Professor Raiton’s Inside Perspectives: Entrepreneurship, Creativity, Innovation

From Get Venture by Mark Davis

VCs understand that the fundraising process is time consuming, taking entrepreneurs away from building the company.  Creating documents for investors can be one of the most time-consuming parts of the process.  While not all of the documents are likely to assist in operations, some of the materials can and should be created with operational purposes in mind to make more use of these efforts.

Here are five ways to make the fundraising process more useful to your operation:

1. Create projections in a manner that makes them easy to use for future planning and budgeting,
2. Design your uses of capital raised analysis to play into your short term budgets by making it sufficiently detailed,
3. Leverage the addressable market analysis to identify the most attractive target customer segments,
4. Revisit your competitive landscape when preparing investor materials to look for best practices and opportunities to enhance your model, and
5. Generate a sales pipelines document that can be leveraged by your sales department going forward (you’ll probably need an operational version of this document to share with your board in the future).

Fundraising can be a tedious process – try to get as much operational value out of it as possible.