Rich Bello advises emerging fund managers on building operations and fundraising. He recommends hiring fractional executives (COOs, CFOs, CCOs) to set up best practices, and offers a 10-week masterclass plus a SaaS tool that maps out fundraising campaigns with KPIs and delegation steps.
I have to imagine it's pretty tough to start at as a marketing manager on your own. Is this an area that a route assists with?
Assist. We do a lot more than assist. But yeah, that's, that's, that's one way to put it, you know. I'll tell you a story. When John Griffin and I first started out Blue Ridge Capital and we raised a funder, co founders, we raised the, finally started out 150 million to 10 billion at our height. We first started out, I'll never forget this, we're walking across the street and he said, rich, I'm going to hire three analysts. The two of us, I'm going to hire three analysts. They're going to bring me in like a dessert cart, right? Of desserts. The analogy was these are investments. Of course. He's like, pick this one, like this one, don't like this one, like short that one. Right. Then pick all these out. He's like, that's what I want to do. I love investing. Did you do everything else? I said, yeah, John, I can do everything else. And by the way, you have a hard job. I'm in control of what I'm doing. It's hard invested. I know how hard it is, but I can do everything else. So for emerging managers, for instance, we certainly can help them set up their infrastructure in a lot of different ways. We've got a deep bench of literally hundreds of expert advisors in any functional area. We've got COOs, CFOs, CCOs, CISOs. We've got business development people. You have analysts. These are fractional consultants or employees that can be hired. It's extremely valuable, it's extremely valuable to hire fractional employees or consultants. They come in and set you up in any area of your business. They can do a best practice review, means completely get you set up. They can write out procedures and they can even do the jobs themselves. And by the way, you might end up hiring one of these folks, kind of a long term interview. Yeah, they can come in three, four hours a week or 40 hours. So that takes care of one of the things that they don't want to do. And by the way, usually the managers are not great at setting up operational infrastructure, nor should they, nor is it a good use of their time. So remember, there are two things we talked about that managers need to do. One was setting up their operational infrastructure. The other one is fundraising. Right. So that's where on the fundraising front we're now getting a third party market marketer. But there's plenty that we can do to help. So we've written a book on fundraising for emerging managers. It's a book that has 10 fundraising principles and it's also the book that goes along with our 10 week masterclass by the same name. So we covered 10 principles of how to run a successful fundraising campaign. We covered things like the basics, of course, like pitch decks and other marketing materials. We discussed fit technology like CRMs. You discuss the sales pitch itself, which a lot of managers don't have much experience in, but it's a necessity. You get into this meeting, this is your chance, right? Get in front of an allocator. It's like this is it kind of like on an interview. You're going for an interview, same type of thing. You got to sell people on this and you got to really believe it, believe in your fun. Hopefully you've got a great track record. There are also legal and regulatory issues that a lot of managers are not aware of, but they must be aware of them, so be careful with that. So the class is taught by experts, different people teaching the class. And it's also in a workshop format. I don't like just doing lecture. We do lecture and then workshop formats. Get a real experience doing it. You can kind of do practice. These aren't just for managers. These are also for business development folks on the teams. So now importantly, in addition to the book and the masterclass, we also developed this blueprint technology, SAS technology, really the blueprint for a successful fundraising campaign. We put a lot of effort into a lot of resources into this blueprint. You have this blueprint, you can get it done. It's a plan on how to raise capital. It goes through each step. Who do you delegate it to? Has a bunch of KPIs. It's a really amazing plan. It goes perfectly with the book and the master class. So I encourage anybody that's looking to start a fund that's in the formation stages of starting fund to check out all of these three. It's a really great package having all together.
Yeah, that sounds like it.
Wow. Really?
You're setting them up for success.
Yeah, that's exactly where you're going, setting them up for success. You get all three, boom, then you got to execute on it.
