3 Must-Read Books to Help You Raise Money for Your Business.
To successfully raise capital for a business, you need to have the right knowledge from the right sources. This applies whether it’s for a new business or a successful start-up you’re now looking to scale. Arming yourself with the right knowledge through research will always get you to your goals as a business owner quicker than anything else.
Now, we’ve established research is essential to elevate a business, but what books should you be reading? If you search for books aimed at helping businesses grow, you’ll find at least hundreds of them. But if your main goal is to raise money for your business, there are a few books in particular that we’d highly recommend. 3 of them to be exact.
Don’t worry, we’ll share them with you right away. Here are 3 must-read books to help you raise money for your business right now!
1. Venture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson.
Building a business is more than simply creating a beauty brand or coming up with a brilliant tech idea that will set you apart from potential competition. You need a wide range of skills to start and scale a business successfully, and the ability to obtain financing for your business is one of the most vital of them.
Venture Deals introduces you to the “term sheet”, the document that sets out the terms and conditions for financing your business. It also defines all the key terms used in raising funding for you, from capitalization to liquidation preference, automatic conversion, vesting, and more.
Most importantly, Feld and Mendelson take you through what a successful process of funding your business should be like and everything you should look out for. Venture Deals is indeed targeted at first-time business owners, but the book is packed with wisdom that every entrepreneur should know, especially those who want to raise capital for their ventures.
2. It’s About Damn Time by Arlan Hamilton.
Arlan Hamilton’s book is a business guide by the first Black, queer woman to start a venture capital firm. Through her life and her book, she teaches that anyone can become “the next Mark Zuckerberg”, including you. And she shows how by teaching readers “How to Turn Being Underestimated into Your Greatest Advantage.”
Her personal experience with being underestimated is the center of the book, providing a relatable guide on how instead of obsessing over the skills, funding, experience, and so on that you don’t have, you should be working with what you do have to carve out a path to your goals. Hamilton lays out the nitty-gritty of her success to serve as an example and teach crucial lessons for ambitious entrepreneurs searching for success.
Of course, she tells her story with her trademark boldness and striking humor. And besides all the business lessons she teaches, there are also significant lessons to be learned from Hamilton’s confidence in her identity and her worth, especially for business owners looking to raise capital for their businesses.
3. Edge: Turning Adversity into Advantage by Laura Huang.
In her book, Harvard Business School professor, Laura Huang, explains how you can turn adversity into advantage by finding, building, and maximizing your “edge”. This is a very enlightening read written in four parts. The first, “Enrich”, teaches you how to realize your own “edge” or value and convince others of it. It also pushes you to acknowledge the value of your “basic goods” and the things that make you unique. This enables you to portray your competencies and potential in ways that will make your business positively stand out from the crowd.
Part 2, “Delight”, reiterates the value of humor. Not flagrant flattery, but being able to land a good joke can open up doors to make a perfectly delightful pitch when looking for funding for your business. The third part “Guide”, teaches you how to guide people’s perceptions so they can share your vision. If you can get someone to see and resonate with your vision, you can also get them to invest.
The final segment, “Effort”, reiterates the value of hard work—it keeps you strong even in the face of adversity. The author also reminds you to never focus on effort to the exclusion of enriching, delighting and guiding. These four parts are the four concepts that you can wield to give you an edge when raising money for your business. Huang’s book is the perfect read that will shift you into the right mindset and psyche to operate with when sourcing capital for your business.