Evan Carmichael explains how to find investors and partners who share your values. Show up consistently in communities where your product lives—gyms, forums, trade shows—and share your work with early adopters. He met his branding partner Jason at a coffee-shop event and built a lasting collaboration by being present and patient.
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How do you find investors and partners for your business? If you're running a business, you can't do everything yourself. It's not possible. Successful entrepreneurs do not do everything themselves. You're always going to be limited by how much time you have, and you don't have the skill set, the experience, or probably the desire to do everything, right? You're really good at one thing or two things, but you're not good at the hundred things that you need to make your business successful. And so a great option is to look at bringing on people, bringing on a team, either in the form of employees but also partners, to help you make this business successful. Finding a partner is like getting married though. It is tough. It is something that you need to really invest a lot of time with because you don't want to give up a part of your business to somebody who's not going to be a long-term fit for your company. I got a great question from one of my readers Andy, who wrote in a long email, he's an inventor. He's created this invention in weightlifting category, so he's helping people. Could be life-saving invention for weightlifters. He's 52 years old, he wants to retire, he's got this great invention, and he's looking for investors and partners to help him take this thing to the next level. But he doesn't know where to start, doesn't know where to find these people. If you want to find somebody who is a potential partner for you, the best thing you can do is start hanging around in the circles of that you are already passionate about. So if the product is about weightlifting, I don't know why you started this business. I'm assuming you are a weightlifter, right? I hope you're a weightlifter. I hope you know something about this business. I'm assuming you're a passionate weightlifter. You need to start hanging around people who are also passionate about weightlifting. You can hang around with, at the gyms with gym owners. You can hang around with people online who are in forums and communities. You can hang around if there's events community events, if there's trade shows, if there's conferences, that's where you need to be. You need to be hanging around people who care about weightlifting because your goal here is to find people who you can connect with, who have the same value system as you, who believe in the same things as you do, who love the idea of building a business, but who have complementary skills to what you do. You're the inventor, so you need to find somebody who's great at sales and marketing. Might be great at production, great at creating distribution deals. And those people exist. There are people who are great at marketing, who love weightlifting, and who share the same value system as you do, who want the same thing as a, as a vision for the business as you do. And that's gonna come by hanging around in those circles. You're not gonna have a lot of success going, posting online, hey, I need a partner for this business. Right? That's not how you go out and find a business partner. It's got to be somebody who is passionate about your community just as much as you do, you are. Believes in the same thing that you do. And to find those guys, where are they going to hang out? You want to hang out where they're hanging out. And that's going to be at the gyms and the trade shows and the conferences. And you don't have to be the big schmoozer networking guy, you know, hanging out your cards to everybody. Doesn't have to be you. But you should start to get known a little bit in your community for this great invention that you have among the, the early adopters, right? The people who love trying new things. And spread the word that you're looking for a partner. Spread the word that you are looking for some marketing help and some investment help. That's how you're going to find those initial first people to partner up with, or potential employees, or potential investors for your business. Here's an example to kind of bring that home a little bit more. I, uh, there's a new guy on my team, okay, his name is Jason, he's been helping me a lot with my branding and web design and strategy, great new person on the team. And I met him because I did an event for this coffee shop here in Toronto. What happened was a bus ran into the coffee shop. Something happened, it was trying to swerve away from a bicyclist, and the bus ran right into a coffee shop. Smashed through the front door. The business had to go out of business for a while to close down and repair the shop. And I knew the owner, I loved her coffee and her drinks, and I thought, wow, like, imagine how bad that is. Imagine how bad it is to have a business— you're already struggling enough, it's hard enough to run a business— you have to worry about a bus coming through your front door and having to shut down for a couple weeks. And so I thought, you know what, I'm going to surprise this business owner and I'm going to send out a newsletter to my list and say, "Hey everybody, let's meet at this store on this date at this time. We'll have fun, get to know each other, and buy some coffee and some treats and support this entrepreneur." That's something that's core to me. That's something that I believe in. I believe in helping entrepreneurs, helping the little guy, and being a part of entrepreneurial success. That's what I love doing. Jason was a guy who came out to that event. So right away, here's a guy who believes the same thing as I do. He believes in entrepreneurs. He wants to help this person out. There's something about him that he shares that value with me that would make us potentially compatible. People who got that email might say, "Ah, this is stupid. I'm not going to go to this. I got something else that day. I'm not going to make it a priority." That's great. I don't want to talk to those guys. They're not going to be potential fits for me. I want somebody who's just as excited about this idea as I am. And that's what you need to find for your business. So Jason came out to this event and we met, we had coffee, it was great. We met a couple times afterwards, we developed a relationship. We never thought about, "Hey, we should work together." That wasn't my intention going in, but we ended up working on some projects and then he came on board and became a bigger part of my team. The same thing can happen for you. You've got to go to events that you feel passionate about and get involved in the weightlifting community, and people will gravitate towards you. The same people who have the same value system and believe in what you're doing, they'll come to you, and you can decide who might be a good potential partner and what help you need to grow this thing up. But you're not gonna find the partner by just emailing people or by searching on the web. That's not how you do it. You've got to make real personal connections with people who share the same system as you. Same ideals, and hopefully be able to build a long-term relationship with them. It's a little bit, uh, what? It's a little bit scary. It's a little bit not so concrete, and it may not work the first time. You know, you can't go to one event and expect something great to happen, but if you keep going Eventually you'll find the right people to help you take your business to where it needs to go. You have to believe that it's going to work out. Believe. For those of you watching, like the video, please give it a thumbs up below, and I'd love to hear what you have to think. Leave a comment underneath, let me know your thoughts. You have a question, leave it below, I'll make a video response. Thank you so much, and I'll see you soon.
