Two things that really suck in business

Sales is really hard for most of us.

From my experience, it’s not as much about the act of selling itself, it’s more about dealing with rejection. Because the reality is, if you’re doing a lot of selling, you’re getting a lot of “no’s”. It’s just the nature of it.

Over time you get better at selling and also at dealing with the rejection, but that doesn’t mean you don’t feel it here and there.

Want to know what’s even harder than selling and has a lot more rejection, from my experience?

Fundraising.

I’ve fundraised for my tech startup, Visto, 3 times over the last 6 years, and I don’t plan on doing it again if I don’t have to. If you’ve ever fundraised for a company, maybe you can relate.

The reason why fundraising sucks way more is because you typically have an even lower success rate than selling (unless you started the next Facebook) and because it’s a lot more subjective, in my opinion.

In sales, it’s usually about understanding the prospects needs and pain points, and showing them how you can solve their problem, and offering it at a fair price (among other things). But if you can do that well, you’re in a good spot and will get your fair share of wins.

Fundraising is semi-similar in that you are still selling (yourself, your company, your mission, etc.), but the investor doesn’t have a burning desire/problem that investing in your company will solve. They also might just make their decision on a hunch, “feeling”, or something else.

It’s just a lower conversion rate overall and in many cases, for reasons entirely out of your control.

Now why am I talking about fundraising, especially since I’m not fundraising?

Well, I just finished re-reading a book called “What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence” by Stephen A. Schwarzman, and near the beginning of the book he describes in great detail the experience of trying to raise his first private equity fund.

Spoiler: it starts off really, really bad.

And while the overlap between his experience and my experience ends at “it was really hard”, because he was raising vastly larger amounts of money from far more sophisticated investors, I couldn’t help but be drawn into his story.

How he started his career in finance, worked his way up, started his own fund, raised crazy amounts of money and built a massive company that does M&A, private equity, real estate investing and more.

I don’t live or work at the scale he does, but it’s interesting to read about how a lot of the ups and downs are very similar. It also makes me think - and this is part of the advice from his book - that you might as well go big, if you’re going to do something at all.

Because if things are just as hard/stressful for a smaller business, might as well go as big as possible to get more upside for similar stress, right?

Anyway, if you’re at all interested in memoirs from entrepreneurs, business, private equity, or just an interesting story about a super successful businessman, I’d recommend it.

And if you’ve read it or decide to, let me know what you think.

Have a great day,

Josh Schachnow

Canadian lawyer, CEO at Visto.ai

Who I can help:

1. Anyone with Canadian immigration needs, hit “reply” to see if I can help.

2. If you’re trying to learn the basics of AI and how I’m able get way more done in less time, check out my course on how to build custom GPTs here;

3. Immigration law firms in Canada looking to prepare immigration applications faster than ever before, check out Visto here;

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