How to Raise Capital (3 Step Strategy)

Hey, hey, welcome back to the show. Today I'm going to share with my 3-step strategy to constantly find investors and money for our funds or syndications. This is for people that are actually going out and raising the money. Now we talk in other parts of the program, things like that, we talk about, you know, it's not the how, it's the who. Stop asking how do I raise money or how do I build a website, just go find who, right? Who can build the website for me or who can go out and raise the money? Today I'm actually going to teach you the how, right? How I personally go out and raise money. Now, this being said, there's a lot of ways to go out and raise money, and these are just a few strategies that I use. There's probably a million different ways to do this, but this is stuff that's worked for me consistently to go out and raise millions of dollars for our funds and syndications and do pretty well to constantly be networking and building that list of investors. Now, before we dive into this, by way of announcement, Welcome onto the show. If this is your first time watching, welcome in. We actually are just starting a new fun thing for new subscribers and commenters or reviewers on the podcast or on YouTube. We are going to do every month, we are doing $100 giveaways. So we're going to select a few people every single month to do giveaways to. So today we're actually doing our first one. Today is Raging Bull. So if Raging Bull is on here, we're going to reach out to you. You reach out to us if we don't get in contact with you. You got a $100 gift card today that we're giving to you. If you want to win on future videos, come subscribe on the YouTube channel and comment below and say, hey, I want to win the next one, or let me in, or figure something out, and we'll, uh, we'll make sure to follow up with you. Sound good? Okay, now back to the topic— raising money, how to constantly get deal flow. A few days ago, somebody asked me this question: Bridger, how do you consistently find investors? And you guys know my backstory. I didn't go to Harvard. I don't have the Ivy League degree. I don't have the crazy pedigree, Vanderbilt family, whatever. How do you constantly find rich people to give you money? And the, you know, it's one thing for them to give you money, it's another thing to find rich people, to pitch them, to get in the room, all that kind of stuff. I've tried to boil it down to 3 simple steps to try to make it easier for people to think about, okay? So let's kick it off. Number 1, go where wealthy people are. Sounds simple, a little bit harder to put into practice, right? To find and meet both people, you gotta go where wealthy people are at. So number 1, first thing to do is write down all the places where you think wealthy people would hang out. Now, there's 2 strategies to get into those places where wealthy people hang out, okay? These are charity events, these are entrepreneurship events, these are season tickets in a box seat to an NFL game or a Jazz— Utah Jazz. I love the Utah Jazz. By the way, the Utah Jazz are crushing it. We got to give a shout out to Utah Jazz, absolutely murdering it. out in the league. We'll see if it can maintain and hold up throughout the season. Donovan Mitchell, Rudy Gobert, big shoutouts to those guys crushing it on the— going into the All-Star Weekend. All right, back, I digress. Okay, that's where wealthy people hang out. They're hanging out in the Porsche club or the Ferrari club of your state or area. So there's 2 ways to get into those groups and meetups. Number one is you can work your way in, right? You do, and it's in the name, you got to work your way in. You got to work connections, you got to work relationships, you gotta provide value, and usually working your way in takes quite a bit of time. The other way is to buy your way in, okay? For, for example, the Ferrari Club. You buy a Ferrari, you're in the club, okay? That's a pretty easy way to get into the Ferrari Club of Utah, the Ferrari Club of South Beach, Florida. Another example is you buy your way into certain charities, charity events, or political events. By donating to someone's charity, it raises some eyebrows. Oh, who's that guy that's donating? Another way you can do it is mastermind groups. I don't say this lightly but I've spent around $50,000 in the last year for mastermind groups and I do that because I pay to get into rooms with other wealthy people. I just went to a mastermind group, it was $30,000 for each person to show up. When you walk into that room, every single person there has paid $30,000 to be there. It's a pretty good room to be in, right? These guys must have a decent amount of disposable income that they could maybe put into my fund, okay? So work your way in or buy your way in. And sometimes you can do a hybrid of both where you kind of buy your way into a smaller group and work your way up through that group. We'll touch on this in just a minute on how to actually work the room, okay? So number 1 though, get where wealthy people are. And just to give a few examples, I mentioned them earlier, Charity events are really great, political events. I mean, everybody's heated about politics. If I need to be a Democrat today, I can be a Democrat today. If I need to be a Republican tomorrow, I can be a Republican tomorrow. I just want to get in the rooms where wealthy people are at, where I can find who's writing big checks and where they're at. Doctor meetup groups, lawyer meetup groups, where are wealthy people? Are they skiing? Are they out surfing? Are they— where— and these people congregate, where can you go? To find them, okay? In your area right now, there are real estate meetup groups. I guarantee you every single city in the country has a real estate meetup group. They're gonna vary, and by who's going and who's showing up, those potentially could be great places to go. Now, you've gotten to the place though, right? You get into the event, you're in that entrepreneurship event or that VC club event, whatever club you're at. That's the bigger part though. How do I convert someone from a brand new meetup to a potential investor, that someone's gonna put millions of dollars potentially into my fund. That's quite a big leap when you're showing up to these events, right? This is something that I've used, and it's one way to do it. There's probably 100 different ways to do it, okay? What I do, I go to an event, and I'm gonna share 2 different examples here. This is the first example if you're going solo. The next example is if you're going with a business partner, okay? So if I'm going solo to an event, number 1, as I'm walking to that event, you've got to hype your— you got to psych yourself out a little bit. This event, people are going to meet other people. No one woke up this morning and said, I don't want to make a friend today, or I don't want to meet anybody when I go to this public event. They're obviously dressing up, they're going there for a reason. They like wealthy people, or they want to meet interesting other people like them. So I go to these events. Number 1, so put yourself in a mood, I'm gonna be extroverted, I'm gonna go find some people. I go in there and I start meeting people. Now there's a lot of different ways you can go about this. If you read the book by Oren Klaff, Flip the Script, incredible book, I highly recommend it. He talks about the first meeting, you need to have what he calls a status alignment. So the first 3 to 4 sentences out of your mouth, he goes, are absolutely crucial. For example, if you saw Justin Bieber, you're at this event, Justin Bieber is there, okay, and you run up to Justin Bieber and you're like, Justin, bro, and I like rip off my shirt and I've got Justin Bieber tattooed on my chest, right, and I'm like, can I get an autograph? Like, this sounds amazing. Justin immediately goes, okay, this person is a fan, they are— it's hard to say lower, but they're in a fan status in his brain. He's just got to change, oh, okay, this person is a fan. In my status and yeah, we can take a picture or whatever, yeah dude, awesome, okay? Do you think that person's gonna invest with somebody at a lower status than them? No, right? They're not gonna do that. Now, totally different if I walked up to Justin Bieber and I worked in the music industry, okay? Hey, oh hey Justin, hey, I actually worked with Warner Brothers and this other group, I helped produce Drake's music out in, you know, in Canada and Toronto and anyways, love your stuff, it's awesome. All of a sudden now, my status alignment is to the same industry. Okay, oh, I, you know, hey, you're in the music industry, you're not a fan, you're kind of at a similar level as me, you also produce music and you're in the industry, right? Maybe you're not famous, but you're at least in the industry. See how the status changed there just by the first 3 sentences? You could still be a big fan of Justin, but you don't show that there. Now, if you showed up and you were, I don't know, let's call it, I don't know, Dwayne The Rock Johnson and Justin loves him, that would be an increase in status, right? He's going to feel like, oh my gosh, I want to meet The Rock, right? I'm not sure who Justin looks up to or whatever, but you kind of understand what's going on there. That's what Oren Klaff talks about in his book. So the first 3 sentences out of your mouth are absolutely crucial for who you're meeting. I was actually listening to an interview the other day. Anderson Cooper on CNN met Bill Gates, and he didn't know what to say to Bill Gates. I mean, it's the richest guy in the world. What do I say to this guy when I meet him? And Anderson Cooper, and put politics aside right now, this is just one person to another, okay? I know a lot of people get heated when I bring up different political— anyways, Anderson Cooper, right? CNN. He goes, I bet Bill doesn't care much about small talk. So when he met Bill Gates, they were sitting next to each other at a certain event, he turned to Bill, he goes, Bill, what do you think about climate change in the next 10 years? What are your thoughts? And obviously Bill knows who Anderson Cooper is, but even the topic that he brought up, and I believe, I can't remember, I can't quote it directly, but he brought up a certain aspect of climate change. He knows Bill cares about the climate change and what's happening, and I think he asked him something about ion batteries or what he thought the future of that was, and what it showed, number one, is Anderson Cooper was at least well enough read on a certain topic to ask an informed question that Bill would care about. Okay, I'm not going to go any more depth here, but that is called status alignment in that first meeting. The good thing we have on our side is we run funds. A lot of the times when you meet people, when you say you're a fund manager, you work in private equity or hedge funds, that already puts your status pretty high for most people. Some people might despise fund managers, say you guys are the scum of the earth, but it does— I think in most situations it puts your status pretty close up there. So when you meet these people, I always, this is what I do. I go, hey, what do you do? What's your name? This is just average, I'm not meeting famous people, just regular people that might be wealthy. What do you do? You're retired, where do you live? What do you like to do? And they always will return the favor, right? Hey Bridger, what do you do? Well, I run a fund, and my fund does XYZ, and this is what we do. And I always, I'll cut them off, I'll go, hey, actually, I get, this is the line that changed my life. This has led to more investors in my life than anything else. I go, hey, I actually, the nature of my business, I get a lot of deals across my desk. I get real estate deals and different investing opportunities, early-stage companies, and I always say this. I go, if I have a good deal come across my desk, I mean, you seem like you're an active individual in the investing space. Can I shoot these deals over your way? Just because the nature of my fund, I can't do them, but they're still good deals. Can I send them your way? 9 times out of 10, that person will say yes. Who doesn't like to look at a deal? And so I shoot them the deal their way, and what I do at the event, I go, well, let me get your email. Take their email down, I save it, and the next few months I actually do get a lot of deals because I tell everybody I run a fund, I'm looking for deals, they send to me. I will start forwarding them deals. Over the next month, 2 months, 3 months, I start sending them maybe 1 or 2 deals a week for 3 months. Now they know Bridger as the deal guy. Bridger's the guy that sends deals, and he's got some great investment opportunities. It seems like he's in the game. So over about two to three months, I'm emailing them. Maybe he'll email back, or he or she will email back. We'll talk about the deal, whatever it is. They may or may not do any of those deals, but they now know me as Bridger's the deal guy. Bridger's the investing guy. And so what I'll do after two to three months, I'll go, "Hey." I've got a new deal. It's called my fund, and here it is. And I'll send them my whatever my offering. I'll say, "Hey, I've had this new fund coming out. We have a new round or a raise. If this is in your appetite of investing, I would love to talk to you more about it. If it's not, no worries. I don't want to burn any bridges. But if you're interested in this kind of stuff, can we go to lunch next Thursday and talk about it further?" Bam! Right there, I just took someone I met at a party cold. To three months later, we're sitting down and getting lunch and talking about a fund investing. It's a very natural, easy way to convert somebody from a cold lead to someone that might actually invest with you. Is that making sense? So that's if you're if you're solo, okay? And that's something. It's one example of probably a million examples you could use at a party. But that is something I have used over and over again. I ask them if they want if they like looking at deals. Even if someone's rich or poor, everybody always says yes. I like looking at deals. And so I start sending them deals. That's where we get it. Number 2, okay, this is if you go in a pair, and I would highly recommend this if you can go to an event with a business partner. And I— we actually just did this a few weeks ago, me and my business partner. I won't share his name, but that's what we did. We went to an event, a lot of people there, big room, and it's a little intimidating. So I would go up, I would start to meet people. Hey, what's going on? And I go, wait, you gotta meet my business partner. And I start to talk about my business partner across the room, and he's talking to somebody else, whatever he is. And I go, oh, you gotta meet him. He does X, Y, and Z. He's so great. Oh my gosh, he's He's done all this stuff. I got to introduce you to him. And they go, yeah, that'd be great. And I go, hey, and I call my business partner, hey, come on over. And he comes on, oh, he goes, excuse me, he's talking to somebody else. He gets an easy out of that conversation. A lot of times these networking events, you get stuck talking to somebody for too long and it's a little bit awkward to leave. And so you're like, hey, how do we close this conversation? It's a really great exit. You go, hey, come on over. And you invite your business partner over. He goes, "Hey Bridger," and he goes, "Oh, you met Bridger," and he starts to build me up. Oh, Bridger is so great. He does X, Y, and Z. And I go, "Oh, stop it." Hey, I wanted to introduce you guys. Here it is. Blah blah blah. And it gives me a great exit to leave. Hey, I'm gonna let you guys talk. I'm gonna move on. I move on to the next person and start chatting it up. Hey, I'm Bridger. What do you do? About three minutes later, hey, my business partner's over there. Hey, hey, come on over. He goes, "Oh, excuse me. I gotta run over and talk to him." Okay, thank you. Really easy exit, and we move from one person to the next over and over and over again. And in about an hour, we have circulated the entire room and talked to everybody, and it's very easy to pitch and promote somebody else and for them to promote you, okay? It's very hard to brag about yourself. You don't want to be egotistic or whatever, but it's very easy to brag about somebody else and build them That's how we've gone out and actually we circle rooms and find a lot of money out of rooms and a lot of connections. Not even just money, but just connections and meet people. It's a really easy way. If you can go in a pair, it makes your chances of success exponentially higher. Anyways, that's today's episode. You guys can go back and listen to it again. Those are 2 things that have crazy helped me a lot when networking and trying to raise money and find investors. This has caused me to actually been able to have a constant stream of investors and deal flow and money flow in my life by actively, number one, how do I get to the places where wealthy people are at? Do I work my way in or do I buy my way in? Number 2, once I'm there, getting people on my list and sending them deals, converting them. If I go in a pair, we can do that even faster, and then slowly converting those people to investors or just friends or just business partners, whatever they want to be. Thank you guys so much. Again, if you like this video, we're doing those giveaways, so come over, subscribe, comment. If you guys can give us a review, that would be fantastic. We're trying to give out more better and better content for you guys, so please, if you go over to YouTube in the comment section, tell us below what type of content you'd like to see, what's in there, and what we can do to provide value for you. Sound fair enough? Thank you guys so much, and I'll see you on the next episode. Bye.