Startup Fundraising Consultants
When raising capital for your small business startup is essential to your growth plans, our end to end fundraising service helps you find the right investment quicker and more easily.
Get fundraising fit with Scaling Partners
• Help you choose the right route to investment
• Help you define a proposition that really engages investors
• Refine your pitch and produce the marketing collaterals to
make you stand out
• Maintain momentum to maximise results
• Help you choose the best investor match
Successful fundraising as a service
Successful fundraising as a service with Scaling Partners
with Scaling Partners
Whether you’re raising £300k or £30m we can help. Here’s how:
Get investor fit
When raising funds, the pitch is never the place to discover that potential investors feel your financials are hazy and your deck is weak. Fundraising strategic plans, forecasting and valuation: we’ll help ensure your figures are robust and your presentation strong to meet your fundraising goals.
Find investors
Investors expect a lot before they release their money. Robust figures. Water-tight answers. A business and a CEO they can believe in. But you should have high expectations too – that your investor is the right partner for you and your business. With our years of experience, we’ll help you build a campaign to bring perfectly-matched partners together.
Get crowdfunding fit
Everyone’s crowdfunding. That makes it a potentially powerful source of funding, but you’re swimming in a very large pool. How do you stand out? Make sure you get help from the best crowdfunding consultants. From the financials to the marketing strategy to creating a story that sells, we’ll help you run a successful campaign.
Fundraising is more successful with Scaling Partners. The key is being armed with the information, understanding and assets you need to engage potential investors in the first place, avoid being blindsided by an unexpected question, and make the strongest possible case for their involvement.
For first timers and seasoned investment seekers, we’ll help you discover the most effective fundraising strategies, and put them to work. Here’s how:
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Develop your investment strategy
What’s the proposition? That’s the key to defining a rewarding investment strategy that raises capital for your small business startup. Everything else – the investors you target, the pitch you present, and the collateral you develop – rely on it.
That’s why we’ll work with you to define and refine the proposition before using it to further define investor targets, timelines, exit strategies and more.
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Create your investment assets
A great pitch deck makes your offering beautifully simple yet razor-sharp. The Scaling Partners team will combine your strategy, figures and your existing brand guidelines to help you develop a pitch deck that delivers the long term vision, ambition and detail investors expect.
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Know your numbers
Being secure in your financials isn’t only an essential part of your capital fundraising campaign strategy. It’s vital to being able to maintain investor confidence when they start probing your forecasts and valuation. We’ll produce the detailed financial analysis to help you understand the numbers investors need and help you answer their questions with clarity.
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Make a perfect pitch
A great pitch can work wonders in inspiring investor confidence and excitement in you and the brand. That takes practice, so we’ll develop an honest working relationship with you, to provide you with feedback and help you sell your pitch, anticipate questions and prepare answers.
Crowdfunding is more successful with Scaling Partners when you work with the best crowdfunding consultants. Whether you’re exploring crowdfunding platforms for the first time or want to make this round a simpler, more rewarding experience than the last, our end-to-end fundraising crowdfunding experts and service will help you create the strategy, campaign and assets that help bring more funding your way. Here’s how:
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Develop your crowdfunding strategy
What is your offering? How much are you aiming to raise? Who are the investor targets most likely to engage with you – and how should you structure your campaign to deliver?
We’ll work with you to develop your capital fundraising campaign strategy, defining clear goals and next steps, and always you’ll be able to rely on our experience to help steer a course through unfamiliar territory.
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Find your hook
What’s compelling for a customer can be very different to what makes a potential investor sit up and take notice. We’ll find the elements in your offering most likely to engage the crowdfunding community and help you shape a story that delivers real investor impact.
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Build your campaign
The right investor pack does more than provide ‘nuts and bolts’ information about the business, its goals and its performance to date. It creates a compelling story that shares your vision. It makes investors want to be part of it.
We’ll work with you to craft messaging that cuts to the core of your investment proposition, so every potential investor understands the opportunity instantly. Then we’ll help you carry that messaging across an integrated marketing campaign of video, social media, web, print and more.
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Maintain momentum
The pitch is not the end. It’s just the start of a process that should result in queries, suggestions and a general back and forth between you and your potential investors. Our startup fundraising consultants will help you maintain momentum, with the additional assets and tools you need to drive the conversation – and investment.
We make scaling simple. One of the ways we do that is by making it easier to raise investment. And from working out which investment route to take, to establishing your case and preparing the pitch, we’ll help you every step of the way. Here’s how:
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Define the challenge – and the opportunity
What funding do you need to raise? What’s the right route to take to raise it? What are the key points of attraction for investors? And how could you make life easier for investors to invest?
From valuation to funding route assessment to applying for SEIS/EIS Advance Assurance (enabling tax breaks for investment), we’ll lay out the roadmap to investment success.
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Create investor assets
Yours is far from the only pitch a potential investor will see this week. So not only will we create a deck and video to help you stand out amidst the noise; we’ll also help you prepare the perfect in-person pitch so you can face your investors armed with answers and confidence.
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Drive engagement
We’ll manage your campaign, ensuring you reach the right potential investors and managing the flow of communication to maintain momentum.
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Decide
With a pool of interested investors to work with, we’ll help you make the right choice for your business.
Why Scaling Partners?
The fundraising pitch can be a lonely place. That’s especially the case when you discover your proposition isn’t as powerful as you thought it was and your financials are being ripped apart by savvy investors.
Scaling Partners know fundraising. We’re veterans of securing startup and growth investment across a wide range of sectors. We’ve secured millions of pounds (and dollars) worth of investment from multiple fundraising rounds. We can do the same for you.
For startups at late seed to Series A+ stage, when you’re preparing to face your potential investors, take us with you.
How We Work
Done with you
Our most economical model. A low touch approach where we Analyse and Support the execution
Done for you
Our ‘Let’s Go’ Model where we take care of just about everything. We Analyse, Support, and Execute
Subscription
Our most integrated model working as a full extension to your team on open-ended or midterm projects
FAQ
Do I need to hire a professional fundraising consultant?
You don’t need to – it’s entirely possible to crowdfund or launch a successful investment round flying solo. But the private equity fund raising process can be a complex one. By taking a DIY approach you will mistakes and you’ll gradually refine your approach with each iteration. Work with experienced capital raising consultants and you remove a huge part of that learning curve, because we’ve already done it. We know the pitfalls, processes, formalities and opportunities, which means you’re far more likely to enjoy fundraising success faster.
How do small businesses fundraise?
Venture capitalist (VC) investment is the classic route for scaling startups to raise investment. Over recent years, crowdfunding, angel investment and peer to peer lending (see below) have all become popular alternative routes. Each has its advantages and for many of the startups we work with any route could be a viable option. One of the crucial elements of developing your capital fundraising campaign strategy is deciding which is right for you. We’ll help you with that.
What is a fundraising strategy?
There’s a simple truth about successful fundraising – it’s not just about the money. It’s about the other ways an investor (depending on their type and the way you define their role) could support, engage with and influence your business. Crowdfunders won’t sit on your board. They won’t change your company culture. Generally speaking, they won’t alter the way you operate. Venture capitalists and angels might. And as a growing startup looking for new opportunities to scale and explore new markets, having an engaged investor may be absolutely what you need.
A fundraising strategy helps you establish what you need from your investor. It ensures you’ve factored in timescales, rules and regulations and ultimately ensures your investment takes you where you want to go.
How do you write a strategic fundraising plan?
A strategic fundraising plan is not the pitch you make to potential investors. This is the preparatory work that helps you create that pitch and it will provide clarity – for you and potential investors – about why they should invest in you and what you plan to do with their money.
With the fundraising strategy set (that is, the type of investor you plan to approach) the plan will consider the following additional points:
- Who are you and what do you do?
- What makes you different?
- What problem do your products/services address?
- The story so far – what are your successes to date?
- In what ways will fundraising help you grow?
- How much do you want to raise?
- Why should the investor invest?
Next, you’ll want to develop your plan. Our startup fundraising consultants can help you do that.
What are the 3 types of investors?
For startups seeking investment, potential investors fall into three groups: venture capitalists (VCs), angel investors and crowdfunders. Crowdfunding involves lots of investors investing small amounts so it requires a simple, powerful business proposition everyone can ‘get’ easily. It’s also likely to involve a more passive investor happy to let you continue as you are. VCs will invest more in smaller numbers and will likely expect to be more engaged in the direction of the company. Angel investors are wealthy individuals who invest in startups they believe in. Securing an angel investor requires a powerful and well-articulated vision and plan. They may, but are not always, highly engaged with the business’ growth.
What Our Customers Say
Laurent has a sharp commercial mind and was quick to start offering value to our startup. Scaling Partners have helped to sharpen our approach and refine our focus with every session, helping us on key topics such as go-to-market business models to fundraising strategies, providing many actionable tips, and really forcing us to think in a deep way. Laurent has a huge amount of experience and it’s very satisfying to see how much we’ve learned along the way.
Matthew Curley, Founder & CEO
Laurent and the team at Scaling Partners helped us to figure out several missing pieces of the puzzle to help our business take the next stepl, discussing how to find the right investment partner, how to find strategic partners e-commerce operations in Europe and how find a design partner for the fintech operation. Laurent helped us come up with new lines of thinking which was very useful.
Moshe Avrish, Founder & CEO
The experience, support and guidance given to us by Laurent and the team at Scaling Partners was invaluable. Right from the get go they have steered us to avoid the pitfalls the an enthusiastic Entrepreneur would surely fall into and pointed to us to achieve maximum output from the right organisations at the right time in order to take our idea to market.
We are not there yet but Laurent is on speed dial so will get there.
Paul Gilley, CEO
Focused, knowledgeable, and a pleasure to work with. As our business is very tech and Lifesciences focussed, having a commercial sounding board like Scaling Partners, helped us to figure out complex questions to do with pricing, business models, and scalability. Incredibly valuable advice, which has helped us to grow more consistently and even faster.
Chief Revenue Officer
The insights and experience provided by Laurent during a key phase in our business where we were considering both fundraising or exiting proved incredibly helpful. Laurent has deep sector knowledge when it comes to the different fundraising routes a startup can take and talking through different strategies and their implication help us make the best decision for our business.
Cofounder & CEO
Laurent helped our CEO and Leadership team to structure our go-to-market project as we were investigating approaching a new market segment, helping us backfill the gaps in knoeldeg and resources in the business. Laurent helped us create an easy to follow structure to allow the team to do a full competitive and product review as well as looking at pricing and customer ROI.
Chairman
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