It’s easy to invest in an already successful business – you just say “Show me that you’ve already got traction with users and are driving sales.” I do something exponentially harder – I work with teams that are not yet proven and lead them on that path.
The simplest answer on how I know which ones have the best chance of success – I just “know.”
How I know is a bit more complicated and has to do with a combination of my work experience mixed with my advanced training in behavioral profiling, but the good news is, there is actually a shortcut for people who don’t have that.
You can have them take a test[1].
Seriously.
This test will tell you straight out if the team you are dealing with have the personality type of a successful entrepreneurial team.
Individually, or together.
And that’s important, because someone may be awesome on their own, or it may be that they are only great if they work in combination with this other person, so what happens if they split up later? These are things that are important for an investor to know.
Lest this sound all “woo-woo” or “neuro-science mumbo jumbo”, every major corporation (including Government entities) perform similar assessments on their candidates before hiring them, like StrengthsFinder[2], Caliper[3], etc – this is one that tests specifically forentrepreneurial traits.
Quite simply, it will tell you (and the test taker) things that will make otherwise harder conversations easier.
For example, my own results overwhelmingly show that I am not interested in money, in any possible sense. No investor in their right mind would want me as their CEO, CFO or anything that had to do with being in charge of ensuring their money was returned to them properly.
In the flip side, I score extremely high in things relating to loyalty, work ethic and “caring about others”. In very simple terms, I will work as hard for someone else as myself.
These traits, along with all of the rest, are unique to me, but do fit an overall blueprint of what is and isn’t successful.
Take an entire team together and you can paint a relatively good picture of the likelihood of success, before they’ve even begun.
That, plus their background – socioeconomic factors, work and/or military experience, hobbies/interests, education – all of it together will help me to determine whether or not a team has what it takes to succeed in their chosen field.
Footnotes
[3] Caliper Hiring Assessment | Talent Management