Build Your Dream Syndication Team | Legal, Accounting & Marketing Made Simple | Ep 146

Speaker A: Welcome to the Capital Raising Show. I'm your host, Nate Dodson, and today I'm going to talk a little bit about you're getting started. You got your first deal, your fifth deal, don't care if it's your 10th deal. You got to make sure that you are set up to be able to deliver to the investors what you're promising. And I say promise in a loose term. Of course there is always risk in, in investing and I do want to throw out there all of this is for your education. You know, it. It's the best practices, smart thing to do. When you're doing investments, you are a fiduciary for your investors. And so you know what you need is the best team to make sure that you're doing everything right. So today I'm going to talk a little bit more about, hey, who do you need? How do you find them? Let's make sure that your projects, not just as you're capitalizing them, but as you're running them, are actually fitting the bill, taking care of your investors as you are, as we all are, looking for a lifetime legacy business, something that's going to go on for our career and hopefully take care of our kids and our kids kids. That's why we're all here, that's why we're all doing deals. And your own piggy bank only goes so far. So then your capital raising, making these deals happen. So without further ado, let me just jump into what your syndication team should really look like. And when I talk about your syndication team, we're talking about who's helping you from beginning of the capital raise to the very end. But you know what, let's just start with the basics. Of course, you should know by now, I'm, uh, a securities attorney by my old trade. And it's all about making sure that things are done right smart. Good for the investors, good for yourself. You've got to be making money, the investors got to be making money. But it all has to be legal at the end of the day. So I'm not going to dwell because my God, it's boring. But as part of you doing these investment projects, make sure that you are always covered by legal counsel. Crowdfunding lawyers are great, but I'm not here to pitch or talk about crowdfunding lawyers. If you are looking for good counsel, that should be your first phone call. However, a lot of you that you're already working with, attorneys, guys that already know the business, all I gotta say to you is make sure that you're working with an actual securities attorney, the real estate guys don't necessarily know investments. The securities attorneys may actually not know real estate or investment funds on it often. So everything that you do, it, uh, can be very specialized. Make sure that you're working with the right attorney with the right background to make sure that you're protected. But also with all these investments, you're raising capital from investors. There's all these rules and compliance and don't need to go through all that. However, there are securities filings, investment filings, entity filings that you're going to have to do and have to handle. So just make sure that you got the right people on board. That's about as deep as I want to get into the whole legal compliance side of raising capital. Because we all know that is not the most fun topic, important, necessary, but let's move on. Going right along with your compliance, your legal team. The second most important thing that you really need to have is make sure that you have a good account team, A, uh, backdrop to make sure that you're doing things right along the way. Now, just to talk through, you don't have to spend a ridiculous amount of money. You don't need to hire a fund administrator. I encourage people to not use fund administrators. It's a great buzzword, but it is ungodly expensive. And if you're on your first even $20 million fundraise, cost benefit is just not there. So the easiest thing to do, go hire your bookkeeper. If you've been in business for any length of time, they can do the bookkeeping. There is nothing different about bookkeeping. For a fund, for a syndication, for your business, for your startup, it's all the same because it's debits and credits and keeping up with QuickBooks or whatever the accounting filing system is for yourself. Make sure that you are educated and knowledgeable on financial statements, though, because the bookkeepers, they know how to put stuff into categories. They will have questions for you, but they're not there to coach you, to teach you what the financial statements actually mean. And when I say a financial statements, we've got the balance sheet. The balance sheet, it's like a snapshot in time. It lists your assets, at least your liabilities. It lists your owner's equity, what you own, what your investors own, and keeps track of how distributions work, those capital transactions of things that are going in and going out, that affects the value of the investment, it affects the value of the syndication. So this balance sheet, it's an important thing to know. It is a snapshot in time. But really, if you care about how profitable am uh, I, how much money am um, I making? And that's called the profit and loss statement. And that is a time period. It may be quarterly, you may look at it monthly, you may look at annually. There's different reasons to look at different things, different ways. So you decide what time frame you're looking at. This P and L statement, profit and loss, P and L. And that will actually include, uh, how much money you brought in, where you brought it in from, and what you paid out to anyone. They go into certain categories like employees, like capital expenses, meaning construction expenses. All of that affects the balance sheet. But it goes into play with your profit and loss statement. That's where you know how profitable you actually are at the end of the day. Now your bookkeeper, that shouldn't cost that much. If you want a great easy Referral, go to fundersaccounting.com. i think they are charging like 50, $60 a month for these basic syndications. I say that as a, you don't have to pay an arm and a leg. If you hire a cpa, it is going to get expensive if they are just doing the bookkeeping or you're hiring a fund administrator. I'm actually just trying to save you some money. Just know for your regular accounting, your day to day, hire yourself a bookkeeper. They are worth their weight in gold. Now you do need a CPA certified public accountant. Your bookkeeper, they may know how to put together the quickbooks, uh, put things into categories. But the CPA is there to actually get to that next level reading. They are the professionals when it comes down to those financial statements. Because often you'll have questions, why is this done this way? How do I improve it? Because sometimes just changing up your accounting methods can be tricks of the trade to make you look more profitable, actually be more profitable. And it also can get very confusing. I gotta be honest, most every deal I've ever done has been they call it cash counting. Hey, you see what money comes in, you see what money goes out. It's an accurate as of that day statement. But a lot of businesses get a better cash flow management if they use accrual accounting. And that's like, okay, I got this long term contract. Well, I, uh, need to make sure that I am adding this long term obligation to my profit and loss in a reasonable smart time frame. Not just cash. What came in, what went out, it's complicated. I would never even pretend to understand it. Way over My head. But that's where the CPA comes into play for the bookkeeper. It's all the same. It's literally both a push of the button and the right information plugged into QuickBooks. It's already in there. You can switch between these two types of accounting methods, but your CPA will get in there and say, okay, based on your business, your strategies, the best way for you to manage your cash flow to maximize your profitability. Here's how you should be looking at these financial statements and may give more strategic direction to your bookkeeper. But ultimately, really, you know what you need a CPA for, and that's that filing of taxes. CPA always go to a CPA 100% of the time for tax prep for your investment transactions, your syndications, doing your investment fund. They are, hey, maybe your bookkeeper is a. They call it an enrolled agent. They can file taxes, but they're not CPAs. They haven't gone through the schooling, the testing, the experience, work experience. All of that is prerequisites to being a cpa. An enroll agent. I think you got to pass a test, maybe take a class, and you're good to go. When we're talking about investments, it is that, what's your risk? And how do you minimize that risk for your investors as well as for yourself? When it comes to taxes, that's where your CPA is there to protect you. When it comes to compliance, that's where your attorneys are there to protect you as well. But like I was saying, you don't want your CPA to do all your bookkeeping. It's just cost prohibitive. It doesn't make sense. But make sure that you're using a CPA that is knowledgeable about your industry, about your target. If it's a investment fund, make sure the CPA has some experience. With investment funds. There's always unique attributes, different considerations based on whatever your business is, whatever your focus is. So you always want to get that experience. Professional guidance, whether it's accounting through your CPA or through compliance with your legal. Now there's one more part that may or may not be important or even a part of your accounting team, a financial auditor. I'm, um, going to just kind of breeze through it. If you have to hire an auditor, they're always a cpa. There is a process behind that. They're obligated to. And my God, it gets expensive. We're talking about tens of thousands of dollars. If it's a public company that gets audited, it's hundreds of Thousands of dollars. Why would you ever uh, do that? Well you wouldn't unless you really have to. And there are certain investment regulations and oh, I want to do this type of an offering strategy like regulation, crowdfunding regulation a that um, I don't need to dive into those require audited financials. You're required to hire an auditor. Well that auditor is just going to look at the books, create those financial statements and they put their stamp of approval saying that I've looked at everything and I've determined that these are true, correct and accurate. They're expensive. It is what it is. You do it if you have to. Sometimes once you get to the point that you're getting the Wall street investors, the institutional investors, a lot of them will require you to have audited financials. Then you use an auditor, auditor third party CPA only use them for the audit. Your tax CPA is generally going to be different. And then your bookkeeper takes care of the day to day that ends up being your overall accounting team. Now you actually got to find your investors. You do have a marketing team that comes together of course I with the other co host Jillian Sidoti, rerun the investment attraction academy. And through that we do help with the social media marketing those automations to help you build your client base, your investor base. And that's just one point. So like you gotta know how to market whether you're hiring an agency, you're doing it yourself, you're getting some coaching. The done with you versus done for you versus diy. I'll talk a little bit more about that but make sure that you know what you're doing which is one of the most important things about the M marketing team. And I'll be honest, I'll uh, share. Nowadays to build your investor base you have to know digital marketing. Whether it's social media, whether it's doing your blogs and your SEO, whether you're managing email lists that you've built over the years through your network marketing for your meetup groups. All of that has different strategies and it's not just for you. Anybody in business needs to know this digital marketing, uh, I've gone through and attended and been part of many masterminds focused and specializing in digital marketing. Literally where the marketing agencies all uh, come together to stay on the cutting edge of what's working and not working. That's part of our own education and experience process and of course we're there to share with others. But my only real point is it's constantly changing. There's different ways and strategies that are working one year. Then this weird algorithm that absolutely nobody can explain, that's at Facebook, that's at Google, gets changed and all of a sudden what's been working for years no longer works anymore. That's why you got to work with at least learn from up to date experienced digital marketers that are staying on the cutting edge, that know what they're doing. Of course you can DIY it yourself, but that's also where I'm um, sharing with you. Things change if you are diy, if you're doing it all yourself. Fantastic. You know, you can hire some offshore assistants. They're pretty reasonably priced to really be able to maximize your outreach, to find your awareness with investors, to build your base, to build your email list, to pitch, to just know that it's always changing. So make sure that you at least have current information, if not guidance, if not support of a marketing agency. But that's just the information. That's a strategy in the direction. But the next step is design. And it doesn't matter if you're doing landing pages, webinars, non stop posting of content of value on um, Facebook, Instagram, social media, there's always a component of design behind it. And if you've got that, that strategy or those uh, abilities yourself, phenomenal. If you're just wanting to play around and figure out what can you do or what you should hire somebody for, I do recommend going and playing with systems like canva, canva, C A N V a dot com. It's a great platform that has a lot of stock footage, a lot of just design tools that can really help you create personalized and unique presentation materials, help with landing pages, help with your email newsletters. That's a great place. But if you don't have the ability, I got no creativity. So I'm um, in the same show. You're hiring graphic designers. If you hire one in the United States, Generally you're paying 50 to $100 an hour for help and they should be great. Personally, I go offshore even though there's this 50, $100 an hour and they're great. And if you're just doing I've got one project or I'm doing a smaller series that I just don't need a whole lot of help. Always recommend some great US based graphic designers and if you need any introductions, please reach out, throw it in the comments. Um, we are here to help you build your team as well at the capital raising show. But you do need a graphic designer. As I mentioned I like to go offshore because rather than paying the $50 a month, you can literally hire somebody full time for 600 to $1,000 per month. And I know that that's quite a cost to get started, but it just depends on where are you in your business and where are you hoping to scale to and if you can hire a full time social media designer, presentation designer, email blast designer, making you look professional looking, making you look awesome, custom, not like you just grab some stockyard footage and just ran with it. Uh, having a graphic designer is one of the most important things. Having one down the street, yeah, it's a great way to get it done. But if you're really trying to expand, really build that syndication or investing business, start looking at what options are offshore. You can use the platforms like Upwork.com or Fiverr.com those are some great resources to connect with international graphic designers that can help you at a reasonable cost. And oftentimes full time, part time where you have regular hours. Personally I've built a team that are multiple full time designers in the Philippines. I also have full time administrative assistance out of, well, Kenya, Africa. I'm a huge fan of going offshore because it keeps things relatively cheap to be honest. Plus the scalability. You are a one man army, but wouldn't you rather to be an entire football team? Wouldn't it make life easier to reach your goals to have that team surrounding you? Again, great to have help from down the street. Great to have personal assistants that work your hours, that uh, communicates um, English as a first language, not as a second. There are some cultural boundaries working offshore, but personally I think it's well worth it. So that's for your graphic designers. And then of course you need copywriters. And again, you may think that you write better than anybody, but copywriting for sales, for raising capital, that's an artwork. So if you're doing it yourself, I still recommend running it by a copywriter. But nowadays we have the easiest, simplest, most straightforward copywriter to help you be successful. Our good friend Chat GPT and I encourage everybody to take some time to really get educated on it. We'll dive in some of these episodes a little bit deeper on some of the strategies and the types of ways to really leverage ChatGPT. Gemini is Google's AI. There's also perplexity. Claude, uh, I will say I've uh, used rock in the past. It's great for punchy social media type stuff. But if you're working on more pitch decks, business plans, blog articles definitely found that ChatGPT and Gemini and Perplexity is the way to go. And we'll do more dive into that. Long story short, just make sure that you are not just doing stuff yourself. Have somebody helping you with the copy. Whether you're hiring somebody, then they do have to be English as a first language. You can't go to the Philippines or way offshore for copywriting. So, uh, it does tend to cost a little bit more. If you're hiring somebody to look over your shoulders. It's a money well spent. But if you don't want to spend the money, let's be honest, ChatGPT is amazing. So with that, there's one more component that we didn't talk about, and that is actually your technology. Everybody now uses funding portals where you can have your investment online. You're driving your email list, your traffic, even the people that you're meeting with in person, you're bringing them to your investment portal and that's where they're getting all of their information. That's where your legal documents live. That's where your marketing pitch decks, your business plans, your one pagers, where your webinars are. That's where you can completely deliver the pitch to your investors without you having to go through page by page explaining everything to the investors. No, you give them the power to do it all themselves. And with most of these, if not all of these funding portals, there are also ways that they can just wire the funds, hit invest now, and truly make your life easy to help get more deals done faster. So I recommend everybody use one of these funding portals. And I'm not going to make a recommendation of which because there's a thousand of them out there. They all have their gimmicks, their unique pricing, and why they're the greatest thing. So sliced bread. And you know what? They're right. All of them are because they are very talented, uh, whatever they say they're good at. And that doesn't mean that they're actually good software platforms for anything else. You will find them from, um, a couple hundred dollars per month to a couple thousand dollars per month. The gimmicks, the we do this better than anyone else. Or is it doing the accounting and the fund administration for you? Is it just simply to process the investments? Is it doing ongoing reporting back to your investors, including delivering tax information? All of that can happen through the portals. It's just up to you to decide which one to work with. Another one of these episodes, we'll talk about the differences of actually making offers for Investments or in the alternative, doing testing the waters. All of that relies on funding portals. So definitely check them out. There are huge differences between them and we'll talk about those on, uh, a later episode. But for right now, we have covered those big components of who is your team. And so we've touched on the legal. What I didn't tell you is your attorney can be different than the group, the company, the person that's filing your investment filings, whether they're with states, whether they're with the SECs, there's always something. They will be cheaper, very admittedly. And if you hire a company that is not a law firm, that that's all that they do. So if you're not having a lot of legal support or if, my God, your lawyer is expensive, look for one of these filing services. Then we have the accounting with those different levels of getting your bookkeeper, getting your CPA for that tax prep, and those times that you actually need to have a financial auditor looking at your deal. Then we talked about marketing with getting the information, the education, whether it's done for you through a marketing agency, done, um, with you with a team, uh, like Investor Attraction Academy, or you're just trying to do it yourself and you still need that education and information. You can always find us atfind more investors.com. and there's a ton of education that you can get there for DIY as well. And then finally we've got that technology side. I can tell you 100%. If you are raising capital, you need to have a funding portal. You don't need to create your own, but just find a company to work with. So there's your team. And if you're doing deals, raising capital, managing a fund, syndicating real estate, buying business with investors, it really doesn't matter who you need to be successful with your team, not just to raise the capital, but actually managing the investors, the compliance and the financials on an ongoing basis. Make sure you get that complete team. And if you need any help, feel free to connect with us. You can also check us out at, uh, find more investors, slash, get dash started just to get some free education, learn a little bit more. If you'd like to connect with us further, that's a great way to do it. Like I said, it's Find more investor dot com. But until then, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate you. We're up to, I think it's over 150 episodes now, so there is a lot of, um, amazing content education interviews that have happened in the past. So, long story short, if you are raising capital, if you're doing deals, make sure that you've got the arrows in the quiver, the bullets in the gun. Make sure that you have everything you need to be successful. And we're always here to help you along as your cheerleader, as your coach, as your team member. And until then, Nate Dodson, thank you so much for watching the capital Raising show and hopefully see you again.