After our meeting at Burrell last Thursday we setup a conference call with an old colleague from college.  He had been asking us about the business and has been interested in investing, but we weren’t quite ready to bring private equity into the picture until recently.  I believe that you always want to have all your ducks in a row before starting to consume money from private parties.  Motown’s ducks are lined up and walking single file, so we finally made the call.

One tip for those who plan to do investor business over the phone, make sure you have a good phone in hand.  I love my phone, but had it not been for the fact that my partner and I were conference calling right across from each other, we may have lost the call.  After the call began, things were going great but my phone battery died in the middle of a sentence.  This happened to take place while I was explaining the basis of the Motown Initiative.  I quickly reached across for my partner’s phone and politically informed the party on the other end that my partner had to step out for a moment.  After about 3 minutes of talking, the potential investor simply said “you know, my decision was made before we spoke today, but I wanted to hear more about the project from you guys, you have confirmed my intuition, how can I transfer money”.   My mouth kinda dropped, I can’t lie.  I always heard that investors making their decisions off the bat, but I had never experienced it first hand.  All the work on the pitch deck and executive summary had paid off.  Someone gets it!

Yes folks, we have our first private investor and from the sounds of it, there may be a couple more on the way.  This was just the confidence booster I needed to get back on my feet to find more private funding while we await final decision from large VCs.