Bridger Pennington shares a fundraising lesson: when pitching family offices, ask for advice instead of asking directly for money. You'll get real feedback and they're more likely to invest afterward.
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This is one of my favorite quotes of all time. When you ask for advice, what do you get? Money. When you ask for money, you generally get advice. This is so true. When I heard this first time, like, that is the most true thing I've ever heard in my life. When we go into a family office, we're like, hey, we're ready to pitch you guys. Like, always zero. But when we go in and like, hey, I want to ask you the question, how could we position our fund to appeal to a family office like yours? Could you have 11 minutes of your time? We could walk through the pitch and you give us a little feedback. We talked to the CFO of the family office. Oh yeah, I can do that. So we walk them through, we pitch them just like normal, we pitch them. Okay, here's our pitch, so what do you think? And they go, man, that's pretty interesting. Man, if I was you, I maybe tweak this or double-click on this. And they're like, are you guys actually raising money? Well yeah, we're actually doing this deal. Huh, we might be interested. Can we do another call next week? It's so interesting, the dynamic change when we ask for advice, not money.
