How to Attract High Net Worth Investors on Autopilot w/Yakov Smart

The key to more syndications and bigger deals is more capital. Connecting with high net worth investors allows us to tap into more money, but how do we find them in the first place? 

By systematizing our social media platforms and outbound marketing strategies, we can make attracting investors effortless without taking up a lot of resources or personal bandwidth.   

How do we connect with investors online? What messages do we need to be posting and sending out? In this episode,  President at Investor Attraction Academy, Yakov Smart shares the best way to stand out to investors. 

Three Things You’ll Learn In This Episode

-How to get a quick win
There are 3 levels to raising capital, what are the foundational pieces we need to have before moving onto higher bandwidth tasks? 

-Social media mistakes capital raisers make
Why is it mission critical to have a funnel before we do any marketing activity? 

-Why you need to have a personal brand
What are some of the best ways to stand out to investors online? 

Guest Bio

Yakov Smart is the President at Investor Attraction Academy, host of The Raising Capital Show. His main focus is changing the game of raising capital and attracting investors. For more information, head to https://findmoreinvestors.com/, find Yakov on LinkedIn or send an email to yakov@linkleads.us.  

Transcript

Edited transcript from the Raise Private Money Legally podcast episode, “How to Attract High Net Worth Investors on Autopilot”

With Special Guest Yakov Smart

Originally recorded: Dec. 22, 2022

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Welcome to Syndication Attorneys' free monthly podcast, where we talk about topics of interest to real estate syndicators with the opportunity to ask live questions and get answers at the end of the call. I am attorney Kim Lisa Taylor. 

Before we get started, please note that all of our podcasts will be recorded and may be used for a future promotion, posted on our website, broadcast on a podcast, or posted on social media. We are live-streaming on YouTube, so if you don't wish to have your voice recorded, you can either just ask your question in the chat, ask your question in the Q&A. If you want to have your voice recorded, you can raise your hand. Information discussed during this free podcast is of a general, educational nature and should not be construed as legal advice. 

Today, we are talking about “How to Attract High Net Worth Investors on Autopilot” with Yakov Smart and Yakov, I met just recently at RE Mentor's ultimate partnering event in Phoenix, right? A couple of months ago. I was impressed with his services and what he had to offer, so we connected and said, "Let's share this with our audience," so that's why he's here. So Yakov, tell us about yourself and your business and who you are and what you do.

Yakov Smart:

Yeah, definitely. I'll give you the real Cliff Notes version here and first of all, thank you for having me, Kim, and it's going to be good stuff. I know we have a very relevant audience, real estate syndicators, and it's all about raising capital, finding investors, doing more syndications, doing bigger deals. My business is called Investor Attraction Academy. We work with people who want to scale their capital raising. We show them innovative ways of using the internet to build relationships legally and in a natural, authentic way with high net worth investors who can invest in their deals.

Been doing this a while, wrote a book on LinkedIn marketing several years ago, and then in 2020, started working pretty much mutually exclusively with real estate syndicators, entrepreneurs, raising capital. At this point we've had … I don't know what the exact number is, but I know it's in the tens of millions of private capital raised as a result of some of these strategies and systems that we're going to be talking about today. One of the biggest things that we do when we work with people is we actually set up some of these key systems that we'll be talking about for them, give them strategic guidance so they can go out there, build those relationships and ultimately raise more capital as a result.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Excellent. That definitely sounds like something that our clients and all of you potential syndicators out there who haven't done a deal yet need to know about. In fact, I'm interested in learning. Half the reason I interview people is because I want to learn about their services because I might want to use it for our business. We do a little bit of stuff on LinkedIn, but we're absolutely certain that we are not maximizing our returns that we could be getting from LinkedIn, so I'm super excited that you've joined and maybe we're going to be able to do some business together that way too. All right, so where are the best places to find investors online? I know some people find them on Facebook, some people on LinkedIn, some people are claiming TikTok is the next greatest thing. What are you seeing?

Yakov Smart:

Well, there's so many options. In theory, you could find investors anywhere — Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, you could have a podcast, you could be a guest on podcasts, you could guest blog, you could have SEO, you could do pay-per-click, you could do YouTube ads, you could do Facebook ads, do LinkedIn ads, you could do organic outreach, you could post content. Just even that list alone is like a big buffet, and it's overwhelming.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

I'm overwhelmed just hearing that.

Yakov Smart:

Yeah, I saw. It makes me want to do nothing, which is what some people do when they hear that. The best places are... You have to think about who your ideal investor is. For most people starting out that we work with, we talk about having an inbound and an outbound strategy. As far as outbound goes, LinkedIn right now, is a great place to get hyper-focused in who you're building those relationships with, who you're getting in front of and doing it in an intentional way. Facebook can be as well. I think most people — where they're at in their investor attraction journey — I think starting on those two platforms and building from there is going to be the name of the game.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

So Facebook and LinkedIn. I know for us, for finding legal clients, Facebook has not been good, but for us, Google's been good and also LinkedIn's been good, but I know that for a lot of my clients that Facebook has been really great for them. OK, well good. Facebook. What do you think about the other platforms like Instagram, TikTok? Are those as useful or maybe not as good for this purpose?

Yakov Smart:

I think they can be. I think a lot of times, people will overextend themselves and try to be everywhere. Unless you've got a huge budget, huge team, a lot of resources already, I think that's a major mistake. I'll share a concept that we talk about in our program. It's called the “levels of investor attraction.” Most people, when they start out, they're starting with what? Friends and family. When they start to go beyond that current network, they know online is the way to do it, and they start doing things like starting a podcast, YouTube channel. Maybe they want to run Facebook ads and we call that a “Level 3 activity.” My contention is you want to start where you're at. You want to start at Level 1, so the real foundation is having outbound messages that build relationships and book calls of potential investors.

Not just go out there and solicit people, but that get curiosity and start that intro call, just like you would when you meet someone at a conference. Having that initial intro conversation. That's Level 1. A lot of people start at Level 2, which is posting, content creation, all those different things that can get overwhelming and take up a lot of resources. What's great about Level 1 is you can automate a lot of the process. You can really streamline things through templates, automations, some of these different things that we're going to be talking about.

I think a lot of syndicators, if they just start at Level 1 and then branch out into posting content, then branch out into writing books, ads, all these different things, if you want to do them, great. You might not even need to, but understand the Level 1 activities, they're going to get you those quick wins, and a lot of the time, that's the core foundation that you'll need. I think any platform can be useful, but until you have the strategy and the messaging dialed in and the funnel as well to drive people to, you're not going to be able to really maximize the platform that you're using.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

So Level 1 is the building relationships, instigating calls, and that's where you're dealing with your message and your automation, right?

Yakov Smart:

Direct messaging, yep.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

The content creation would be Level 2. Once you've got that up and running, you can start thinking about posting a lot of content. That's what we've done. It's taken us years to get the content that we have, but here's one of the things I do, just a little tip for the people that are on the call. If I find myself answering a long question in an email, I just go ahead and cut and paste that and edit it to make it an FAQ, and I recast the question, so I'm not stealing that person's exact words, but I'm saying, "OK, here's the question that I'm answering," and I've written three this week just based on doing that.

Another place, if you want to get some great questions and answers that you can use as FAQs, get on BiggerPockets because you can get into the forums and you can hear people's questions and whatever they're asking, a lot of other people are thinking, but as a syndicator, you're thinking, "What are the questions my investors are asking?" You always want to cast from their viewpoint. What are they asking? For me, it's easier because it's like, "What are my syndication clients or potential clients asking?" Well, they're emailing you that stuff every day, but that's how I do it, is just if you see you're writing yourself a two- or three-paragraph email in response to somebody's question, turn it into an FAQ. Now you've got some content posted on your website.

Keep doing that, and then I write articles when I find myself writing more than just a two- or three-paragraph answer or it's something like, "Oh, I could write a one- or two-page article about this. I'll go ahead and write that," and then I send it to my editor, she edits it and post it. That's how you get content. Eventually, when I had enough content and then FAQs and all these other things, I turned it into a book. That's for me, been my journey in creating content, but I will tell you it's not without time, effort, pain. It takes a long time. I like your idea of starting with Level 1, which is I think where you guys come in and helping people get that part of it set up, which can be pretty overwhelming by itself.

Yakov Smart:

It's really important too, because with Level 1, that's where you can see a lot more of the quick wins and then still doing the Level 2 things, for example, being a guest on a podcast. That's a Level 2 activity. You can still do them in harmony, but I look at it as 80/20. So as you're starting out building your investor list, going beyond your current network, 80%, that foundation is Level 1. Having conversations, booking calls of potential investors, educating people. Then Level 2 is that content, and then like you were talking about in your story, it stacks up. It really starts to compound, but that's not going to happen overnight and a project like writing a book we talked about, you're re-releasing book, that's a big project.

It takes resources and takes bandwidth and there's a huge long-term return on that, but if someone's just starting out trying to find more investors beyond their current network or even with their capital raising journey, they just want to write a book out of the gate, well, it's usually not the best play. It's something if you're like, "OK, I want to add more investors in the next six months," well you might not even publish the book for the next six months. It's one of those things, it's really important to have, we call it, a strategic plan when we work with people. Just a roadmap for, OK, how do you get from where you are right now to having X amount of investors or access to X amount of capital for future syndications?

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Yeah. Well, my first book took me nine years to write. I don't recommend anybody do that. Maybe you can get a little more focused than I did. I finally asked David Lindahl, who's written a whole bunch of books saying, "How do you get them all done, Dave?" He said, "I just get up an hour earlier," so I started doing that too. I find I get my best writing done in the morning before coffee, before dealing with animals in the morning and then updating the book, that's a chore in itself. That's the thing that keeps me up at night. Yeah, you can do these things, but it's not easy. What are some of the biggest social media mistakes you see syndicators and capital raisers making?

Yakov Smart:

We could do an hour-long seminar on this topic alone. First of all, doing nothing. That's the biggest mistake. You've got a resource available on social media, literally millions of high net worth individuals are there. Millions of people. It's free to use, you can advertise, but there's a lot of things you can do that are free to use that cost almost nothing and reaching those people and building relationships. People overthink it. They think that communication and psychology, for some reason, they get online and get on social media, just all the common sense just goes out the window. They're like, "OK, if I message someone, I'm going to send them five paragraphs. They don't know who I am, but here we go. If I post something, I'm going to write it super formally and just not capture people's attention," so forgetting human nature is a big one.

Another one, a more tactical one is they don't have their profiles updated. Here's what I mean. For example, on LinkedIn, if you don't have those sections filled in, your reach is going to be limited. Just having the sections filled in is going to suggest you as a contact to people, or if you're posting something or messaging, it's going to give you more reach. Same thing on Facebook. Your personal Facebook, some people talk about business pages. Business pages on Facebook, unless you're paying a play, you're not going to get much reach, and a lot of people think that they just need to post on their business page. Well, no one sees this stuff, so that's another mistake. They think that if they have X amount of friends or connections, let's say you have 4,000 friends on Facebook or 4,000 connections on LinkedIn and you post something, that all 4,000 or the majority are going to see them. There's a whole algorithm.

You could have 4,000 connections and have 40 people see what you posted. That's a really important thing not to overstate. Another mistake is they don't sound credible with their profile. It doesn't look professional and it doesn't grab attention. It's very much all about them. But I love what you said earlier about the FAQs. It doesn't meet the investors where they're at. It doesn't have people feel seen and heard and understood. It's all about, "Hey, I've got great deals. We've got the best returns. Hit me up," that kind of thing. Another mistake, and this is an attorney, is people will post their deals and it's illegal to do that. They've got a 506(b) and they're blasting the deal because they're desperate to raise money. It comes down to building the relationships before you need to ask someone for money.

Just like you would offline, the same thing applies to online. The other thing is not streamlining things, not being systematic, not having automation in place, because if you're asking yourself to do that grunt work every day and you don't like being on social media, you don't really know how to do it, your time is better spent building relationships, finding deals, and building the business. There's a lot that you can streamline, you can automate and systematize, whether it's human automation, having a virtual assistant, having an admin person who does some of these tasks or better yet, automation that starts the conversations, responds to some of the posting that makes your life easier, and then the other thing is people don't do enough to build trust to one to many. If you're having to repeat the same questions again and again when you talk to a potential investor, I don't know about you, but I hate that stuff.

I don't like repeating. It doesn't excite me. We're big on — we'll talk about this on next week's workshop as we're having a prerecorded webinar — we call them an investor attraction webinar. It's not a solicitation. It's for “entertainment purposes only,” as we say, but it shows people a little bit about who you are, track record, how you look at investing, strategy, that type of thing, and it starts to do that just like you would share that with them one-on-one, it does it one to many, so that ideally, if you're generating inbound leads, they're coming, they're watching that first before they talk to you. A lot of the legwork you can have the automation do for you.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

That all sounds amazing. It all sounds like stuff that I would never be able to do on my own and I would absolutely hire an expert to do that for me. Yeah, I can't say enough how just thinking about doing that by myself was just like, "Yeah, no. It's never going to get done." All right. Maybe we've already covered this, but if you want to expand on it, why is it so important that your LinkedIn profile stands out?

Yakov Smart:

It's a really big thing. A lot of people don't know this, but when someone goes to Google your name, even if you haven't logged into your profile in years, that profile's going to come up on the first page most of the time. Sometimes it'll even be the very first thing just because LinkedIn for whatever reason, has really strong SEO. As an investor, most of the time, in today's day and age, they're going to Google you before investing money with you. I'd hope so anyway. They're going to at least Google you, see if there's any red flags and that LinkedIn profile comes up. If that LinkedIn profile's incongruent with what you're saying, if you're saying, "Hey, I'm the president of X, Y, Z capital and this is what we do," and your profile positions you differently or just looks scattered or sloppy, or you've got 10 different businesses and it's all over the place, it's a red flag.

It's something that's not necessarily going to get someone to wire you money right away, obviously, but it can get someone deterred from investing with you. It's important to have that cleaned up. It's important to establish credibility and it also gives you that added visibility piece. A lot of the time, people really focus on their websites and websites are really important, but other assets like a LinkedIn profile that's optimized or a funnel where you have an automated way of following up with people capturing leads, those assets online are of equal if not greater importance, and it's just like having real estate assets. Those are things that you can pull on again and again, but cash flow online, you have those assets in place, you can lean on them for credibility, you can lean on them for establishing trust with investors and making your life that much easier.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Wow, I never even thought about that, and I can't tell you when the last time I updated my LinkedIn profile. It's probably been more than a year. How often should somebody be updating it?

Yakov Smart:

Well, ideally, if they're doing the same thing, it's set it and forget it. Every once in a while, maybe you added experience or you want to brush up on something, but that's another mistake that people make. They're putting their focus on updating the profile on the funnel when in reality, that needs to be “set it and forget it,” and their focus needs to be on generating what's called traffic. Eyeballs, reaching more people, getting more people in the front door instead of constantly having to repaint, rearrange the front door. You build the front-door systems once, set and forget them. That's where the automation comes in. Then the focus of your marketing is getting more of the right people in those front doors.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

OK. All right. Well, that sounds like advice I need to take. What are some of the best ways that people can stand out to investors online? There's so many people looking for investors. How do you make yourself stand out from a crowd?

Yakov Smart:

Well, we talk about something when we work with people call “streams of commonality.” If you can identify, and this is where a lot of people go too broad when they're looking for investors. Say, "Oh, doctors, lawyers, people have money. I don't care. If they have a pulse and they have money, I'm good. They can invest in my deals." In reality, you have to look at, OK, what do you have in common with people? So for example, one of our clients, he comes from a corporate background, Fortune 500 company. His entire strategy, especially on LinkedIn, is to talk to people at that company because that commonality, you can't fake that. No one can not come off.

Literally, no one can compete on that commonality, so it's unique and there's that instant rapport. That's one way to do it. Another way is to address them, their questions, concerns in your marketing in advance. Very few syndicators are doing that. A lot of syndicators are talking about deals and cap rates and all these different things that are nice, but you want to create what's called a paradigm shift. I talked about this on one of my podcast episodes as well, where if you can change someone's way of thinking or someone's perspective, that's the most powerful way you can educate someone, not just throwing data and facts at them.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

So I love the “find your niche, find commonality,” because that is something that I've been teaching people for a long time and someone will come to me and they're in the military. Well, your target market is other people in the military. It may even be other people in your branch of the military and doctors... Mostly, I get a lot of people that come from the medical profession. It's like, "Hey, you already know how to talk the lingo of the people in your profession. Those are the people that you should be trying to approach for investing with you," and they're all interested in learning.

I think a lot of people would really like to invest in real estate as part of a group if they knew there was a possibility or a way to even do that. For a lot of investors, they've never even heard of the concept, so your job is to train them and show them that this is something that you can do. I love that your system seems to be able to bridge that gap. All right, what's the difference between posting content and direct messaging for finding investors?

Yakov Smart:

So there's a big difference. Posting content is a little less intentional. It can be very effective, just got to be consistent with it. The big thing is when you post, you never know who's going to see it. You could have someone randomly reach out, you could not. A lot of people in the syndication space, their networks on LinkedIn and Facebook, it's other syndicators. You might get a pat on the back, you might get a like, you might get comment, but is that going to translate into dollars raised? Probably not. With direct messages, and ideally, once someone is really up and going, they're doing a combination both, but initially, we talked about building that foundation, direct messages, you can very intentionally target who's getting your message, what they're seeing, when they're seeing it. You can grab their attention, it's one-to-one, and you can streamline and automate a lot of it.

So it's more intentional. You can build value faster. You can get someone to raise their hand and say, "Yeah, I'm interested," faster, and it expedites things and it takes a lot less. Once it's up — and it takes some bandwidth to build the systems — but once it's up and running, it takes less bandwidth. It's very much managing the system instead of having to constantly update the direct messages or having to constantly switch up the campaign, because once you've got one that's working, it's continuing to dial that in, rinse and repeat. With posting, you're posting — if you're doing it right — at least three times a week. There's a level of consistency there. What I like about direct messaging … again, what I found in my years working with syndicators and capital raisers is a lot of people, they need that foundation. How can they book their first few calls a week with potential investors? That starts with direct relationship building. It's the closest thing to being in a room with people and meeting those high net worth individuals in person.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Yeah. They definitely need to see your name more than once and see you out there and making yourself a thought leader, right?

Yakov Smart:

Yep.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

That's the whole concept, is once you're a thought leader and they look at you and say, "This guy knows what he's doing," or, "This gal really seems to get this," then they start trusting you and next thing you know, they want to do business with you. When do you think is the right time to start building a personal brand?

Yakov Smart:

I think it's yesterday. I think for people who haven't started, and I want to unpack what personal brand really means. My definition's a little bit different. I don't think it's about having a fancy looking website or a bunch of fancy looking marketing materials necessarily. It's about being clear on what you stand for. It's about being clear on your messaging, because to me, messaging defines a personal brand. If your brand is X, Y, Z Capital, cool. Maybe you're president, founder of X, Y, Z Capital. That's how you're positioning your personal brand. Nothing wrong with that. You don't need to be a speaker and do all that necessarily, but at the same time, when someone goes to your LinkedIn profile, your Facebook, go to your website, they need to be able to see a picture of you and say, "OK, here's that person. Here's some of their core values. Here's a little bit about their story," to at least humanize you.

We talk about humanizing in marketing as a really important thing. It's something that I think is going to continue to be a bigger trend. I think a lot of people — and I'm not knocking it because I've done this before too — they'll read a marketing book or two and they'll go out and their messaging sounds very ... I don't want to use the word salesy, but almost sleazy or inauthentic or very like, "Here's the five bullet point statements and yeah, I check the box," but if you tell that human story…. So for example, when we work with people in their investor attraction webinars and we want to identify “What's the story? What are the commonalities to weave in?” Because if someone's saying, "Hey, that person's like me," it's a lot easier to build trust, so that personal brand does that.

That thought leadership also, it happens over time. That compounds. That's something that doesn't happen overnight, but the conversations can happen much more quickly. Then also, once someone's on your investor list — and a lot of syndicators mess this up — is someone's on the list, the only time they hear from the syndicator is when the syndicator has a deal to pitch. There's a lot of opportunities to have multiple touchpoints, establish that thought leadership, be consistent, be relevant, and be frequent with that person and that personal brand piece. Yes, it's a perception. Yes, it could be how the branding looks and the images, but it's also the feeling that you create with people and how they resonate, what they find, what they see in themselves that they see in you.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

You said three words that I thought were really important. Consistent, relevant, and what was the third?

Yakov Smart:

Frequent.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Frequent.

Yakov Smart:

Frequency. Frequency, consistency, they're similar. Frequency is just how often you're going to be consistent. How intentionally are you going to communicate? Once a week, couple times a month, once a month?

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Definitely consistent. We started these podcasts in 2016 and it's just amazing how quickly time goes by and all of a sudden, there's more than 60 podcast episodes out there. Now I'm getting to a point where we might have to do them twice a month because I'm backing up on speakers that I really want to interview, and so, I think we’ll probably bump up our frequency. Of course, everybody has told me you need to do it once a week, but I also have to live my life.

Yakov Smart:

Yeah, that's important too.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

That is something I have to constantly remind myself of, and all of you need to remember that too. Don't forget to live your life. Don't forget to live your life. That is hugely important. OK, cool. Not only do you get marketing lessons here, you get life lessons. What are a few of the most important tech tools for people to have if they want to implement your system?

Yakov Smart:

Yeah, there's quite a few. I'll say obviously, having things like a funnel where you can actually capture leads, not just a website, that's really important.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Is that like your CRM?

Yakov Smart:

To get really tactical, it's having a landing page, so a page where people go, they can opt in name, email, ideally whether or not they're an accredited investor. A thank-you page after they've opted in, having automated emails. We work with people and we design these things, usually 7 to 10 posts. We call them our post-webinar emails. Inviting people to book a call, find out more, re-emphasizing some of those key content points from the webinar. Also having a CRM auto-responder where you can tag people. 

We share with people, you want to tag people three different ways once they've opted in. You've got your active investors. These are people who've already invested in your deals. You've got your deal-ready investors. You've talked to them, you've established a relationship, you know how much capital they're bringing to the table. There's a good chance when you're doing your next syndication, they're in. Then you've got that final group who've opted in. Maybe they've requested something for free, maybe they were in your friends and family. You guys talked three years ago, but they haven't just yet committed. Just saying, "OK, I'm ready for that next deal." 

You want to be able to segment that list. There's page builder tools out there, there are a lot of different ones that people can use. Also, CRMs, there's some different ones. I'll be talking about this on next week's workshop as well, but the biggest thing is making sure. The other thing too, and I want to say this with the tech tools, it's easy to creatively procrastinate and do a bunch of research on the tech tools and not get a whole lot done. A lot of the tech tools, they do the same thing, and once you get them set up again, spend your time, energy, focus on actually building relationships with investors, not upgrading the tech tools, because a lot of them, the CRMs, they do pretty much the same thing. The good ones do.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Well, my advice to people that are exploring tech tools is do not opt in for the annual plan because it's cheaper. Do the monthly, pay the extra monthly, use it for six months, make sure you're going to keep using it before you decide to go with the annual plan, because I have been locked into 1-, 2-, 3-year-long contracts on things that I didn't like after the first six months and I'm still in one of those now. Just be cautious about that.

Don't let that happen to you, and we've gone through multiple CRMs. We started with Insightly for our law firm. That's a Google app, and then we graduated up to ActiveCampaign and then we went beyond ActiveCampaign and now use HubSpot, and of course, each of those have increasing expense levels associated with them, but they all have increased capabilities. I would imagine there's some that you like. Would you be willing to share some of those with us?

Yakov Smart:

Yeah, so for clients, we recommend ActiveCampaign the majority of the time. Some of the people are using Infusionsoft/Keap. I wouldn't recommend that.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

I thought it was nightmare.

Yakov Smart:

Yeah, I wouldn't recommend starting with that. It's complicated.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Well, that was the problem that we had with some of them, is that they were so complicated, we never figured it out, and so, we're just like, "Forget it. It's too much."

Yakov Smart:

Yeah, and it's an energy suck. When in doubt, ActiveCampaign is what I'll say for CRMs. We use Kartra. It's a little more advanced. We pay a little more too, but we do some pretty nifty things with segmentation and all those different things, but again, when in doubt with CRMs, ActiveCampaign, and I know there's a few different softwares for investor portals as well, and maybe there's some that you recommend, but I know there's a few that I usually recommend to people. Then on the technology side too, there's different tools for text message automation. There's different tools for page builders too.

Sometimes that's separate from a CRM. What else? If people are starting the podcast, there's different tools, so one of the things for next week, and I know we'll talk about this in a second, we actually give people a document that's like, "OK, here's the tech tools that we recommend." You can also automate a lot of the LinkedIn messages. There's tech tools for that. There's tools to automate posting. A lot of people are surprised at how much can be really streamlined and automated. I'm big on systematizing things. If we can have it where it's systematized or automated, let's do that. As long as we're not losing the relationship building element.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Excellent. All right. I'm just going to remind everybody if you have questions, this is a great time to start putting them in the chat, putting them in the Q and A, because we're down to our last couple of questions and then we're going to go live. You can ask questions of Yakov, you can ask questions of me. We're happy to answer anything that we can get through during this hour call. All right. What do you think are some of the biggest opportunities for finding investors in 2023?

Yakov Smart:

Yeah, it's a great question. I think right now with what's happened in the stock market, I think there's a whole pool of people who are working corporate whose portfolios took a dump this year. Let's just call it what it is. In the past, I think finding investors, having a conversation, we were talking about things like cash flow, tax benefits, all still very important things, but I think now, it's much more directly, "Hey, you've got this big problem. I've got a great solution." It's safer. You're actually going to get cash flow, monthly passive income or quarterly, however you do your payouts. It's a real solution to a problem, so marrying the two without doing it in a way that doesn't meet people where they're at, because a lot of people don't know what a syndication is. I know it's crazy for people on this call.

A lot of people have no idea what a syndication is, and they're legitimately high net worth individuals. You have access to a decent amount of money, so I think the opportunity with the money sitting in retirement accounts is something like $4 trillion that's sitting there that could potentially be accessed through self-directed IRAs. I think that's a big opportunity. I think people are craving connection more than they ever have. I think especially the humanness in our marketing, telling stories, establishing that commonality, that's going to be more important. I think paid advertising online, if any of you have done it, I would advise against it right now. I always tell people, unless you have $10,000 a month that you're just willing to spend for six months and get no results on the paid ad side, I would say don't do it, because it can be a money drain.

Paid advertising has really changed a lot with iOS and there's some different things, but I think niche-specific advertising could be really powerful. Specific journals, magazines, websites, blogs, much better ROI. I think it's also important to build that trust in advance. I think a lot of people are familiar with... There's crowdsource platforms for investing. … It’s really important to educate people and build that trust in advance and take care of that as much as you can before they have an opportunity to invest, because if you give someone an opportunity to invest and they've got those unspoken objections and you're not anticipating those, it's going to take a lot longer for them to invest.

The other thing with social media, I think the opportunity for reach is still out there, even on the organic side with posting, direct messaging, reaching people, building those relationships. I think that's a big thing. I think the world of alternative investing is still a very much a golden age. I think over the next 12, 18 months, there's going to be access to great deals out there. Even if the media is screaming, "Hey, recession," or whatever the case may be, I think the people who are the most aggressive in their marketing and building that list bigger and better faster, they're going to really be able to have a lot more assets under management and raise a lot of money, because I think people are looking for a legitimate solution to what's a very big problem right now.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Well, this is really good advice and I'm sure there's a lot of people... I'm taking a lot of notes. I hope some of you are in the audience as well. I just want to know, all right, so all this sounds really great. Sounds like you've got it down. How in the world would somebody like me that wants your services work with you and what do you have to offer?

Yakov Smart:

Yeah, so our core program, it's called Investor Attraction Academy, and we basically build out a lot of the tech stuff, the systems for you. Literally, we'll customize it toward what you need and then we give you a strategic plan, messaging templates for how to execute the system. Best way for people to learn more, next week on the 29th, we're having a live workshop. It's going to be a two-hour workshop where we go in-depth on some of these strategies, systems, tools. It's a great introduction to some of this stuff. It's a great way to understand where I'm at, where I'm going, and whether or not you'd be a fit to work with us.

That's something we're making available. My recommendation for people who are interested, curious … the workshop, we're making it available at a ridiculously low price because I want to be able to share this with a live audience. I want to make sure that before we talk to people, that they're educated, they're informed, and they understand that it's a fit. They're going to understand that there's some alignment. If you have a link, Kim, we can drop that in the chat.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

You could put it into the chat. Can you do that?

Yakov Smart:

Yeah. I don't have it in front of me, but we can definitely find it here in a second, or at the very least, follow up with it. That's called the Attracting Investors in 2023 Workshop. I know Kim's got a special code so you can get in for 23 bucks. I know it sounds crazy. 2023, 23 bucks, but again, it's a great introduction. It's actually going to be real content, real strategies. At the very least, you'll leave with one or two ideas of things you can do to grow your investor list, and if at that point you're like, "OK, I want to work with these guys, really get the style, then get the fastest results possible," we'll share how to do that on the workshop as well. As we start taking questions, I'm going to see if I can find this.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

OK, so I've got some of these links right now. Let's see. What do I do? Trackable registration link for the workshop, right? That's the one?

Yakov Smart:

Yeah.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Let's put it in there. I'm going to put that one in right now. If anybody wants to join the workshop, there, go ahead and do that. It looks like you might have a couple other offers. There's a guide.

Yakov Smart:

Yeah, there's a coupon code. If people click on that link and then use the coupon code “KIM” at checkout, you'll get in for 23 bucks. That's what I recommend. We'll share the guide with people who attend the workshop as well, but it's going to be on the 29th.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Is the coupon code for the workshop or for the guide?

Yakov Smart:

For the workshop. Yeah. Coupon code’s for the workshop so that if they go to the page, they enter that at checkout, they can get in for 23 bucks, because it's 2023.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

All right, cool. OK, I'm going to put that in the chat also. OK. Let's see. What else? So anything else that we haven't covered that you think we should talk about, Yakov, that's important for our audience?

Yakov Smart:

So we've got some questions. We can go to those. I think it's really important for people to think about capital raising and investor attraction systematically. I can't stress about enough. I don't know. You probably are the same way, Kim. I get messages literally every week. Someone's like, "Hey, I need to raise 250K in the next seven days. Do you have anyone I can talk to?" I'm like, "Should have built those relationships beforehand," and it's also not legal. If you need an extra 250K and you're just blasting it out and it's a 506(b), it's also not legal and it's not the smartest approach. This is all about building those relationships in advance, having that list so you can turn to people when you have that deal and you're doing the next syndication, and have that confidence that you can go out there and raise the money. It's a huge leverage point.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Yeah, absolutely. That's what we're all about too. We have a program also that can help you and can go hand-in-hand with what you're doing with Yakov, and what we call ours is a “pre-syndication retainer.” That's for people who are in between deals. They don't have a deal right now, but they want to work on their investor marketing program. That's exactly what Yakov's talking about. For me, what we teach is you've got to have a combination of your online presence and your physical presence. You can go to meetings in your local communities, you've got to learn what to say when you meet new people and they ask you what you're doing, so you have to get polished with your response to that question.

Some people call it an elevator pitch, but it has to come off organic. With our pre-syndication retainer program, we'll give you an investor marketing plan template where you can write down, "This is what I'm going to do to find investors. This is what I'm going to build out this year," and number one on the list should be, "I'm going to have Yakov help me with my online presence," and then number two is, "These are the kind of meetings I'm going to go to and I'm going to go two or three times a month." They could be meetups, they could be real estate investment association meetings or anything like that.

Then you've got to figure out how you're going to follow up, so that again, goes back to Yakov's system of what are you going to do and then what are you going to have in place that you can use when you meet people in person, something you hand them that they can take back to their family or their friends, or can you create an educational webinar or something like that that's going to educate them on the process? I think that you can get a lot of that content and that guidance from both Yakov and us. I highly encourage you to do that. We do weekly masterminds on Wednesdays at 9:00 a.m. Pacific time, noon Eastern time. There we go, and let's go to questions.

Yakov Smart:

So before we do, I just want to make sure... It says the chat is disabled, so I want to make sure people can see the link, because that might have just gone to you and I.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Yeah, I sent it out. If you guys can't see it, let us know. I sent it out to me and everybody. I'm not sure why it's disabled for you, so I should try to send that out.

Yakov Smart:

Yeah, we have one person, Marie, saying they can see the link.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Oh, they can’t? OK.

Yakov Smart:

Yeah. One person says, but guys, I just confirmed with someone in the chat or the Q and A that you can in fact see the link in the coupon code. OK. It says, "Chat disabled. We can see the link."

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Then it's working.

Yakov Smart:

OK, cool. We're good on that.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Yeah. I just clicked the link and it went right to your page.

Yakov Smart:

Perfect.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

That's perfect. OK, so Satish says, "So Level 1 strategy is to direct-message folks in your social media network and set up a call with them?" So she just wanted to confirm what is that Level 1 strategy.

Yakov Smart:

It might not be directly setting up a call. It's more of building the relationship, gauging interest, establishing commonality, curiosity, all those different things before setting up a call. If you've known them for a while, you could be a little more direct there too, but there's some different strategies. We'll talk about that next week too. Level 1 is having a way to directly build relationships from anywhere. Meeting people in person is great. It's also great to be able to sit on your laptop at a home or wherever you want to be, and each and every day, you're building conversations, you're starting dialogues with people who potentially can become investors. It's really powerful to be able to do that, so that's Level 1.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

OK, great. Steven asks, "Yakov seems to really know his stuff. How do we draw people to our front door once we build the front door?"

Yakov Smart:

Great question. That's where all these different marketing platforms come in. Everyone's a little bit different. That's where LinkedIn, Facebook, wherever you're going to strategically be online, that's what you're using. On the inbound side, there's a number of different strategies. For example, I'll give just one easy-to-digest example. Let's say you're a guest on a podcast and someone at the end of the podcast will usually say, "OK, where can people go to find out more?" If you just drive people to your website, that's cool. You'll get some people potentially, but you haven't captured the lead. Unless they're hot to trot, ready to go, ready to have a call, you miss out on the lead. Versus if you say, "OK, go to this link. You can access a free training that I recorded talking about passive income strategies in any economy."

I'm just shooting from the hip on titles, because titles are very important. You'd say, "Go to this URL." I go to the page, I listen to you on a podcast, I put in my name and my email, now our relationship starts and it starts one-to-many. Now I'm getting emails from you. Now I can watch your presentation. Now I'm well-informed. Now I trust you before we talk versus it being ice-cold. That's one of the strategies. It's really having multiple ...  Just like you want multiple deals, multiple streams of income, multiple ways of getting people in that front door on your calendar.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Well, make sure you're following up with those people, because I can't tell you the number of times I've put my name in on somebody's website and never heard from them again.

Yakov Smart:

Well, that's where the automation comes in and the CRM and all the tech stuff, because to manually remember to do that can be tough.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Yes. All right. Richard asks, "Amen to that on tech tools." Thanks Richard. Then he says, "Thoughts about syndication model to acquire businesses or best for real estate?"... The rules for raising private money from private individuals — so high net worth investors, friends and family, acquaintances, people you meet on the internet, individuals — the SEC calls them all retail investors. The rules of raising money are the same for all retail investors. It doesn't matter what you're raising money for. You could be buying a plane, yachts, land in another country, multi-family property, any kind of asset class you can imagine for real estate or businesses. There are some differences, some additional hurdles that you will have to jump through if you are buying securities and other people's offerings versus buying something directly that you're going to own and control, and specifically real estate.

If you're going to own and control real estate, then you just have to follow the Securities Act of 1933. If you're going to do a fund of funds and you're going to start raising a pool of people who are going to invest in other people's deals, then you're going to have to follow some additional rules that can be quite burdensome. If you're going to be buying and just owning businesses directly, then yes, there may be some additional rules that apply, but it's probably not going to be all that onerous, so absolutely. We do have an attorney in our team that specifically deals with non-real estate offerings and he's taken a lot of companies public and can help with all aspects of those types of offerings, so yes. Richard asked again, "Is using short videos on LinkedIn, maybe more effective than blog articles or written posts or is it better to post on YouTube or directed emails?"

Yakov Smart:

So the short videos on LinkedIn right now, they're not doing as well. LinkedIn long form is working well, especially for this type of audience. Then as far as the short videos, it's just one of those things. You can repurpose a video a lot of different ways. You get it transcribed, you can make that a blog. The biggest thing though that I'd say when it comes to the short videos — and I want to reread the question here; I saw something — OK, so I wouldn't use short videos on LinkedIn. Posting on YouTube, it's more, again, a Level 2 or even Level 3 strategy. It's very long term. Love email marketing, especially if people have already opted in. That's great. If you're sending in a short video in an email for example, "Hey, click the link. Watch this short video."

So that's the big thing, but if you're doing Instagram, that type of thing, yeah, those short videos are real style things. They're effective. Here's the problem, and here's what people don't understand about investor attraction. A lot of these high net worth individuals are going to be a little bit older. They're going to be usually 40-plus. Not always, but typically 40 -plus. If they're actually serious legit investors and they're talking about investing their money, they're going to want to do their due diligence. They're open to being educated. They don't need the video to be 30 seconds or less. They really don't. They're going to sit and watch, like you guys are here. We've been here almost an hour. We didn't need to make a 30-second reel talking about this stuff. You would've just been like, "OK, cool," and brushed it off. Don't be afraid of doing long form content.

Be open to having depth, because that depth creates trust. It creates the sense that you know your stuff. That's a really key thing. The other thing that I'll say just on the short video side is just make sure you're very intentional if you're going to be doing that, because a lot of people are just doing that to create content. It's a lot of work. You might even have an editing team and it's like, does it really create the outcome that you're looking for? Does it put you in front of investors? Does it get you calls? Does it raise capital for you at the end of the day? If it does not, if you were playing the popularity contest on social media, how many views and likes and comments, that stuff's cool, but where's the real ROI on that? Just be mindful of that with the videos.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

So, hey, Hector said that the coupon code doesn't work.

Yakov Smart:

Yeah, so that's my bad. It's “KLT.” So capital K as in Kim, L as in Lisa, T as in Taylor, so it's KLT. Yeah, forgive me, guys. We've had a lot of moving parts on the automation side. So yeah, coupon code is KLT. That should do the trick. I just verified that.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

OK, I'm going to just put that in the chat. OK, great. That's done. Let's see. Got a lot of questions. OK. All right. They've got KLT. It's now working. All right, so we've gotten through those. I think we've gotten through all of those. Did anybody raise their hand? Nobody's brave enough to be live.

Yakov Smart:

There's someone.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Is there someone live there?

Yakov Smart:

I see Hugo and I see Bud.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

OK, go ahead. I'm not seeing them. Go ahead. Can you see their question?

Yakov Smart:

So Hugo just reappeared, disappeared. I'm clicking on him and he is not. ..  So Bud has his hand raised, so I think the way to do this is going to be ... Bud, if you've got a question, you can probably put it in…

Kim Lisa Taylor:

There we go.

Yakov Smart:

The Q and A box, and let's see if we can ... OK, we got it down. We're on roll today.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Got it. 

Bud:

Chat was disabled.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Yeah.

Yakov Smart:

There you go.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Bud, how are you doing?

Bud:

Doing very well. I wanted to know if there's going to be a replay.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

We're live-streaming on YouTube right now, so you can go to YouTube right after this and listen to this again if you want.

Bud:

Great. Thank you very much.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Then we will be posting this on our podcast, so our podcast is “Raise Private Money Legally.” It's on 20 different podcast platforms. Encourage all of you to sign up and subscribe to that. There's over 60 different episodes, so you can listen to it while you're in the car or wherever you want to be. Let's see. Here is our link to the podcast. I'm going to stick that in the chat also. Then if you have been listening to the podcast and you want to give us a review, we would love that. There's a link for that too.

It's like “there's an app for that. “There's an app for everything. Then we love reviews, so if you guys want to give us a Google review, we're going to go ahead and put that in the chat also, and if you want to save the chat from this entire program, you can do so. If you go down to where you would type a message, there's three little dots to the right of that. If you click those dots, then you're going to get a popup, and one of the options is to save the chat. You can just save this chat and get all these links, keep them on your computer, and then use them when you're ready. All right, well, anybody have any questions for me? I'm happy to answer those as well.

Yakov Smart:

Looks like we've got one more here. What's your take on pitch decks?

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Go for it.

Yakov Smart:

I'll have you answer that first and then I'll give a little bit of a unique perspective.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

So you need a pitch deck ... You can do a webinar where you're going to be talking to a group of people and you want to educate a group of people. You can use a pitch deck for that, or you can do some kind of educational content where you're just explaining what is syndication, how it works. If you don't have a deal, your pitch deck is going to be a lot like that anyway. Kind of, "Here's what our business does. We do these kinds of real estate deals. We put small groups of people together. Here's how you can participate. Here's the kind of returns that we look for." Et cetera. It's very generic about what in general your team does. If you're doing an offering, if you have a pre-vetted group of investors, then you can do a deal-specific pitch deck and you can invite those pre-vetted investors because those are the people that you have established the right substantive relationship with.

So once you have that relationship, you're able to pitch deals to them in a group, as long as you're not including outsiders that aren't pre-vetted in that pitch. I always recommend 15, 20 slides. This should only take 15 or 20 minutes. If you're doing an hour and a half presentation, you've just made everybody go to sleep and everybody forgot what you were talking about. 15, 20 slides max, and not a lot of words on a page. It's bullet points that are reminding you what you want to talk about. You're not letting people read whole sentences on your pages, or that's going to be a very boring presentation as well.

If you are doing a 506(c) offering, and you are allowed to advertise, then you would be able to pitch your deal to an entire group of people. You don't have to know that they're all accredited. You just have to make sure that before they actually make an investment, that they are accredited. There's lots of different ways to use pitch decks. You've got your generic one before you have deals, you've got your deal-specific one for a 506(b) offering only to pre-vetted investors, and you've got your 506(c) that you could do to more the general public. You just have to make sure that the messaging is correct. Yakov, go ahead and contradict me if you want.

Yakov Smart:

No, that's exactly what I was going to say. A lot of people, when I say do a webinar, we're not talking about having a pitch deck and pitching a deal on a webinar. You can, but once you've got the relationship, the investor attraction webinar, just like you mentioned, introductory webinar, telling a little bit about your story, explaining what a syndication is, explaining what passive investing really means, that type of stuff, educating people. I think people skip that step too often. I think the first time they talk, so even if you're friends and family, if you're going in for the kill on the pitch deck on the deal, and that educational foundation isn't there, it's very hard to convert someone and get them to actually wire you money.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Well, I would argue that your first conversation is not a pitch. Your first conversation is, "Hey, this is what we do in general. We're just talking to people to see who might be interested."

Yakov Smart:

Exactly.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Then if they say, "Well, yeah, that sounds interesting," then you say, "The SEC, and legally, we're required to ask you some specific questions to know if this is going to be a good fit for you before we can talk to you about specific offerings," so you get their permission to ask the questions, and then you ask them, "Are you accredited?" You give them the definition. If they say no, then you say, "Are you sophisticated?" You said something earlier, Yakov, and I think a lot of people miss out on this, and maybe it's going to change the way you do things, but if the only question you're asking investors is, "Are you accredited?" And they say no, they have just ruled themselves out as even being eligible to invest and that is absolutely not true, because all it requires is that if they're not accredited, are they sophisticated?

Then you develop a relationship with them, and now you can offer them rule 506(b) offerings that allow you to include up to 35 non-accredited, but sophisticated investors. I really think you always have to ask, are you accredited? If no, are you sophisticated or not really even if no, because even your accredited investors are supposed to be sophisticated. I think you've got to ask that second question though, and that requires giving them the definition of what does the SEC say that means, and then letting them explain in their own words why they think they qualify.

Yakov Smart:

Yeah. A lot of people don't even know they're accredited. That's why some of our clients, I'll talk to someone, "Are you accredited?" They're like, "Yeah, you're definitely accredited, dude. Your net worth is this." They don't really know what that means.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

That's right, so you give them the definitions, say, "Do you check this box?" "Oh yeah, I meet that." You don't have to get verifications from anybody until you're doing a 506(c) offering, and it's at the time they make the investment. At that point, you have to go through the verification process. Until then, you're just asking questions and you're taking note of what the answers are and putting it into your database so that you've now tagged them as accredited, or not accredited, but sophisticated.

When Yakov was saying you have to assign tags to people, you definitely want to have your pre-vetted ones and then you want to know if they're accredited, because then you could offer them either 506(b) or 506(c) offerings, but for your non-accredited, you're not going to be email-blasting them about 506(c) offerings that they're not eligible to participate in. Yakov, we do have one more important question. We're running a little bit over, but what is your email and contact information? How can people get hold of you?

Yakov Smart:

Yeah, best way, we can put the email in the... I guess not the chat box. Let's see if I can do it. My email is yakov@linkedleads.us. Obviously I'm on LinkedIn. Our website is findmoreinvestors.com. Best thing to do though, guys, if you're around next week on the 29th, that workshop, it's going to ... we see a few more questions I know we don't have time for. Can answer those for you on that workshop, so it's the best way to learn, it's the best way to get in touch and really go deeper on this stuff and get a feel for first of all what you need to do, how it applies to you, and it's really the best way to leverage what's available in terms of system strategies for growing your investor list and finding more investors in 2023.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

Excellent. All right. One more time. Your email? yakov@linkedleads?

Yakov Smart:

linkedleads.us. Yep.

Kim Lisa Taylor:

U-S. OK. It's in the chat. I'm going to give you guys a couple minutes to grab that chat. Make sure you do, and this has been really great. I appreciate this very much. I've learned a lot. I think I need to be on your call. Probably need to actually just have a private conversation and say, "All right, what do I have to do to get started?" But anyway, thanks so much. We appreciate everybody taking your time to be with us today, and we look forward to having you as clients or potential clients.

If you want to schedule appointment with us, go to syndicationattorneys.com and there's a “Schedule an Appointment” button. You can go through a little question of what you're looking for, and we'll get you to the right person so that you can engage with us, and we'd be happy to have you. We are also offering a holiday fund sale. We do it annually. We have 20% percent off all blind pool funds right now, 15% off all syndications and $200 off our pre-syndication retainers if they're prepaid by the end of December. You've got nine more days to take advantage of that, and we look forward to talking to all of you soon. All right, talk to you soon.