There are a handful of things that even many highly successful people are fearful about and amateur at doing.

Public speaking is often talked about, but one that haunts us daily is our fear of selling.

All day every day we’re “selling” ourselves and our ideas, but even many who sell for a living lack the skills they need to do it well, let alone confidently.

Fearful being “salesy.” Fearful asking for the order. Fearful hearing no. Fearful being rejected. Fearful facing objections…

Ignorance Ain’t Bliss

Perhaps in some contexts ignorance makes your life better but not when it comes to the most important skills of success.

Competence equals confidence, and at selling, many of us lack both.

Even many who have selling on their business card haven’t developed the skills they need to do it confidently, let alone excellently.

Then there are people like many investment bankers who live in denial that their job is selling, so few ever learn the skills they need to succeed. (hence, nearly all fail to become rainmakers, wondering why)

Capital raisers have the same problem, where all day every day investment managers run around meeting potential investors “trying” to sell them on their fund.

They’re smart people. Highly successful. Professionals at investing.

But few approach capital raising the same way.

Pros Being Pro

If you’re a professional, you approach every aspect of your game this way.

And while most investors dedicate their lives to being pros at the game of investing, many overlook the fact that capital is the entire game.

No capital. No game.

That’s OK for employees, but for any ambitious professionals looking to start their own firm, whatever they call it, capital raising is the name of the game.

Many of them think “I’ve got this.”

They’ve “presented” plenty before. Sat in countless “pitches.”

But, ignorant of what is selling, and unwilling to approach capital raising like a pro, many fail, and many more live in fear and torment of the capital raise.

What Does It Take To Be Pro? 

Working on deals at Goldman Sachs I advised clients on pitching investors and I was terrible at it…

Well, in all fairness I was probably about average, maybe above average, yet by my definition today, I grade myself “T.”

Ignorant, back then it seemed that if you could speak eloquently and script up smart-sounding answers you were “pitching” effectively but pros never do it that way.

Of all the things I’ve studied, selling might be the most under-appreciated craft, and, yet, one of the most powerful skills for driving all success.

Get Excellent At Capital Raising

Over some 8 years I’ve built a highly systematic approach for capital raising which we now use in our consulting firm, BLK.

Our institutional clients don’t have years of their life to read books and master the craft of selling, and we must be able to give them a method they can learn quickly and put to work effectively.

In many different places I came across many top ideas for selling and capital raising, but I also saw that was insufficient.

Even the best ideas are useless unless you have a method for putting them to work.

And, even then, all that matters is how excellent you are at doing it.

A Systematic Approach To Capital Raising

I’m no longer going to share advanced ideas without actually providing a solution.

This report is our best solution to capital raising.

In some 65 pages we break down capital raising into four parts:

1. Become The Capital Raiser: Whereas most start with selling, just as my Do What You Want books begin with a chapter titled Starting With You, we do here. Straight up, what matters most to selling is you’re the one doing it… This is skill. Development. Training. Preparation. Being the person who drives the capital raise.

2. Sourcing / Lead Generation: A secret of selling is that the most important part isn’t “selling,” but getting in front of people who want to buy. Said differently, capital raising isn’t “selling investors.” First and foremost it’s a search process, finding those investors who don’t need to be sold.

3. Getting To The Heart… Of Capital Raising: What actually sells? If you ask most people you’ll hear a laundry list of ideas but pros know there are only two things to master: What moves people forward—Emotional and Logical Drivers—and what holds them back—Objections? How you collect this intel and use it is selling.

4. Structure Of The Sale: Even once you’ve got all the right ingredients you must bring it together in the right way. If you’re baking a cake you can’t leave out the eggs and if you’re capital raising you must hit every part of the sale. This takes leading, skill, and of course preparation.

While most investors settle for amateur, if you’re serious about being a professional at capital raising, you want this report.

And if you’re a real pro you’ll want to work with us to win at the only necessary part to winning the investing game!

After reading our report on Living Dalio’s Principles a client put a good question to me.

Is it possible that we give too much credit to Dalio’s principles because we’re biased by his success?

Yes, absolutely.

It’s entirely possible that while Ray asserts principles as the cause of his success, the radical truth is that we have no way of actually measuring their causality.

How could we?

Surely there are people out there with great principles and terrible results and those with great results and terrible principles. Heck, for all we know there is an alternate reality in which Ray Dalio is even more successful without having even thought about a principle.

That’s the hard thing about “modeling” success. We can’t know what drives it.

Returns on Luck

Some people tell stories of how they got lucky and won the lottery, whereas others say they deliberately picked the winning numbers.

A way you might assess their skill is to have them replicate their success—which Dalio has done for years—but even then you might still struggle to distinguish skill from luck.

All success is similarly squishy to model.

Is Tom Brady’s success the product of his rigorous TB12 Method, or would he have crushed it anyways? Who knows?

What about Michael Schumacher? For decades he raced at 300 km/h, yet he was permanently disabled in a skiing accident. Was he under-skilled or out of luck?

Did Mark Cuban get lucky because he sold Yahoo! stock at the right time? Is Zuckerberg a genius or was he lucky he wasn’t born in 1885? Was Myspace just less lucky?

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Since I first read the pdf version of Principles, I’ve been fascinated by the way Ray Dalio thinks.

It’s true that his billionaire success is what drew me into his thinking, but it’s the rigor of Ray’s ideas that really hooked me.

Although I spend my life exploring ideas, I’m intensely practical. I’m not interested in philosophy or kicking around ideas for the sake of it, but in ideas that you can use.

And that’s what I see from Ray.

He’s deep, deep, deep on the topics he knows, but ultimately he’s focused on identifying the best ideas so he can rigorously put them to work.

More Than Principles

While I find Ray’s principles incredibly fascinating, what I most enjoyed in reading Ray’s recently released book, Principles, was his story at the front.

Some time ago I remember seeing Ray quoted about failure, and thought to myself, With all of his success, what could he possibly know about failure?

It turns out, quite a lot.

In fact, the way Ray tells his story, it was failure that led him to develop his principles-based approach to begin with, so he could avoid making the same mistakes.

Writing with great humility, throughout the book Ray calls himself things like a “dumb shit,” and suggests that the success he’s created has less to do with him, and more to do with his principles.

While there’s certainly some modesty in that, perhaps the greatest learning from Ray’s book is seeing that it’s not so much his principles that have driven his success, but the discipline and focus that Ray dedicates to living this way.

How Do You Live It?

In reading Ray’s book I began to think more deeply about how, specifically, we each might develop and use our own principles.

Over some 40+ years Ray has developed many principles for his work and life, yet he implores readers to not follow his, but to develop principles of their own.

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Public market investors and traders, by and large, fit a certain mold. They are:

• Optimistic, but extremely skeptical.
• Data-driven, but creative.
• Ambitious, but soberingly realistic.

And most of all, they are always looking for an edge.

More often than not, we look for edge via outside resources—better research, information, technology, etc.—but in my experience working with top Wall Streeters, the difference between the good and great is never outside of them.

The difference is inside. The difference is their mind.

More specifically, great investors and traders recognize that they have access to more or less the same outside resources. What separates them is, of course, what they do with it.

While the right outside resources are crucial to making good investment and trading decisions, the fundamental tool we rely upon is the 3 pound organ that sits between our ears. Great investors recognize the crucial importance of getting their mind right in the way that they approach each and every trading day.

Continue reading…