How to pitch private equity brokers

[Jay Ben]

Would you pitch a capital raiser/equity broker the same way as you would an investor? Would you need to have a certain SEC license to work with a capital broker or just a ppm?

What do you need to have ready before speaking to brokers?

[Doug Smith]

When you figure that one out let me know. We've tried doing that for about 15 years and finally stopped. Everyone seems to talk a good game, but when it comes time to stroke a check, they seem to forget where they put the check book. The money we were offered from larger funds came with so many strings that we didn't take the cash. There was one company we did take a chunk of money from about 10 years ago. They actually had someone from their accounting department and someone from their legal team each independently call me every single day...each one of them separately...and want to go through every single deal in the portfolio...every day. We had over 100 deals in the portfolio at that time in various stages of work. After about 9 months I liquidated the portfolio, handed them back their money, and said "have a nice life". We are really, really good at what we do and provide great returns to the smaller investors that we work with, but when it came to nabbing institutional capital, we found that those that raise the capital can't get out of the way of those who actually are great at managing it. We'll likely never get in bed with bigger capital again. Unless we find someone that actually is a pleasure to work with and understands what we do, we'll stay the course with the smaller one-set-two-sey investors. Good luck to you.