Get the Most Out of Your Investors
The relationship with your investors shouldn’t start and stop with each round you raise. In fact, depending on who your investors are, neglecting the relationship could dramatically decrease their chances of participating in your next round. More importantly, when you don’t maximize your relationships with investors, you leave opportunities for growing your startup and strengthening your position in the market on the table.
With most of your investors, a little bit of effort will go a long way. Here are a few simple ways to keep the relationships strong and mutually beneficial.
1) Keep Them Up-to-Date
Investors with dozens or hundreds of portfolio companies usually can’t dedicate equal amounts of time and effort to all of them. Naturally, not all of their companies have the same needs, anyway. However, to put yourself in the best position, you should make sure to keep your investors updated on your business.
Specifically, sending quarterly or even monthly updates on how your company is performing, where you’re tracking on milestones, and what your concrete goals and plans are will be enough to keep you on their minds. Just from these updates, they may think of new ways to help you achieve your goals and milestones, in addition to feeling more inclined to provide guidance, support, and capital in future rounds.
2) Stay Connected
To build a strong, healthy relationship, you have to do more than keep investor updated — you have to learn to stay connected. Without expending an enormous amount of time with investors, you can yield enormous results. Specifically, if you chose the right investors, they can support you with more than just financial capital. They may be experts in your industry, organizational management gurus, seasoned executives, or have some other vast well of experience that can help you bring your startup to the next level.
Setting up a meeting or a call to talk through a problem or get insights into a particular development strengthens the bond while also allowing you to leverage valuable expertise. It’s a win-win — your investors want the business to succeed, too, in addition to often looking for the chance to give back and help.
3) Leverage Their Networks
One of the biggest advantages of having investors is their actual networks. These individuals and institutions have deep-seated connections across the venture capital, technology, and countless other spaces. Whether you’re looking for Fortune 500 customers, a CTO or other top talent, or future investors, tapping on your existing investor contacts can prove massively useful.
As you continue to develop relationships with your investors, you can clearly assess which relationships need more time and which less, along with which provide you the most value for your time, and which the least. There’s no sense in investing a lot of energy for low-yield results, so you can always decide how to adjust your strategy. However, to make sure you’re getting the most out of an investment, you should look beyond the capital at the people who invested it.