An early Kris Kringle

Santa is coming early to SmartCompany blog readers. Presents included in this blog!

Whew! Just over two weeks to red wine, good food and lots of family fun.

The first present is our Investor Readiness Checklist.

This checklist will give you a good idea of how prepared you are to go and pitch to investors. You simply score yourself out of 10 against each of the criteria to assess your Investor Readiness. Be as objective as possible in your scoring. There is no point in kidding yourself.

As well, why not get a close adviser or business colleague to complete the checklist and compare notes. You may also get each member of your management team to fill it our separately. Talk about where the scores vary considerably. You’ll be surprised what comes out of these discussions.

Come up with a joint view and then work on any areas where you scored low. This checklist will help you through the process and you will cover the main issues that investors want to hear about. Checklists can be so useful to get the process moving.

Of course, that’s not the end of the story but you will find that the checklist will trigger discussions about the main aspects of your business – that in itself is a valuable process.

Click here to download the Investor Ready Checklist

And now it’s movie time.

The second present is a link to my interviews with four investors. In the last few weeks I spoke to a number of investors to get their views on what works when pitching and what they see as the biggest mistakes made by entrepreneurs.

Three of the investors are from the US and one from Australia. Between them they manage funds in excess of $1100 million. A couple invest in very early stage (pre revenue) companies, most focus on information technology and/or biotechnology, and they all have many years experience as investors.

These investors were great. They were completely open about what entrepreneurs need to do to get their attention. There are lots of valuable presentation tips in these videos. And they come straight from the investors.

Each video goes for about 30 minutes so you might pace your viewing. Have a pen and paper beside you as you look at these videos. Take notes of the key comments. Think about how you can make sure that you cover the main points.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve found that I need to carefully manage both “getting information” and “applying that information”. The presentation tips in these videos are spot on but if you don’t do something with the information you will have wasted your time.

Ask yourself: “How can I use these tips to improve my pitch?”

Click here to view videos.

So that’s it for my Xmas specials. I hope that you find the checklist and the videos useful.

By the way, I’d really love to hear what you thought about these presents. I’d like to post more free stuff, so your feedback would give me guidance on what you want to get.

Have a great week.

Till next time.

Gail Geronimos, is the founder of Achaeus, which helps entrepreneurs develop their businesses and she has just started a new site www.pitchingtoinvestors.com with tools and tips about how to develop killer presentations to raise capital.

To read more Gail Geronimos blogs, click here.