7-15 – Jeff Barnes interviewed by Robert Steven Kramarz

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Hi, everybody.

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This is Robert Steven Kramars of Intelliversity.

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And this is your Vision Master podcast.

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And today I’m really happy to present to you Jeff Barnes, CEO of Angel Investors Sisters Network, who is a featured presenter and exhibitor here at the Freedom Fest in Las Vegas.

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What a privilege to interview you, even though we only have about 15 minutes.

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Yes.

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So tell our distinguished audience of Vision masters who are entrepreneurs striving to be excellent at running companies, what Ain does.

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Sure.

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Well, first of all, thanks for having me here, Robert.

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So, Angel Investor Network has been around since 1997, and what we are is a network of investors nationwide and many international investors as well, whose focus is helping entrepreneurs raise capital and scale their businesses.

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And our network of investors are designed to come together to look at incredible opportunities that you can’t find anywhere else.

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So entrepreneurs come to us that need help getting in front of more investors.

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We get them ready to raise capital, and then when they’re ready and they’ve proven that they’re ready, then we put them on the stage, just like we saw this morning here at Freedom Fest for our Sharks and Angels Live competition.

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So, yeah, what we do is bring all these incredible entrepreneurs together with our incredible angel investors and our VCs and our family offices and our fund managers who want to look at deals.

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And we are the matchmakers in between, if you will.

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I see.

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Now, you also seem to be doing a bit of training, education of entrepreneurs regarding how to raise capital, maybe how to improve their growth prospects.

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Absolutely.

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Is that part of your vision? Absolutely.

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So our vision here at Ain is to democratize angel investing.

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And what that means is, without going into all the history, angel investing is relatively new in the grand scheme of things.

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And it was not open to a number of individuals.

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It was only accredited investors that could actually invest in private companies.

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Okay, so we’re on this mission to democratize angel investing.

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Well, in order to do that, you have to have really good opportunities for people to invest in.

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We don’t want to go back to the pre securities act regulation era where a lot of people would just pitch a great idea, they take the money, and then they lose all the money because they didn’t actually know what they’re doing or they just are not trustworthy.

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Right.

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And that’s where the securities act regulation came from.

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But our job is to make sure that we bring great deals to our investors.

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In order to do that, we have to coach them, we have to train them.

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We have to make sure they understand the process of pitching and presenting.

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And it’s a laborious process.

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It’s not easy.

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Most companies are never able to get in front of investors, or even if they are, they’re not able to raise capital because they don’t know how to do it.

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And so we spend a good amount of time working with those folks to get them ready.

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And of course, our investors expect a certain pedigree, if you will, of the companies that we bring to them.

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So if you recall our conversation last night over dinner, there’s some secrets for entrepreneurs to know.

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What motivates and demotivates investors absolutely.

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That are not usually the normal part of an education that an entrepreneur gets, right? So what do you think the major barrier that an entrepreneur faces when attempting to breach the mentality of an investor and get into his needs system? The first and foremost is like you were saying and alluding to understanding what that investor is actually looking for.

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Investors are looking for a number of different things.

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And a lot of entrepreneurs think that I’m just going to try and make my investors money.

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And if that’s where you start and that’s where you finished and that’s surface level deep.

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And if you think about diving deeper into the human psyche and what people really want, making money is one thing, but we’re talking about investors.

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We’re talking about people that have money, right? And so if you’re talking to somebody who already has money about making more money, sometimes that falls on deaf ears and it’s not the right pitch.

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Instead, you have to focus on what is it that would really inspire them to take action and work with you.

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And that’s a very different conversation to have.

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So in your opinion, your observation, what does inspire investors nowadays to put their money in company A instead of company B? Assuming both look good on paper financially, yeah.

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Assuming both look good and they’re both really good opportunities, there’s a number of things that will prevent somebody from investing in A versus B or B versus A.

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And sometimes it comes down to just comfort level, right? So if I’m really knowledgeable and say the Internet of things and somebody gives me an Internet of things investment opportunity, and another person gives me a crypto investment opportunity and I don’t know enough, I won’t feel comfortable making a decision.

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And as a result, I’ll probably go with the IoT route because I feel more knowledgeable about that.

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And here’s the funny thing about that, is that when somebody is knowledgeable in an area and they get to do something that other people don’t, they get bragging rights, right? And so those bragging rights can carry over to the golf course or the country club sitting in the salon.

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The ladies can talk about it, and they get these bragging rights.

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Now, here’s the thing about bragging rights.

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It doesn’t do any good if you don’t know what you’re talking about.

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Right? If somebody can poke a hole in your argument within a minute, then you have not really prop yourself up properly.

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It’s one of the reasons why you’ll tend to invest.

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I would attend to invest in companies I know something about so that I can defend my bragging rights.

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Exactly right, exactly right.

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I mean, imagine if you could go to your friends who, again, birds of a feather flock together, right? So these people will hang out with each other.

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And imagine if you went to your friends, say, guess what? I just invested in this really cool company called Google and they’re going to go IPO, and they’re a multi billion dollar company.

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How cool does that make you sound? Now, if you can’t talk about what in the world Google is in the first place, they’re like, well, you sound like an idiot.

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Right? We don’t want that.

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So we have to educate our clients on what to say to help people with that decision.

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And the funny thing about that is most entrepreneurs want to sell their product.

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They can’t sell their vision properly.

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And if they can’t sell their vision about where their business is going and what they’re doing and the impact they are making in the world, then it’s very difficult to get an investor excited about their opportunities.

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So how do you coach a company, a CEO, to sell his vision or her vision, so that investors, assuming they want the bragging rights, are now excited about this particular company? Yeah, that is the challenge.

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Right? So a lot of entrepreneurs will come to us with these grandiose plans.

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I’m going to build a billion dollar company.

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Now, the latest thing is, I’m going to build a trillion dollar company.

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It’s not a unicorn anymore, it’s a Pegasus.

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Right.

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So we get all these different things that are coming to us, and as a result, we have to help them understand that it’s great to have a really big vision, but it also has to be somewhat believable.

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Right? And making it believable while also making it grandiose is challenging.

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You got to get them it’s definitely a balancing act.

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And so we walk them through the process of what does it look like 510 years from now.

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Assuming your company succeeds, what does the world look like? What’s different about the world? Not just about you, not just about your business, not even just about your investors.

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What’s different about the world that we’re living in? For example, one of the companies that has come to us is trying to change the future of energy production, okay? They’re literally trying to upend the situation with oil crises and the exorbitant gas price that people are paying.

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So it’s relevant.

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It’s in the minds of the consumer right now, which means it’s also in the minds of the investor.

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And so talking to what the future of this maybe energy independent world could look like is important.

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And if you build that story we talked about, using the hero’s journey and all these different story arc things that you put into there, if you do that properly, then you get engagement from your audience, your intended audience, which in this case is investors they can start to see the vision with you.

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And if you can’t do that, if you can’t get them to see it as well, you’re never going to get buy in.

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So it sounds to me like you’re going to be a big fan of our story pitching.

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Absolutely concept.

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Well, let’s wrap this up by telling our vision masters how they can reach out to Angel Investors Network, how they can make a connection and pitch you on their vision and maybe there’s a relationship that can happen.

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How do they get that? Absolutely.

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So the easiest thing is we’re just angelinvestersnetwork.com and on our site we have a way for entrepreneurs who want to apply to come to our competitions.

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They’re able to do that.

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We have a way for investors who want to join our memberships so they can see the deals, they can get access to all the resources.

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And the way our membership is structured is that we bring investors and business owners, entrepreneurs together so we can essentially mastermind and collaborate on these ideas and help them come to fruition and actually scale up these businesses and make a meaningful impact in the world.

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What a trip it is to meet you, Jeff.

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Yeah.

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Robert, it’s been a pleasure.

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I really appreciate you having me here.

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And I want our audience to know that story pitching is actually a method that we teach at Inteliversity.

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And if you want to know more about story pitching, make sure you go to Intellversity.org.

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You can speak to me personally@inteliversity.org.

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Connect.

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So we’re looking forward to hearing from you too.

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But above all, make yourself known to Jeff and Angel Investors Network.

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It’s probably a good idea.

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Awesome, thanks.

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I really appreciate it.