Marketing | Spoke Fund ®

	slkiel	0
	I know this issue is going to be one that we'll hopefully be talking about for years to come, so I figured we'd might as well kick it off. I've met with a few potential spoke fund portfolio managers in the last month and they remind me a lot of myself a year ago. They love investing, they've done well investing their own money over an extended time period, and they want to make this a full-time job. Being a spoke fund manager is great for all of these things... but, I can't emphasize enough how much time you'll have to put in marketing yourself and your business. I was very naive about this a year ago when I started my firm. Great returns aren't enough. In fact, they're essential, but they're only step one. You can't even go to step two without it. Since we don't have an army of brokers out there selling our product, we become portfolio manager/chief salesmen. In essence, we have two very demanding jobs. As much as I wish it was otherwise, I spend more time being a salesman than being a portfolio manager. For prospective spoke funders out there, if you understand this coming in, you'll be miles ahead of where I was, and your business will be much better off for it. All of this being said, let's throw out some marketing successes and failures. I'll kick it off with the following: I'm a part of a somewhat niche LinkedIn group unrelated to investing. One of my portfolios should be attractive to members of this group. I've had some success getting new investors by sending out emails and messages to some of these members and asking them to take a look at my website. It's kind of like a cold call except the recipients are going to look at my LinkedIn profile (hopefully giving me some legitimacy), and then take a look at my firm's website. If they contact me, I'll set up a call, we'll talk about the portfolio, how it's run, etc., and then see if they'll get on board. If not immediate, I'll get them on my email list. I've gotten some new investors this way and the acquisition cost was... free! All it took was some time. One of the nice things about it is that you can target, for example, business owners, or executives, or other folks you think might be particularly interested and able to invest. Looking forward to reading other poster's thoughts, and posting some other ones in the future!
	Sat, Oct 16 '10 at 4:13PM EDT	Post 1 • IP

	calesmith	0
	Yep, I keep coming back to the online channel as the key...the economics of acquiring those new investors at zero cost are just too compelling. Actually been neck deep for a while now in all things online marketing related...search engine optimization, pay-per-click, and local search/maps, too, actually. Been quite the learning experience, and hope to summarize my thoughts there soon.
	Mon, Oct 18 '10 at 1:02AM EDT	Post 2 • IP

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