straightforward but extremely important- "make awesome tools that help founders build awesome companies."  

Raising money is a huge pain point for growing companies, and simplicity and support are what every founder needs when growing a company, and that's precisely why I decided to do this podcast. Nathan also has a podcast called "How I Raised It," which offers listeners 190 different ways that founders have raised capital. If you haven't listened to it, you should!

💡What is FounderSuite:

FounderSuite came to fruition from an idea of a spreadsheet that tracks conversations with Investors. There was a light bulb moment when trying to make the tool better, and magically FounderSuite was born! This software has been specifically for Start-Ups and Founders to help qualify investors, start communication with potential investors, create relationships, manage and track those relationships.

Noteworthy Tips for Building Investor Relationships:

1. Always, Always, Always do your research first. Qualify potential investors do not just "spray and pray." You will waste your time. 
2. Spend time nurturing relationships before raising money.
3. Reach out to investors 6-12 months before they planned to raise money. 
4. Send your company update for a few months, then wow with a buy-in option.
5. Once you start the fundraising round, run a tight process, reach out for help when you need it.

💡"How I Raised It'- How I raised it is Nathans podcast, which discusses exactly the title--How founders raised money.  This podcast is fascinating and an excellent tool for anyone getting ready to raise money. There are 190 interviews and 190 different ways that companies raise capital. There is no one way to raise capital, but there are standard patterns that should be followed. 

💡Fundraising Tips:

• Fundraising is a full-time job for a CEO, so support is necessary.  
• Keep your Due Diligence in order-Do not to be the bottleneck
• Maintain the momentum by moving quickly
• Reduce friction by maintaining clear communication and benchmarks with stakeholders.

🚀HOW CAN FOUNDERSUITE HELP COMPANIES SCALE: 

FounderSuite was created for founders so they can save time while raising money. This platform can save you hundreds of hours raising money and getting to know and maintaining relationships for investors. Foundersu

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Scale By Numbers Podcast

💡WHO WAS OUR GUEST:  Joe DeLucchi | President and CEO of CAL Insurance

💡What does CAL Insurance do?  Cal puts together structured insurance programs, for businesses, schools, nonprofits, real estate investment groups, and successful individuals and successful families across the United States. They are business insurance advisors. They will help founders learn precisely what they need to cover their business and then go to bat for them and make sure they have the best insurance packages and coverages to mitigate risk.

💡Who should have an Insurance Advisor: Everyone! Insurance is very complex. The policies are created and written by lawyers and can be very difficult to translate. Without having someone on your side checking the boxes, there could be exclusions in your policies that you may not have known were there. No insurance is the same, and the complexities and hidden exclusions are embedded in the language. CALs goal is to explain their policies in precise terms and ensure that each of their clients has the suitable packages to fit their company RIGHT NOW. 

🚀HOW CAN CAL INSURANCE HELP COMPANIES SCALE:   CAL creates policies that protect a company from risk. Like other members of our start-up stack, mitigating risk for their clients is their number one goal. The most valuable thing that a founder can do is to get their insurances right from the beginning. Cal focuses on the transactional side of insurances. As advisors, they take a complete overview of the corporation, the business, the founder's goals, analyze where they are and where they are going, and create a "meaningful insurance program" to fit them perfectly. 

💡Ideal Start-Up Insurance Package: Joe suggests that founders should be involved with finding the correct insurances for their business from the beginning. Why? Because who knows the business better than the founder! He was kind enough to go into deep detail about the ideal coverages that are best for a software company:

• Workers Compensation--In every state you registered in
• D& O Insurance
• Professional Liability
• Cyber Insurance
• Errors and Omissions

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Scale By Numbers Podcast

💡WHO WAS OUR GUEST: Allen Goh | BakerTilly 

💡ABOUT OUR GUEST: Allen offers clients more than 20 years of public accounting and audit experience. He leads several audit, review, and other attestation engagements for publicly traded and privately held corporations. Notably, Allen offers significant expertise working with clients involved in the technology industry. He drives values for his clients by understanding their needs and leveraging his experience, key contacts, and other services.

💡Allen's Expertise:  Allen is in charge of the National Technology Industry practice lead for BakerTilly, which leaves him in charge of all the marketing and strategic direction relating to all the firm's initiatives relating to technology companies' technology. He specializes in high-growth technology companies. Allen shares that BakerTilly's primary specialty is software and software as a service but is quickly growing in eSports and gaming industries. 

• Leads going public/initial public offering engagements 
• Develops and presents audit findings to senior management and makes recommendations to improve effectiveness and efficiency 
• Holds multiple engineering and technology systems certifications 

💡WHO IS BAKERTILLY? BakerTilly is an international Tax, Accounting, Assurance, Audits, and CPA consulting firm--and considered the 12th largest firm in the United States. They have been recognized as one of the "Best Places to Work" for women and considered the 10th largest accounting firm worldwide. Most recently, they are listed as one of Forbes largest employers in 2021.

If you are starting and looking for your first accountant, BakerTilly can help with that. As mentioned, they are an international tax and accounting firm with hundreds of CPAs ready to support. Maybe you are growing and are looking to upgrade your tax services--they can do that. Perhaps you are scaling and preparing to prove assurance to your investors with an audit. Yup. They can do that as well. 

🚀HOW CAN BAKERTILLY HELP COMPANIES SCALE:  One of the most common themes of the Scale by Numbers series is an Audit topic. On top of the many top-notch services that BakerTilly offers, Vanreusel Ventures has direct experience working with them on client audits. Audits can help a company grow quickly. Audits allow companies to raise money, show investors they are ready for growth, prove themselves to stakeholders, and get ready for explosive growth. BakerTilly uses its internal audits to focus on " strengthening an organization's risk management and compliance," "mitigate the risks affecting the org

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