YTKO works closely with a range of business angels and private equity, with seed funds in industry and universities, research councils, and with venture capitalists looking for investable deals from innovative, high growth potential companies. We have our own angel investor and non-executive director (NXD) network, and have invested finance and expertise directly to build our own investment portfolio, currently valued at more than £40 million.
Raising equity is very different from raising other types of finance, and takes time, but it can really accelerate the growth of your business. If an external investor is getting an attractive deal and you get to scale your business for an eventual profitable exit, it’s a win-win scenario. But there is a lot of hype around private equity, and what type of business is suitable – most business aren’t – and even equity backed businesses have a high failure rate.
We know what investors are looking for in a business proposition – and we know what makes a good investor and NXD too, it isn’t just one-way traffic. We’ll support you all the way through our robust investment readiness process for raising equity.
This starts by building a validated business plan, by which we mean that the market opportunities you see should be proven as far as possible, as this is where the risk lies. How many buyers have you talked to and does what you are selling fit their needs better than your competition? Can you get any letters of intent for a certain volume of orders, a pilot project or some other significant step towards future revenue? What is the most cost-effective and proven route to engage your prospects?
The more you can evidence that that money you seek will definitely help you grow sales and profit, the less risky you are for funders. Proving your market and creating strong value propositions is essential to securing investment , so this needs to be the strongest part of your business plan. Then the creation of accompanying financial projections with sufficient runway will be realistic, fully detailed and show different optimism levels, so that lenders or investors can see that, should you not quite make the progress in the timescales you forecast, you are still a good investment.
And after this, we will help you build compelling teasers, pitch decks and detailed business plans, getting you pitch-perfect, taking you through term sheets, valuations, data rooms and much more, and whether formal equity or the P2P equity route is your best option. Best of all, if you happen to be based in one of our GetSet for Growth project geographies, you can get all this support for free!