ENTREPRENEUR STORIES
JONATHAN LEINMULLER FUNDRAISING COACH
Jonny helped me get my funding deck together for our series B raise. He is a former VC turned actor – I’m willing to bet a unique combination! Fundraising, as with so much, is mostly about telling a compelling story. Jonny started by tearing our existing deck to shreds, then built it up afresh; it took four or five sessions of several hours each, with a lot of homework for me in between, but by the end we had something unrecognisable and so much more compelling.
We went out to raise £10m and ended up with just under £15m. Whether you use Jonny or someone else, for all but the smallest raises it’s so worthwhile working with someone who knows what they are doing to get your pitch the best you can make it. If it can raise your valuation by even 10% it will be the best return on a few thousand pounds investment you ever make.
DR HELENA KIM COACHING PSYCHOLOGIST & WORK RELATIONSHIP SPECIALIST
When we started, I figured it would be all about the tech, and a bit about sales, maybe some finance stuff, but in reality, emotions dominate. My own and those of the people I’m working with, even customers and investors. Most people walk around completely oblivious to their own emotions and how they are driven by them, and even more so others’ emotions, how you can influence them and the impact they can have on you. This becomes especially important
as the company grows from a few people (family) to a dozen or so (tribe) to a few dozen (village). Helena has helped me through all that. I like to think that after many years of working closely with her, I have now reached the level of “consciously incompetent” when it comes to my own emotions! I think this puts me above 90% of people, who spend their whole lives in the realm of “unconsciously incompetent”.
MARK SAUNDERS RECRUITER
Over the past two years, Mark has overseen our recruitment as we’ve grown from a team of two in my garden shed to 60+ people in Cambridge and San Francisco. Your first few hires are likely to be people you know or are introduced to, but once you get past that, it’s so valuable to get someone like Mark in from outside to help you attract the talent you need. It’s a cliche, but completely true, that a company is its people – and recruitment is the single most important thing in building a good team of people. Get that right and everything else follows. As a founder,
you need to be intimately involved, but it’s incredibly time consuming and you will benefit enormously from getting expert help. That goes for everything, from designing a logo and doing your accounts to hiring. The temptation as a founder is to do it all yourself, but there are people who will do a better job than you in less time. There�s a saying I like: never trade time for money, you’ll always run out of the former first. But it’s not just about time; by working with people who have done it all before, you�ll get better results, too.
JOHN WATKINSON
I also need to mention John, a Vistage chair. Vistage is an international organisation of small groups of entrepreneurs and senior executives. It attracts all different types of businesses and helps with plenty of different challenges, but many are the
same from business to business. I joined Vistage three years ago or so, and it’s been a brilliant return on investment for me. So much is covered, from marketing to team building, hiring, vision and strategy and, yes, that one again: coping emotionally.
If it can raise your valuation by even 10% it will be the best return on a few thousand pounds investment you ever make"
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ISSUE 04
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