1 Critical Mistake To Avoid When Pitching Your Deal

So today, let's talk about understanding your audience and why it's important to understand your audience when you pitch. Now, it sounds simple. You might be like, I get it, like to understand my audience. But let's walk through some examples of doing this. I think I have a very good example for you with a crypto hedge fund that I run. Very few people understand crypto. Additionally, I'll talk about our GP Stakes Fund. Also, very few people understand GP Stakes. So what do we do pre-pitch? Now, to put this into context, we're talking the Fund Launch Formula here. If I zoom in on my iPad, We're talking right here. We've already gotten in the room. We've already connected. We are now about to close. Okay, this is— I'm going to— let's put the setting. We're sitting down. I'm about to pitch you on my fund. Okay, we've just sat down. Bridge, we got a little intro, crack some jokes like I always do, you know, get them laughing a little bit, and then we're ready to pitch. Okay. Yeah, let's dive in. Now, before I just dive into my pitch deck, it is very important to understand where they are at in the concept of vehicle, internal, external, and how their brain is already thinking about Your fund. Now we'll come back to vehicle internal external in a second, but this is what I will do. I'll give you an example and I'll kind of unpack it in a second. So I've got my screen pulled up. You can see my screen now. So I'll have like my slide up like ugly unicorn crypto fund. You can see this slide here. I'm on preview. By the way, as a note, use something pretty to present your deck. I don't know. Maybe it's a pet peeve. I hate when people go to PowerPoint like this and they're like, yeah, let's just go through PowerPoint. If you're gonna use PowerPoint, like put it into presenter mode. Make it, here it goes if it'll load here, make it into presenter mode and then click through, like way prettier to go that way than all this ugly crap. Let me escape here, all this ugly crap on the top and bottom. If you really wanna jump around, I like to use preview, just a little bit cleaner, you can even hide, you know, you can hide your sidebar here and just make it look a little bit cleaner. For this, we're gonna have the sidebar here. What I used to do, some people would come in here and just go, okay, let's just get started. Okay, welcome to Ugly Unicorn. Executive summary, here we go. Ugly Unicorn is a deep research team dedicated to finding ugly unicorns in the crypto, blockchain, DeFi space. Does that sound good? Yeah, let's dive in. What I— like, full stop. Do not do that. And I learned this out of sad experience. I'll tell you a quick story. I pitched a family office, big family office. We are on our deck. I start out, hey, like, let's dive in. And we even asked them some of these questions I'll talk about at the beginning, but we dove in, we pitched them the whole deck, and at the end, We came to find out they didn't know the first thing about crypto, the first thing about blockchain. A lot of what we said went over their head. They were still stuck on vehicle, and we'll get to that in a second. So what I will do is right at the beginning, I go full stop and I go, okay, hey, before we dive, we've got the deck here. You can see, and I actually make sure they can see the deck. The deck is now visible on the Zoom screen or on the— hey, here's the deck. Hey, before I dive into the deck, real quick, give me your background on crypto and blockchain. Have you ever bought? Like, where are you at on a scale of one to ten? How much do you like crypto? How much do you know? Have you been burned before? And they always almost always have a story. Oh yeah, back in 2016, and they they're like dying to tell you their crypto. Everyone's got this crypto story of how they heard about Bitcoin early on, but they didn't invest, and now they regret it, and they should have invested back in 2013. Everyone's got that story, or they put money in, and then it went down. They sold the bottom. They lost a bunch of money, and they have jaded. I want to I want to. figure out how sold are they on the vehicle. I keep bringing this concept of vehicle, internal, external. So I will get their background here, 'cause I'm trying to figure out vehicle. Let me go back to the iPad here. Alright, so back on the iPad, what I'm trying to do, and I wanna make this framework clear, this is a bunch of psychologists came together and I've read a ton of books talk about this concept. They name them different things, but this has been like across the board. You can read Expert Secrets, Launch by Jeff Walker, Influence. They all talk about the same concept of what I call vehicle, internal, external. This is the way the brain processes information. Oren Klaff, in his book Flip the Script or Pitch Anything, talks about same concept, how your brain consumes info. He calls it the croc brain, the midbrain, and the neocortex. They're just different names for the same concept. What the concept is, is the prospective investor or person is trying to answer these questions. They answer them in order. Number 1 is vehicle. Does this work? And I'll give you an example here. Of when I talk about funds. All of you are here, you've seen me pitch or talk about investment funds. The first question someone is asking when Bridger gets on stage or I'm on a podcast, start talking about fund is, does this work? Do funds work in general? Right? Do funds or does crypto work in general? Can anybody out there make money in crypto? Can anybody out there make money in commercial real estate? Okay, that's the vehicle, the vehicle of an investment fund or selling an Amazon store or building websites or launching a dental, like a dental practice or a nail salon. Like those are all vehicles. Does it work? Does this work in general? I'm trying to sell them on that. If I cannot sell them on that, the rest of everything I say does not work. I'll give you an example in a second. The next logical answer, and I'll use this example for like funds. Okay, so do funds work? Yes or no? Hopefully, all of you are like, yes, funds work. The next thing I'm trying to share is, do funds work for me? OK, I get that funds work for other people. That's great. But do a— does a fund work for me in my situation with my background and whatever I'm doing? Does crypto work for someone like me that's maybe old or not good with computers or whatever? Does commercial real estate work for someone like me and people in our situation? That's a totally different set of questions. Now, if you can get somebody to answer, yes, this works and it will work for me, those people are usually lay down sales. 'Cause the next tier is third is external, which is time, money, knowledge. This is where, okay, how much time is it? How much money? How much knowledge do I need to do this? That's the next things that they're gonna answer in their brain. This is problem solving, just, you know, things here. When someone objects, I'll actually, let me give you a real-world example. So, we pitched this family office. We walked through, actually asked some good leading questions, I thought anyways. We pitch on, so the beginning of my pitch deck, guess what we pitch on? Vehicle. Let's just talk about crypto as an asset class. I'm asking, how sold are you on crypto as an asset class? Most people are between a 4 and a 7, you know, somewhere in there. For you, if you're pitching like a commercial real estate fund, They might say, dude, I love commercial. I've been investing in commercial real estate for 30 years. Great. Check. I don't need to resell them on commercial real estate. I now need to sell them on me and our team and why our team can approach commercial real estate. Does that make sense? The differentiator there. They might, you know, let's look at real estate like a multifamily real estate fund. They're going to say, yeah, I've done 30 years, 40 years of multifamily real estate. I love multifamily real estate. I'm in. Don't spend your time pitching them on vehicle then. Check off vehicle. Great. Let's move on to— they're now wondering if real estate's a good or bad investment. They already know that. They're now wondering if you and them, they— it works for you guys in this situation right now. That's what they're now wondering. And then at the end, okay, what's the fund terms? How much time? What's your minimum commitment? How much money? What's your management fees? How much knowledge do I need to do this? That's what they're trying to answer there. So back to, sorry, back to my story. Pitching a family office. We pitch them first vehicle, then we pitch them internal, then we get to external. And we're kind of trying to close this family office. Hey, where are you guys at? What's going on? And it's hard always pitching. There was a bunch of sons and brother-in-laws on this call. They're all family. It's not like institutional management. These are the family members that are running the family office. So that's when it's always different personalities and stuff. The oldest brother, the eldest brother, the one that's kind of running everything, We hit kind of the end of our call and he goes, man, I just, can you help me figure what is crypto? Like, what is a blockchain? Can you walk me through that again? Like, how does that? And I'm like, oh crap. He, we spent 30 minutes. We thought we were on internal and external. He was still on vehicle. So then we were trying to now answer questions on vehicle. And I mean, we had really missed the mark. We went through vehicle too quick. He was still like, I don't get how it even works. Like, how does this even— what's this like basic starting blocks of crypto? And obviously they did not invest. Sometimes people will ask questions on time and money and knowledge. I would not answer those questions unless you are certain they are sold on the vehicle and internal. If someone is sold on vehicle and internal, External problems usually go away or they're very easily mitigated. I'll give you an example for funds. So, Fund Launch, we're pitching or talking about funds like selling Black Card. If someone comes, man, Bridger, okay, how much is Black Card? I'm like, or how much time is it gonna take? And I'm answering those questions. I will stop them and go, yeah, I'm happy to answer those questions, but real quick, help me understand. Do you believe a fund, funds work in general? Like, funds have worked for other people. Before? Yes or no? And they'll answer that. Let's say they said yes. And I go, OK, great. Let me just— help me just for a second. Do you believe a fund would work for you? Like, in your situation right now, if you had a fund, what would it do for you? Would it change? How would it change your life? What would happen? And if they're like, man, a fund would be incredible, a fund would take me to the next level. So then $35,000 or $40,000 or $20,000, whatever the number is, $30,000, isn't that big of a deal to launch a fund. Because you're telling me you're pretty certain it's going to make you millions of dollars, correct? Yeah, you're right. So, okay, let's just figure out, you want to do a credit card? You want to do ACH wires? Like, what do you want to do? And those people are, quote unquote, laydown sales or people that would buy very easily versus someone that's just, they're pounding, I can't, I can't afford it, money so much. Usually, they're not sold on internal or vehicle things. Now, sometimes people just literally don't have the money. They're just not qualified. But hopefully, you qualify them in the beginning. OK? This is the concept of vehicle, internal, external. Very important. So, when you're qualifying somebody before I pitch, I think about this all the time. So, back to my pitch deck here. I've pulled this up. I'm gauging of where they're at with this specific asset class. So, give me a little sense of where you're at with crypto. Tell me essentially vehicle. How sold? And actually, I will ask them that direct question. They'll tell me their story in crypto. I go, so, on a scale of 1 to 10, how sold are you like on blockchain and cryptocurrency? Just as an asset class. And that's very telling. If someone's like, oh, I'm a 10, I love that. Like, I get it. I get the Bitcoin halvings. I get it all. Like, I'm in. I love it. Great. I kind of checked that. I still am going to talk a little bit about vehicle, but I'm now going to move to internal. If they're like, yeah, I'm a 5 or 6, you know, I'm interested. I'm going to spend a lot more time on vehicle. And if you look at my deck here, scroll down, the opportunity, what I call the opportunity, these slides right here are all on vehicle. We talk about, I mean, we're talking charts, investment strategy, tokenization of BlackRock, Ethereum ETFs, like all this kind of stuff. This is a little bit older deck. This is version 50. We used this a few months ago. But this is all, and we'll stay on this. I've got appendix slides talking about if they need more help on vehicle, we'll talk about it, okay? I will, and then I usually, by the end of this, I do a check. I go, okay, so as an asset class, like how are you feeling now about crypto? Does that make sense on where we're at in the market cycle, how we view crypto? Yes, that sounds great. Or no, they might say no. Well, what questions do you have? I will pause and make sure they— because we— they have to be sold on the vehicle. They will never invest if they're not sold on the vehicle. Maybe not never, but it's unlikely. Then I go, OK, great. Now that you're sold on— OK, you get that crypto is a compelling asset class. You get that Dan and Bridger are a decent team. And maybe we'll talk about team again here. Let's talk about how we approach the market now. How and that now moving to internal, how we the the fund, how we approach it. Here's how our breakdown of our investment strategy. Here it is. Boom! And we talk through our investment strategy. Do you see how there's this tidal wave of capital and how we're going to plug ourselves into that tidal wave and how we think it's we're going to risk mitigate? Do does that all make sense to you? Great. Here's some of our performance returns. We go through this, and then I'll then I talk fund terms. Okay, and I'll even review. Okay. And we talk about risk mitigation, security. These are now more external questions. How do you guys keep things secure? How do you mitigate for fraud? Hey, we do an annual audit. We have a third-party administrator. We pay a lot of money for great security. Dan's done 30 years of security work with NASA, Air Force, U.S. Army. Now let's walk through how the fund works. Boom. We walk through how the fund works, all the fund terms, all that kind of stuff. Okay? So the pre-call questions, though, are massive. We do the same thing with our GP Stakes Fund with Fund Launch Partners. The beginning. Hey, have you guys heard of a GP stake before? What are your thoughts on this asset class? Kind of a newer asset class. What do you guys think? And they— people love to talk about their— they love to talk and it breaks the ice and it gets them to talk about what we're doing and helps me figure out, are they vehicle, are they internal, or are they external? So one more time to review. We've got vehicle. Does this work? Internal. Does this work for me or would it work with this specific fund? External. Time, money, knowledge. How will the fund work? Have this in the back of your brain when you pitch, how you construct your slides. I think it's a very good way to approach pitching someone or helping someone figure out if your fund is the right fit for them, their family office, their institution. This will help you drastically when pitching. It's helped me raise tens of millions of dollars now in my fund. Before, I didn't do this and we didn't raise much money. And now that I do this, it's helped us drastically when raising money. So, hopefully that helps. Let me know down below what you guys think.