Bridger Pennington, who runs two eight-figure funds and helped launch 300 funds managing $4.7 B, shares three ways to raise capital: get into rooms where wealthy people gather, improve your deal's terms and risk structure, and add partners with complementary networks. Two partners helped him raise $25 M of a $30 M fund.
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Here's 3 ideas you could use to raise more capital in 2 minutes or less. My name is Bridger Pennington. I currently run 2 8-figure investment funds. We've helped 300 people launch their funds in FundLaunch that combined manage $4.7 billion of AUM. So let's dive down the iPad and talk about this. Number 1 idea. When I talk about the 3 stages of raising capital, you've seen other videos on this. We talk about getting in the right rooms, then connecting in those rooms, then closing those rooms. Most people I talk to aren't even around enough people that have money. So the first idea I'd give you is just get into the vicinity of people that have money. People with money already are grouped together. You don't have to go reinvent the wheel. People that are wealthy like to hang out with other people that are wealthy. How do you insert yourself in those rooms? There's 2 ways to do this. Number one, you can work your way in, or number 2, you can buy your way in. You can see a little list here. Working your way in would be LinkedIn networking groups, real estate meetups, social media events, kind of that kind of stuff. Buying your way in, you can pay for masterminds. You could buy a Ferrari and join the Ferrari Club of Dallas. You can do pay-to-pitch. You can buy Box seats to the NFL game. Again, these are— again, you're buying your way into rooms where wealthy people are already together. My suggestion is do a little bit of both of these. I have joined personally. I've joined masterminds that were $24,000, $30,000. I joined one for $150,000 and one that was $250,000. OK? These are not cheap masterminds. But guess what? Everyone else in the room also paid $150,000 to be there. These are types of math you can do. Pay to pitch there, you know, $14,000, $12,000 sometimes to go pitch. But again, it guarantees you a spot in the room. Doing a mix of these helps a lot. That's example number 1. Number 2 on raising capital, have a better deal. If you've seen my other things, oftentimes it's just hard to raise capital because your deal kind of sucks. It doesn't have asymmetrical risk. It doesn't have strong parameters to be a great investment opportunity. And how to vet that out on phase 3, I would go and find mentors and/or people in your space that can really give you honest feedback that will really actually tell you, you know what, Bridger, this deal just isn't good. There's holes here, here and here and here. You're not convincing me on why we should invest into, you know, this business in Oklahoma because there's— it looks like we can lose a lot of money a lot of ways. We're trying to find asymmetrical risk. We have other videos on that. So to recap, number 1, get more rooms. You can work your buyer way in. Number 2, just have a better deal. Have asymmetrical risk. We have videos on that. And number 3, you can expand your capital raising a lot by— this is kind of a playoff of number 1, but bringing in more partners. You'd be surprised. We did this with Funnel Launch Partners, Bradley. We brought in 2 partners. We gave them pretty good stakes in the firm, pretty much just for their networks. They had unique networks that we didn't have access to. They lived in different parts of the country and they just knew people that we just didn't know. We brought in one partner. He pretty much raised us about $20 million in about a month and a half, which is pretty good for our firm. We're like, wow, that was pretty good. We were raising a $30 million fund total. One guy from his network raised $20 million. The other guy raised about $5 million from his unique network. Okay. So adding in new partners. Then again, level 10 partners like to be with level 10 opportunities and level 10 partners as well. So sharpen the axe. We have other videos on this to attract and bring in more partners, but they may bring you different pools of people. We talked about another video about reverse vesting schedules that might work well for you. But again, this gets you into more rooms and gets you around different people to raise more money. I would rather have a smaller piece of a much bigger pie. There's my pie example here than a, you know, all of just one piece of pie. Okay. That's my terrible drawing right there. That's how I say those are your 3 ideas to raise more money.
