What are some of the best practices for raising funds? How to go about finding a partner? AdaPia d’Errico, principal and VP of strategy at Alpha Investing, shares her experience with us.

You can read this entire interview here: https://bit.ly/3fiThiB

What are some of your best practices for raising funds?

The best practice is going to be to be a genuine person, I often use the word authentic. Even though that can be a bit of a strange word, what I really mean by authenticity is being genuine, being a real person. And a lot of that comes with humility. And for me personally, that means being myself, there's always this expectation that somebody should have all the answers and be an expert and be able to make guarantees, which of course we know, in any kind of investing is just not something you want to do. You can't make guarantees.

And I think a real best practice is to take the time to get to know somebody and to be a real person when you're knowing them, not like an old 1980s style of sales. Simply, this is who I am. This is this is my background. This is what we do in a really specific scenario. For example, this was our worst deal. This is what went wrong. This is what we learned from it. Because we get things wrong. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that every project that we've invested in has knocked it out of the park, including senior living, we've had a couple that aren't performing to pro forma. Why did that happen? Those are important things for investors to understand and to know. Especially having conversations with people, there's a lot to be said for automating the process, for letting people almost be without needing to talk to you. And you can do a lot of that, but there is something to be said about taking some time to have phone calls with people.

We always require an initial phone call to understand who would like to work with us, because we are referral based. We're very highly selective even with our investors. And that's important to us, because having the right kind of investors allows us to bring better investments. Building those relationships with those investors helps because they need to know that they can ask me a question. Because if they can't ask me a question, then it means that I can't help them earn trust, if they can't ask a question, they might not invest, and they might miss out on an opportunity. So those are really important things, just running people all the time through a chat bot, or Zendesk, while it is potentially more efficient, it's not as effective as just picking up the phone or spending some time giving bespoke answers, especially in real estate, especially on the equity side, right? It's there's complicated things to talk about. And there's, there's a lot of moving parts to be able to explain to somebody.

What's important is really being holistic in your approach to an investor, being a real, genuine person and being willing to speak about the things that went wrong and not trying to put on a facade of expert, or perfection, or we're the best, nobody's going to believe you.

How did you find a partner?

When my whole life broke down, I had to get super clear on who am I, and what do I want. I wanted great business partners and I manifested them. I have been in the most amazing partnership with them for the past three years.

AdaPia d’Errico

www.alphai.com

www.linkedin.com/in/adapia

Productive Intuition: Connecting To The Subtle

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