What Angels Investors Never Wand to Hear

Los Angeles, CA, October 18, 2006 --(PR.com)-- Icon Angels is an international angel investments network focusing on cross-border deals/transactions and therefore is exposed to large amounts of investor presentations each week. Many of the entrepreneurs that cross the Icon Angels network are truly global players with promising or even revolutionary products/services. However, the majority of these companies fail to realize that first impressions mean everything when they are presenting their company to a potential investor.

Positioning a company so that it attracts the right investors can be a very challenging process. Yet somehow, many entrepreneurs forget that the investors that they are presenting to often have started up and sold multiple companies – after all, that is the precise reason why they are angels. All entrepreneurs must remember one thing: these investors can smell exaggeration and a shaky plan from the first paragraph of an executive summary – 100% of the time. This is no joke!

Having said this, Icon Angels often reviews business plans with the same mistakes over and over again and as a result, it wishes to share some of its insight so that companies do not fall into the same trap. Icon Angels recommends that entrepreneurs follow these simple points before sending any investor your business plan.

1. Be realistic in developing any financial projections. There is very little reason to believe that any start-up company will capture 8% of the US GDP through its proprietary transaction engine or that although the company is loosing $1million for the first two-years of operation, it will make a profit of $36 million on its third year. 

2. Make sure the company assumptions are based on sound research, as investors will question them heavily. Any declaration that the company plans to ‘Capture 1% of the market’ is a sure way to lose any potential investors. 

3. Investors are never interested in ‘who will sign’ a massive contract with the company in two weeks and that the company cannot disclose who it is. Investor want to hear who the current customers are and what the current business development strategy is. The same advise goes for any assertion of signing ‘rainmaker’ personnel once funding is completed. 

4. Regardless of what a company is doing, it has competition. There are two levels of competition: direct and indirect. Company managers must be realistic and present the threats as they are because the truth ‘will’ surface and when it does, the company will lose tremendous credibility. Management should stay away from making claims that the ‘100lbs gorilla’ of the industry is too slow or too caught up in its own bureaucracy to be able to directly compete with you. 

5. Be Realistic. Be Realistic. Be Realistic. Mangers need to build a business plan with this in thought: “if I were an angel investor, why would I sign a $1 million check to fund this idea?” Every manager must continuously remember the fact that these people (angel investors) have been ‘around the block’ and that they can sense shaky deals with a simple glance at any given business plan.

About Icon Angels:
Icon Angels is an international community of exclusive, accredited, and invitation-only investors who share a distinct fortitude towards investing into entrepreneurship on a global scale. The company provides the tools, the technology, the know-how, and the guidance so that its member investors can lower investment risks as well as the cost of performing due diligence. Its unique, practical, and direct involvement with the investment process helps both investors and entrepreneurs ensure a high partnership success rate.

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