Private Investors Near Me

I am often asked, what insights do you have to attract local investors? or How can I meet more private investors, angel investors, or accredited investors in my city - so we could easily develop that relationship and trust over time.

Why? If you follow our investor club's work, you know by now I'm a big Dr. Cialdini fan, and you know that when I interviewed him recently, he stressed how you are 16 as likely to close a deal if you meet in person. Beyond that, though - what gets someone to invest? I have found it is typically because they are VERY high up one of these 3 trust curves or moderate to high on at least 2 of these 3 at the time they allocate:

1. Team: The most influential part of the equation is how well the investor knows the team and/or founder, that matters more than the merits of the deal. Newbies in capital raising get this wrong and think their over-promising of returns due to lack of scar tissue and unknown unknowns is what is going to get someone to invest, but anyone can put any IRR or return % on a piece of paper and hit print. As the panel pictured above mentioned recently at an event of ours, who refers you the deal matters more than the details of the deal sometimes.
2. Industry: If someone made their money in your industry they can help you complete due diligence, round up other investors, ask sharp questions, etc. You don't have to teach them the ABCs of your space, explain things on a base level, and they could help you play offense securing distribution agreements, IP, sharpening your marketing/positioning, etc. or help you play defense and replace a piece of lost talent, etc. Smart money is great as you get a think tank and someone very motivated with the dollars. I often tell investors, see deals first, exclusively and at better valuations and your net worth goes up - how do you do that? Be known as a strategic investor in your space.
3. Opportunity/Deal: Are they local the opportunity or deal? Everything moves faster. If so, you can know the person and industry cold, but if it is self-storage or dental practices and you are based in Dallas and the deal is in Dubai or Belgium, you may not be so excited to move forward. If the deal is local, even if you don't know the industry you may be comfortable if you can visit the team for due diligence easily several times, walk the manufacturing floor, secret shopper the dental practice, and have a good instinct on that area growing or not.

If you are an investor and you are looking at deals from people you do not know, in industries you are not familiar with, and the deals aren't local to you - good luck, as you are going to need it. You will likely lose money and be taking more risk on those deals, and simply wasting time in many cases as you will not end up allocating as much or as quickly.

If you are raising capital and you focus on people who already know your industry, are local to the deal, or know you, you are swimming downstream, and as Buffett famously says, sometimes the tide matters more than the swimmer.

This is why everyone starts with friends and family, they are WAY up the trust curve on the founder raising the money even if they don't understand the industry and aren't local to the deal. If someone worth $15M made their money in industry x, has known you for 2 years, and is local to the deal - they are very likely investing if the merits of the deal line up.

Here is a thorough answer to that question so when my team is approached in this way we can have a clear answer to send them to:

1. Most of what people new to raising capital get wrong applies to meeting with local investors, so if you want to be effective locally, you need to always simply be effective in your positioning, communications, follow-up, etc. Most people lack in all of these areas and have poor or almost no materials - so please see my $100M Rainmaker Series on YouTube under our Centimillionaire Strategies channel - under playlists if you fall into that camp, there are 30 strategies and $100k of value in that mini-series.
2. Identify the top non-profits, business ownership clubs, CEO groups, and industry-specific organizations in your city, join them to see which are valuable, and lead a few over time. Another strategy is to locally sponsor the events that have your key demographic attending and try to negotiate an exclusive sponsorship so nobody else in your niche can also sponsor.
3. Identify the connectors in your city, top CPAs, attorneys, consultants, and power brokers who seem to know everyone and get referred deals, investors, capital, and opportunities constantly. Perhaps they already get to see deals first, exclusively and at better valuations so by partnering with them you can too.
4. Live, work, educate your kids, and exercise in an area that is highly concentrated in terms of potential investors, so just by going to the beach, your kid's school, the gym, etc., you are meeting potential investors, partners, etc. It is an investment in your health and your business at the same time.
5. Create a database of 300 investor leads right in your backyard, those who are within 1-2 hours drive, the local family offices, local investor clubs, and people you can identify on LinkedIn as having 10-20+ employees, and build out your list so 66%-75% of your investors are local to you, and you work them over time to get a cup of coffee or get their attention.
6. The best approach for any type of investor, including local, is to add value first. Can you help investors with tax planning, accessing opportunities, structuring deals, saving them money on fees, or do you have a 1 page infographic on top 20 things to ask when looking at any angel investment deal? We have found it de-risks the entire relationship when you add big value first without asking for anything, that is why we have the Family Office Podcast, the YouTube channel, and this newsletter, it is mass reciprocation as Cialdini would put it, and the more value we give out for free the more good Karma we create. You need to figure out how to do that locally? A meet-up group? An AI tool you could develop, free talks or a newsletter you send out to your 300 leads each month? The most generous in a niche wins.
7. Use big data. Look in the Inc. 500 for the last 15 years in your niche and see who had an explosive business, perhaps they have had an exit and figure out which are in your region or city. Look at county records to see who is on the title of real estate that you are looking to acquire, perhaps you find new investors once you see who owns a lot of the assets already. The more you go the extra mile to be more thorough, more systematic, more thoughtful, more helpful, it is the stuff you don't want to do that will make the difference as nobody else wants to do it either, everyone is "too busy" or "under-resourced" and the big guys have referrals coming in like a river sometimes so they don't have to go out of their way to source deals or capital at times. That is why there is always opportunities, once someone starts winning they often stop doing as many creative, new, innovative, and value-add moves that someone smaller can laser-focus on.

To stand out by definition, you can't get lost in the crowd, so select a unique niche, be concise in communications, add outsized value, and practice extreme focus so that over time, you are known as a top 3 or the #1 player in your sandbox. That is how you reverse the flow from cold reachouts to leads coming in, and if it didn't work, we wouldn't have the investor club we did today; that is what our platform is built out.

I started without enough money to pay my rent 18 years ago in the basement studio apartment in Harvard Square, and by studying family offices (ultra-wealthy investors) figured out which way was up, and scaled our business based on emulating these business owners and investors. I hope whether you are an investor, actively raising capital, a founder, or someone looking to grow a platform that you find these ideas helpful.

Subscribe for Free: Thank you for reading this newsletter, if you haven't subscribed yet please do, if you got value from this please share it in your feed, and please text me at (305) 333-1155 if you are an investor wanting access to opportunities or if you are raising capital and want to get involved in our investor club events 16x a year. You can also set up a call with my team here: https://familyoffices.com/#contact