Getting Investor Ready

Are you investor ready?

What I’m referring to here is whether you have all your legal ducks in a row so that an investor could come along today and invest in your company swiftly.

The important part of getting investment is the due diligence (DD) process. As part of the DD process, the investor and their legal team will root around in your business to assess whether you’re worth investing in. They’ll look into your contracts, your accounts, your assets and your liabilities. Timescales for the DD process from start to finish will depend on the size of the company and the nature of the company, but to give it an idea it can take a couple of weeks, or up to four months.

If the investor finds issues in their deep dive of your business, this could cause them to reduce the amount of money they’re looking to invest, they may look to increase their stake to reflect the greater risk of investment, or they may choose to walk away entirely, which would be disastrous!

If investment is on the cards for you, here’s the questions you need to be asking yourself:

·??????If you’ve gone into business with another person, do you have a shareholder agreement in place?

·??????Do you have all your client contracts in place, and do these legally protect your business?

·??????Do your supplier contracts provide you with sufficient recourse if your suppliers fail to meet their obligations?

·??????Do you have robust employment and contractor agreements in place?

·??????Is your website legally compliant by having website terms of use, a privacy and cookie policy and cookies consent banner?

·??????Do you take your data protection obligations seriously, such as by registering with the Information Commissioner’s Office and by having data processing agreements where you share personal data with third parties?

·??????Have you registered your company name, logos or taglines as trade marks? Have you registered your trade mark in the countries you sell your goods and services in?

Whether you’re looking for investment today or in the future, now is a good time to get yourself investor ready and we can help you with this. Not only will you be ready for investors at a moment's notice, but you will also have the peace of mind that your company is operating above board and you’re not open to any hidden legal risks.

Just drop me an email to arrange a legal advice call and we can discuss how we can help you prepare for investment and represent you during the investment process.

Chat to you soon

Babs