Exploring the web about venture capital partners or investors will give you a myriad of results, each of them offering a good quality of business investment opportunities and valuable resources in today’s market. But the challenge is how to go about attracting these people – venture capital investors or angel investors – to help you with key decisions to your investments? For entrepreneurs and investors, connection is the right key to help your business venture a success. Successful business startups are built around innovative ideas and leading-edge technologies, yet realizing these business plans require the right resources, information, infrastructure, and most of all, the right partnerships.
It all comes down to how well you click with people you first encounter. Clicking has always been a subjective art form. There is that special moment when two people click, rather than simply meet. Brothers Ori and Rom Brafman authored a book,
Click: The Magic of Instant Connections, and Ori shared his ideas to business owners looking to assemble an inner circle of advisers, partners and investors they click with. He categorized the ingredients involving clicking into the following:
- Vulnerability - Exaggerating how many people you employ or boasting about your revenue will only attenuate the ability to attract investors to help you. Brafman’s research found that people who actually display their weaknesses are the best to click with. Just simply try to hang out with these people and bring yourself a box of pizza or invite them for a coffee without a scheduled formal meeting so you get to know each other as real human beings, is exercising a sense of vulnerability.
- Proximity – The advanced communication technology such as Skype, Yahoo Messenger, or Google Talk, is now widely used for most businesses in meeting with people. But Brafman advices that it is better to show up face to face. According to their research, you definitely click with people you meet face to face, people who are physically close to you. And the most important part of any meeting is what happens just before or after the actual meeting because that is when you take the time to get to know the people you are meeting with as individuals, and the chance to click occurs. That is very unlikely to happen when you are talking to someone on the phone.
- Resonance – According to Brafman, people who resonate are both Present and Flowing. Being present is about showing up as a real person and a fully engaged human being. Flowing is about being challenged while doing something you are really good at. He said that if you are talking to an angel investor, and you are just going through the motions of your elevator pitch, you are toast! People know when you are just acting rather than feeling challenged and being fully present.
- Similarities – You best click with people when you have trivial similarities, such as what sports they enjoy, what school they went to, what gadgets they like and a lot more. However, the number of similarities between two individuals is critical when you are trying to click with someone, according to Brafman. The quantity of commonalities overrides the qualities of those connections according to his research.
- Shared Difficulties – The experience of going through something difficult together and coming out of the other side to safety makes people feel as though they click. Brafman suggests that you acknowledge difficult periods you have gone through with your inner circle in order to stimulate this sensation in a business context.
You must take note that above all of these categories, you must not forget that you should connect with the right
venture capital partners in order to take your business further; otherwise, you might just be wasting your effort, time, and money.
