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Tools to keep your steel, be yourself and be prepared
Aligning motivations
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Who is an entrepreneur?
Telling your story
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Challenges of raising funds
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Tools to steel yourself, be yourself & be prepared
Do not wait for someone else to come and speak for you.
It's you who can change the world.
Malala Yousafzai
Founders Workshops
For the under-estimated founders,
seeking to raise funds
Aligning motivations & clear intentions
You, your business & where you want to go
Q What is your product / service?
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Q Where do you see its future?
Q What drives you to do this?
Q How do you see your future? Picture a day, what does it look like, where are you, who are you working with, and what are you doing?
Find your route
Aligning motivations
To understand the connection between your core motivations and your entrepreneurial plans, and how intrinsic these are to delivering both a return for funders, as well as the life you want.
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​Know you and your business purpose and plans, are aligned
Confirm your personal motivations are aligned with the business purpose, and the growth projections you are setting.
For raising funds
Being clear on your growth aspirations, and how these match with different potential funders growth expectations.
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Being clear on aligned motivations has two parts, understanding them yourself, and being able to communicate them.
Who is an entrepreneur?
Who is an entrepreneur?
Telling your story
Perceptions of entrepreneurs
Entrepreneur images in the media can be limited in breadth. Pitch formats draw on one dimension of leadership, pitch delivery. In reality, entrepreneurial characteristics are displayed in many different guises.
We discuss:
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Q Who is an entrepreneur?
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Q What are feminine characteristics?
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Q Who do you think is an entrepreneur?
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Q Your story as an entrepreneur?
communicating your strengths
Telling our stories can communicate our strengths, and lower stereotype assumptions about us.
Consider your own entrepreneurial strengths, and how they grow your business
Know your talents, and capabilities, both as individuals and as a complimentary team.
The challenges these solve, and the opportunities they enable, for your business growth.
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Innovation through diversity, understand the diversity bonus.
Be able to tell your own story, in a way that portrays the characteristics funders look for.
Be upfront with characteristics, outside the entrepreneur stereotype, that are instrumental in growing your business.
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Considering your confidence and competence in your business, and the coach-able factor investors look for.
No blame here, we're all biased, I am too
Understanding our own bias, helps to understand the bias we may experience from others as we grow our business.
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Unconscious bias are a natural, fast, shortcut way our brain processes the millions of pieces of information we continually receive.
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They may not match with our conciscous values, so we may not see, or be comfortable wanting to see, their unnoticed influence on our decisions.
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Where we believe we're objective, and making decisions based on our conscious values of fairness and equality, we may not be.
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The good news, we're learning more on how biases arise, how they can appear in decision making,
how nudges and reminders or 'bias interrupters' can help raise our objectivity.
Those same tools can be employed to counter, or avoid triggering, bias that may reduce our chances of raising funds.
Break
Challenges
Challenges of growing & raising funds
When you are under-estimated
The challenges that can apply, whether you are seeking grant, bank, investor or any other form of funding.
Statistics ...
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Less the 1% of VC funding in the UK goes to female founders,
with 11% to mixed teams, 89% to all male teams.
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The investment statistics do not reflect the actual business leadership. 20% of SMEs are female led, 27% led by mixed teams, 45% all male led.
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The meaning of these, and other statistics for fundraising.
See the potential
Your perspective and experiences ...
The good news ...
Research has been carried out on the statistical data, as well as on what are the reasons for the investment skew. Funders are being called upon to take action, and some are.
Tools to steel yourself, be yourself & be prepared
Evidence based solutions
Gender myths
Know the evidence, dispelling the common gender myths surrounding gender and entrepreneurship.
Women 'are' more cautious, less growth orientated, have lower resources or access to networks, founders of smaller business, less experienced in entrepreneurship.
Learn ways to counter the myths.
Tackling the expected profit 'uptick'
One barrier to raising funds, can be the expectation of a revenue/profit growth chart that follows the Nike tick profile.
A solution could lie in changing what the tick profile means to you.
Language of entrepreneurs & investors
Employ research insight on words and phrases and differing interpretation of meaning, to ensure intentions (risk, innovation, customer-centric, purpose) are clear and cohesive from the investor perspective.
Mindset tools for a male dominated environment
When raising funds, whether from a bank or investor, you'll most likely be entering a male dominated world. Even the strongest among us, can succumb to stereotype expectations.
Learn tools to keep your steel, be yourself and lean in.
Connections
A warm introduction means a team is much more likely to get from the pitchdeck stage to being funded, on average the benefit is 2x.
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Finding your closest warm connections, and how to be time efficient on maximising those connections.
The only 1 in the room
Understand the dynamics at play for the only women, person of colour, in the room.
The pitch Q&A
"Investors may unwittingly offer female entrepreneurs fewer opportunities to present themselves in the same beneficial manner as their male counterparts, by framing questions differently, investors elicit less favourable responses from female than male entrepreneurs." Dana Kanze
Learn how to identify prevention and promotion style questions, and switch your responses to focus on promotion (growth) orientated answers. Founders who switched responses gained 9x more funding.
Wrap up and close
Tools
Preparation ahead:
O Research on pitch Q&A: Dana Kanze, TED, The real reason female founders get less funding
O No longer one size fits all: Our image of an entrepreneur desperately needs an update--here's how we change it
O Dispelling myths: Meet the neuroscientist shattering the myth of the gendered brain
O Inspiration for the future: Greg Gerzema, MIT, TED, the Athena Doctrine
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Workshop day 9am to 4pm
Any questions, please feel free to contact Amy
The tools in action
Day 2 option
Business coaching, FD adviser
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Supporting you as founders in growing your businesses, raising funds or looking ahead to an exit.
Together we work through your business plans.
Covering: the business commercial readiness (including growing pains); people and change management;
the business plan; the financials; the pitch deck; the growth proposition and the funders return.
Preparation for you as founders raising funds (the tools in action).
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Next steps, how individually and collaboratively as a group, you can support and challenge each other.
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Amy Newton
director & consultant
I set up Newton's Theory to combine my FD experience, in getting small-medium size businesses ready for investment or sale, with my passion for equality. By doing the same thing (in bite size) for a wider number of smaller businesses led by female, mixed or minority teams.
As a founder you have the challenges of trying to do it all, having set up my own sports retail chain, I understand those challenges all too well.
Connect
Quick updates on relevant investment decision insights and inclusion news.
Helping bring information, and thought provoking questions, to your conversations.
Newton’s Theory is about commercial inclusive thinking.
Investors, founders, advisors, collectively, small steps, big changes.
Bringing ways investors and founders, can bridge the investment gap, to the benefit of both.
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