Investor Ready: The guide for start-ups on getting investors to say YES

Julie Barber is CEO at Spark! Consulting and has over 20 years experience in business innovation, transformation and winning over £20m in funding from corporate boards. She uses her experience of being on the ‘buy-side’ of corporate investments to help start-ups and scale-ups understand what investors everywhere are looking for. She now works with start-ups and scale-ups from pre-Seed to Series A, preparing them for raises between £100k and £10million, and post-investment, working with them to build appropriate corporate governance for a fast-growth company. Julie is also a NED for a global healthcare company and a UK-based social enterprise. Finally, she is an Accelerator Coach on the Dent Key Person of Influence Accelerator.

Founders start companies because they’ve identified a problem and they have the skills, experience and passion to want to solve it. Unfortunately, they often don’t have skills and experience around raising the investment which will be vital to the survival, and success, of their business. They also don’t always understand what investors are looking for, why they ask the questions they do, and where investors will find gaps when Founders thought there were none. At Spark! we’re on a mission to help as many startups as possible turn fantastic ideas into successful businesses, and Investor Ready helps startups evaluate their business from an investor’s perspective and provides practical steps to help them plan, and execute on, a successful funding round. Finally, all the aspects covered in the book also give Founders great insight on how to structure a solid, growth-ready company, whether they raise or not, meaning they can gain immediate value in their business, by following the book’s recommendations.

In particular, Investor Ready covers:

• An overview of the investment world, the equity investment landscape in particular, and how it works
• Things to consider before you start raising investment – otherwise your ‘round’ may be set to fail from the beginning
• What type of Finance is right for you? Businesses have a multitude of options so understanding the pro’s and cons of each is vital
• The six steps of the Investor Ready Roadmap, as outlined above, which allow the Founder to see their start-up through an investor’s eyes and prepare it accordingly
• Insight into what happens once an investor is interested, and the process that start-ups and scale-ups must go through to complete a deal

Investor Ready: The guide for start-ups on getting investors to say YES (Published by Rethink Press) is available to buy on Amazon. 

Connect with Julie: LinkedIn – Twitter – Facebook

Winners of The Business Book Awards 2021 will be revealed online on Tuesday 25th May 2021.