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Please allow me to provide you with more detailed information about our upcoming online investment event!
This correspondence has a breakdown of the standard charges related to being a Presenter and Featured Entrepreneur Guest. As every company differs with respect to its financial resources, stage, revenues and funding requirements, we do not have a “one size fits all” structure with respect to fees, payment terms or visibility options and will do our best get a qualified company on the conference program. As a courtesy, I can tentatively hold a Presenter or Featured Entrepreneur Guest slot for the company while you are considering this opportunity, subject to your confirmation and any further review of the company on our part.
Our Value Proposition - An Investor-Only Privately Underwritten Venue: In contrast with most groups that hold deal-oriented events, our principal differentiator is that we are not part of any government agency or non-profit group, nor are we supported by paid sponsors or subsidized by vendors or service providers. As a result, our events are not compromised with a high population of lawyers, accountants, advisors and other non-investors. Accordingly, our events are basically a co-op for the featured companies (basically a trade show model). We underwrite the venue with our own capital and the featured companies share in the cost. Over our twenty year plus history with some 120 consecutive fully-booked events behind us, the cost/benefit and potential value of our prestigious investor forums is well-documented.
About “So-Called” Free Events: Although we wish it could be, ours is not a free event. (Over the years we have clearly demonstrated, as is true with most things in life, it is not what or if you pay, but what you get for what you pay.) Please keep in mind that any investor venue (irrespective of its quality) that offers the opportunity to present for free is ONLY free for those who are selected from, what is in most cases, hundreds of companies that have applied. And if you are NOT selected, the fact that it was free to present made absolutely no difference and you are back to the open-end costs of knocking on the doors of investors with perhaps little or no entrée. Conferences of our quality cost a lot to produce. Accordingly, someone has to pay for them - raising the questions, are presenting companies at budget-priced or free venues getting real value? Are they talking to an audience of bona fide investors, as is the case with our events, or to vendors and service providers who have funded the venue?
For those entrepreneurs who do not make the cut to present at "so-called" free events, then they need to pay to be there - in most cases, from about $700 to $1,500 per person or more. A recent event in San Francisco charged entrepreneurs $4,000 per person just for corporate executives to gain VIP access to certain investors. Note that all entrepreneurs at our events have equal access to every investor in attendance, no matter which visibility of Presenter option they choose. To present at our events, entrepreneurs are selected based upon their “individual merit” - not graded on a curve and do not need to win a competition based upon some subjective definition of "The Best". I wonder if Cisco Systems, Amazon, Google, e-Bay or Starbucks would have made it through a presenter selection contest. Looking at the number of VCs who turned many of them down, I would say probably not.
We simply want to see qualified companies based upon reasonable criteria (such as scalability and proprietary advantage) which we believe are likely to resonate with a good percentage of our investors and are run by entrepreneurs who understand the prudence and wisdom of intelligently committing some dollars to accelerate their capital raising.
CONFERENCE PRESENTER OPTIONS AND PRICING:
Big Title
$750
Big Title
Five-Minute STANDARD Presenter Slot:
The fee for a guaranteed Standard Presenter Slot is $1,500, which includes a five-minute, pre-recorded Power Point supported video presentation to the entire audience of investors followed by a dedicated five minute live question and answer session.
$1500
Additional Presenter benefits:
All Presenters as well as Featured Entrepreneur Guests benefit from broad distribution of their corporate material and the opportunity to engage with investors throughout the entire conference by chat. In addition, and following the event, Presenters receive detailed contact information on all of capital sources registered. In this regard, we also provide direct assistance to Presenters in vetting the investors who expressed an interest and assist if the follow-up as may be necessary, at an additional cost.
Ten-Minute PREMIUM Presenter Slot:
The fee for a guaranteed Premium Presenter Slot is $2,950, which includes a ten-minute, pre-recorded Power Point supported video presentation to the entire audience of investors followed by a dedicated ten minute live question and answer session.
$2950
NON-PRESENTER VISIBILTY OPTION AND PRICING, on a wait-list basis:
Featured Entrepreneur Guest:
Being showcased as a Featured Entrepreneur Guest is an affordable way to make an impact with investors at the event. Note that that we also limit the number of Featured Entrepreneur Guest to approximately 3 companies. We will introduce you personally and profile the company at the end of the presentations. In addition, your company name and website will be featured before the event on the registration website. You will receive detailed contact information on all of the investor registrants following the event. This visibility option is an excellent way to get a high profile at the conference and take advantage of the abundant networking opportunities to meet potential capital sources through chat. The Entrepreneur Guest Registration Fee is only $750, which includes up to two persons from the management team. Please also note that it is possible for the company to be upgraded from Entrepreneur Guest to Presenter for some additional amount to be negotiated should a Presenter slot become available closer to the event date or at the very last-minute.
Note: The Featured Entrepreneur Guest registrations will be confirmed once all of the Presenting Company slots are filled, approximately two weeks prior to the conference. In the event that we do not have room for these categories of participants as we approach the event date, we will issue immediate refunds of all deposits paid.
$750
NON-PRESENTER VISIBILITY OPTION AND PRICING, on a wait-list basis:
Add Your Title
Format and Agenda:
The event program is designed to provide a great deal of investor networking time through chat during the online event, approximately 90 minutes, and a maximum amount of exposure for both the Presenters and Entrepreneur Guests. This is accomplished in several ways. With respect to visibility, each presenting company has a total of ten to twenty minutes of structured face-time with the attendees. Five or ten minutes for a pre-recorded Power Point presentation with the entire audience of investors, followed by a five or ten minute Q&A session. The presentations are done in a linear fashion; there are no concurrent presentations, nor is there anything else going-on when the companies have the floor. What is important about our format is that, in most cases, a company is always connected by chat to all conference participants. By using this type of agenda, we avoid guest burn-out, as the event lasts ninety minutes. This keeps the event very energized and fast-moving, facilitates networking and creates a very social environment at the forum.
Note: The Featured Entrepreneur Guest registrations will be confirmed once all of the Presenting Company slots are filled, approximately two weeks prior to the conference. In the event that we do not have room for these categories of participants as we approach the event date, we will issue immediate refunds of all deposits paid.
Transparency:
Post-Event Targeted Investor Outreach:
If your company is selected to be a Presenter or Featured Entrepreneur Guest, we may be able to provide you with introductions to any of the firms listed on the conference website, irrespective of their attendance at the upcoming event. As you know, in many cases, companies can pay investment bankers up to several hundred thousand dollars in front-end fees and monthly retainers to gain access to these types of investment groups. Companies presenting at this forum gain the same entrée at only a small fraction of that cost, notwithstanding the inherent efficiency of the symposium.
We are aware of no other events which offer the concentration of active private equity investors that are in attendance for the primary purpose of seeing early and later-stage opportunities as do our forums. We expect that our conference will be sold-out, as were our prior forums. From our vantage point, venture capital firms and private equity funds, although still cautious and more selective, are clearly showing increased optimism and much greater interest in considering new investments. In fact, we have seen many top investment funds sign-up for our recent conferences, of which a good number had not registered for our earlier events. Please keep in mind that our forum is not a venture fair or a trade show, but a highly focused symposium for serious early-stage investors and fundable companies.
Very important: One of the principal reasons that our conferences have been so successful is that most other venues, having similar stated objective of reaching investors, generally have a very low percentage of investors in attendance. This is because they are supported primarily by "paid corporate sponsors", who in-turn populate the events with their people. This is not the case at our forums. The majority of the attendees at our events are reliable direct or indirect sources of capital, not service providers, who have no interest in making investments. In addition, the conference program has been specifically designed to maximize management's ability to meet with interested investors in a convenient and efficient setting. As you are aware, most professional investors will not even consider deals where they do not know management or those which have not referred by a reliable source. Our forums significantly help to remove these barriers to management's ability to reach qualified investors.
Our experience has taught us that, even under the best market conditions, raising capital is very time consuming and labor intensive, dominating the attention of management when it should be focused on their company’s objectives. Accordingly, raising capital needs to be handled as a targeted marketing project with an appropriate budget and plan, as would be the case with any other business endeavor - not just an ad hoc project undertaken by the principals of the company. Locating potential investors one by one, sending business plans to people who don’t know to you and following-up can be a daunting task. The question then becomes "What would be the most efficient way to do this?"
If you need funding and want to accelerate the process, presenting at this forum can significantly reduce the cost of finding capital as well as the time necessary to raise it, particularly in this current market with fewer active players and tougher investment criteria. The upcoming venue can help you solve the three biggest problems in raising capital 1) identifying qualified investors, 2) gaining credible entrée to them and 3) meeting them under favorable circumstances. Moreover, the event drives the single most essential factor in getting funded quickly, and that is the ability to create "contemporaneous interest" among investors, which also can serve to significantly improve deal terms.
Since there are only a limited number of slots available, please call me as soon as possible with respect to your interest in being on the program. About one-half of our entrepreneur roster is already filled with a good number of candidates in the queue. Many thanks for getting back to me “one way or the other” with respect to your interest in having the company showcased at our event. To ensure that no company is inadvertently shut-out, it is my practice to re-contact all active candidates before we finalize our slate of Presenters. I do not want to disturb you with any unnecessary follow-up e-mails or phone calls if you feel that participating in our funding venue would not be right for your company at this time.
Again, we sincerely believe that if a company's story is truly compelling, and that management's vision can be effectively communicated, it will not find a more cost-effective way to reach potential funding sources directly, than by having a presence at our upcoming Forum. If you have any questions, feel free to call me at 1 907 795 5586.
Look forward to being in touch.
All the best,
Bryan Emerson
emersonb@privateequityforums.co
www.linkedin.com/in/bryantemerson/
1 907-795-5586 (cell/WhatsApp)
Editorial Comment:
We are very respectful of the fact that with most early-stage companies what money is available must be used very wisely -to say the least. In order to put on this conference, and not rely upon paid sponsors and service providers (who will in turn populate the event) it is necessary for the featured companies to help to cover the cost of the forum. As our firm has been involved in raising capital for the last 20 years and looking through the lens of our experience, may I suggest that in evaluating the venue that management asks itself the following questions.
Is raising capital now essential for our business to grow or survive? Do we currently have any prospective investors pending? If not, do we have a specific plan to meet potential investors? Have we spent more than three months in discussions with those investors whom we are already talking to? If so, it is highly unlikely that they will invest. How many "active" early-stage investors have we met through our own outreach or at other events in which we have participated? What did it really cost us per prospective investor? Our event should be less than $ 100 per investor attending. Do we have an alternative cost-effective means of reaching qualified active investors? Can we afford one of the Fee levels to present at the event and still stay in business? Is management spending or likely to spend an inordinate amount of its time seeking capital? Do we believe that our company is fundable? (Among other things, this means that you have clear path to profitability with funding.)
In this market, an early-stage company is destined to spend thousands of dollars in travel, staff time, investment banker retainers and due diligence fees, unless management has personal contacts that can fund the company. This is why so many companies choose to present at our forums; because on balance, the money to present, if not more, will be spent anyway. Why not spend it in a manner that is most efficient, that can result in a timely funding of the company.
PS: I thought that you might like to see the e-mail below that recently came-in from Melissa Matthews, Founder of The Triune Initiative, one of the featured companies at one of our recent events. What Melissa wrote to me very much reflects the type of feedback that we get from our participating entrepreneurs.
In order to make the event as transparent as possible to potential Presenters, we provide confirmed guest information in advance when it is available. In evaluating the value of this event as platform to showcase a company, we encourage entrepreneurs to look at the websites of the prior investment organizations listed on the event site. It provides detailed information on their portfolio companies, industry preferences, funding capabilities and investment criteria. Links to recent participants can be found at https://www.privateequityforums.co/event-registrants. Here is a link to those companies that either I funded or helped get funding: https://www.privateequityforums.co/about-us Here is a link to those companies that I assisted with their funding through conferences: https://www.privateequityforums.co/testimonials
DONT TAKE OUR WORDS, SEE WHAT OUR PRESENTER ARE SAYING
Thank you for co-sponsoring the Private Equity Conference at the Yale Club New York in September. As a former educator turned recent entrepreneur, I was hesitant to attend an event of this magnitude because I was in the initial stages of product development, and I feared that the aspirant nature of my business repertoire would be perceived as a detriment. However, to my surprise it was just the opposite.
Attending the conference has proven to be one of the best decisions I have made to date. The aggregative demographic of your attendees afforded me the opportunity to network with potential clients and investors while increasing my awareness of the business perspective. Both entrepreneurs and investors, alike, offered industry insights, constructive feedback, and potential resources that will ultimately improve my product and my executive efficacies. My original goal was to obtain funding, but I walked away with so much more: experience, knowledge, leads, and four mentors who have agreed to assist me in navigating the start-up process.
Again, I want to thank you for this amazing opportunity. For new entrepreneurs, the business world can be intimidating and very overwhelming, but I left your event feeling confident and encouraged. Even though most participants were further along in their endeavors, there were significant benefits for those in the seed and start-up phases, too. Thus, I hope that others who find themselves at the onset of corporate development realize the value of your Private Equity Conferences.
— Melissa Matthews
The Triune Initiative
Appointment Setting
One trained representative per month for follow-up emails
Valid for one month
$1500
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We email the spreadsheet of investors from our conference
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We can utilize your Sales Navigator/Google Ads
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You are bcc'd on all emails
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You handle all phone sales inquiries
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If any come back to Starlight, we can set your appointment
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You must have a Calendly account for appointment scheduling
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For Linked in appts, have a Sales Navigator acct.
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Not included: a phone team to sell for you (SEC rules)
