This program operates for 3 months and includes coverage of the following areas. You can go as fast as you are able, and we will always keep up with you.

Part 1: Baseline Information

• Market Sector, Subsector, Industry, TAM, and CAGR: This baseline information should already exist in your corporate environment. To the extent it does not, we will rapidly review it with you to develop a preliminary version.

  The selection of these items can lead to different investors and investor interests driving the process. The same company can be worth more or less, appeal to more or fewer investors, and be presented in completely different ways depending on these decisions.

• Business Model and Competitive Advantage: This baseline information should already exist in your corporate environment. To the extent it does not, we will rapidly review it with you to develop a preliminary version.

  The business model is critical to investor fit, because most investors only invest in specific business models they like. Competitive advantages for investors are really about barriers to entry and exit (i.e., stickiness), and most investors prefer "unfair advantages".

• Vision, Strategy, and Core values: This baseline information should already exist in your corporate environment. To the extent it does not, we will rapidly review it with you to develop a preliminary version.

  Many types of investors care more about vision and core values that match their own, more than strategy. The selection of these, particularly in the ESG arena, can lead to investors shunning you or shining to you.

• Problem and Solution:This is the very real problem in the marketplace and how you address that problem for your customers. It is often confused with technical problems, but it's not the same thing.

  Presentation of problem and solution are among the first things the investors see and look at, and if they are not compelling, you are likely sunk before you launch in their eyes. Finding the proper motivation for the investor in the problem you solve is critical to their interest.

Part 2: What you have and how you present it

• Special Sauce: This is, in a sense, the differentiators in the marketplace that set you apart from your competition. It is most commonly related to brand, but also tends to be associated with technology, special position, connections, know-how, intellectual property rights, etc.

  Surprisingly, the special sauce usually doesn't make or break the investment opportunity. But you have to present what you have so that the value of that sauce comes out as a positive.

• Elevator Speeches:These are the first things you say to customers / investors and that tell who you are, what you do, and why they should be motivated. They get you in the door. They show your brand, your value proposition, and your vision in very short order.

  You have about 10 seconds to get them to a preliminary yes or no in terms of their interest. As soon as they turn off listening to you, you have likely lost the deal.

• Customers and Marketing Approach: This is where you identify the customers you are selling to, in the sense that they make the decisions on buying. You need to know more about them than just their job title or function. This is about what motivates than and how you present to them to motivate them.

  You are selling them on your ability to sell to your customers. That means everything you are doing in this effort should have been done for your customer sales as well. The investor should see that you have done this well for the customer, but not necessarily understand that you have done it well for the investor as well.

• Competition: You are not alone in the marketplace, no matter how unique your solution may be. There is always the alternative of not doing anything, and for any substantial market, there are always competitors. This is about how you compete, how you counter the competition, and how they will counter you.

  You are selling in competition with their other investment alternatives. And they usually invest in the top one on their list at each time they decide to make an investment. That means you have to out-sell the other investments, even though you might not know who they are or how many of them are competing.

Part 3: How you project, track, and adapt with time

• Sales Sieves and/or Simulations: This is about how many of what you can sell to whom, at what price, with what timing, and the cost and pay back over time of getting, retaining, and growing them as customers.

  You should have a sales sieve for your investment process, but it's very different from the customer sales sieves you might be used to. Unlike many customer sales, you are only usually aiming to get a very small number of closed deals with investors out of a large pool of potentials.

• Sustainability and Impact: Nothing lasts forever, but depending on the sustainability and impact, very different approaches are taken to different customers. This is where we figure this out.

  Investors are increasingly interested in ESG, even though this is rarely the single highest decision criterion on their list. You likely must show how you are good for the things they want to do good for in order to get their investment. Figuring out how to show that to them is a key to avoiding a "no".

• Sales Capacity and Management: Nothing happens till someone sells something. Sales people don't sell things unless you can provide them with what they need to succeed and manage them as they sell things. If you think your Web portal sells things for you, you will need to rethink that here.

  Investors are really only going to listen to the CEO. And it will take most of the CEO's time to get investments. That limits the sales capacity to one sales person, perhaps with a supporting staff to help with the volume of items to do in getting in toe door with the right investors.

• Go to Market Matrix: This summarizes your short-, medium-, and long-term planning in moving your company from where you are to where you are going. It's a strategic roll-up of everything else you have done, and it helps keep you on track as you adapt and evolve.

  Very few companies that succeed only have one investment round. And ideally, investors in the early stages end up as strategic partners who ultimately buy the company. That means planning for the investment process over the lifecycle of the company and executing against that plan as you adapt it.

Part 4: Execution

While you are building your plan, you are also executing on it.

• Lead generation: We help you identify and sign up to the various platforms that get your company connected to investors. We also have a large database we start with to help identify leads.

  While there are some very big platforms out there, their size limits their utility in getting you in front of the right investors. Getting the right search criteria and evaluating the opportunities is a big part of finding the right investors to contact. This is part of what we will do for/with you.

• Sieving the right ones to pitch: After we / you find lots of investors and investment groups, you need to narrow the field to make it feasible to succeed.

  This is the most labor-intensive part of the process. There are two big problems most companies face; (1) figuring out whether this is someone you want to present to, and (2) getting in communications with them. It's surprisingly hard to get a few minutes of their time in most cases. Our service will do this part of the process for/with you to get to more qualified leads.

• Adapting and customizing: Each time you present you should customize at least a little bit. Investors like to think you know them and have chosen them to pitch to.

  The sieve you use to identify the right investors to pitch to should also support the customization of your pitch to the particulars of the audience. It's a low probability high consequence effort every time. Or you can take a more statistical approach with a different investor set.

• Pitching your brains out: Most successful CEOs getting investment funds spend more than 50% of their time pitching for investments. We reduce your time spent at the lead generation and qualification stage of the sieve.

  This is the CEO's job, in many cases more than any other job they have. Understanding the required effort and optimizing your time in getting investment is key to being able to run the company as you build and fund it. Our service will execute on the top of the sieve to generate you better qualified leads with far less effort.