Let’s talk about investor relations, but more specifically, the investor management software, Cash Flow Portal.
Why You Need Investor Relations Software
A portal benefits both the syndicator and the investors. Simply, this software makes our lives easier.
Back in the early days, before we had an investor portal, we had to work with a whole host of spreadsheets, emails, and Docusigns. One of the challenges that we had when we were scaling our investors was the sheer amount of information needed to manage all of those relationships.
First of all, there's the acquisition side of it, you have investors that you need to get into the deal, and there are all sorts of logistics around that.
There's also the ongoing maintenance. An investor might need to change their address, or update their tax forms. They may need to switch from one entity where their investment is currently held into another, or maybe one of them passes away.
There are a lot of things to keep track of, and as you get bigger and bigger, and you have more and more investors, you have more and more challenges to overcome as an operator.
Maybe in the beginning, you have five guys and every time you go back to them and get money, but when you get up to the level where we are, with hundreds of investors, you have to have a way to maintain those relationships and create a good experience for them.
They need to have a good experience in order to invest with you. That’s part of being a professional.
All of this can take a lot of time.
Dealing with investors and doing something five times is significantly different than doing something 50 times. Any small little task is compounded.
In the early days, we did everything manually,. If we were to do it again, we would sign up with an investor portal, and that’s our advice to any syndicator.
We wouldn’t wait until we had 50 investors.
It used to be that there was maybe one investor portal out there and it was super expensive. That’s what we started to use. About three years ago, several startups came along with investment portals that were really good, much better than the established players who’d been around for a long time, and more affordable.
If you’re in the market for investor portal, we recommend Cash Flow Portal. You can find out more about that right here. You'll find more information about about the CEO Perry Zheng and his company.
It's critical that you make the right choice early on because switching later on is difficult. So, If you’ve done your first deal and you’re ready to scale your portfolio, look into Cash Flow Portal. We think it will be a huge help.