#9 — Skin in the Game
This post can be summarized by the following questions:
If you don’t believe in your business enough to put your own “skin in the game”, how can you expect investors to put their financial resources into your deal?
Appropriate questions that you might ask yourself:
- Have you put your own money into the deal?
- If not, have you worked for free?
- Have you put a 2nd mortgage on your house?
- What have you given up to make this deal successful? (another job, nights, weekends, etc.)
Don’t be haste or stupid, but if you want to attract capital from investors, you better believe enough to put skin in the game!
What about intellectual equity? Building a business from dirty takes talent and the time spent to get it to any point is an investment in time that could have been spent someplace else, but was spent building up a business that is ready to fly if provided the funding. There are a lot of businesses who spent their time putting a business together that could have been spent working the window at McDonalds. Intellectual equity, something like taking the time to write a book, do speeches, travel the country talking to different businesses, is worth while investment into the business that investor should consider.