An Interview With Marianne Hudson, Executive Director, Angel Capital Association (Part 4)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Could you tell us more about Kauffman’s program FastTrac?

Marianne: FastTrac  has a series of different courses, also taught at lots and lots of different local locations and, I believe, on the Web, on everything from starting a business to how to grow your business with lots of different aspects in there.

So, sometimes they’ve got a course for technology based entrepreneurs. Many of these programs continue over quite a period of time. I believe one of them is, usually, taught three hours per night for 11 weeks. So, entrepreneurs walk out of there either understanding that entrepreneurship is for them or not for them. They walk out with an idea and a business plan and connections for the startup and growth of their businesses.

Irina: Do you know their fee range?

Marianne: I haven’t been in touch with that for four years, so I don’t know.

Irina: What are your personal challenges?

Marianne: There are so many things that we could do. The challenge, I think, is sometimes figuring out what has the most value and making sure we have the resources to get things done.

We will, probably, be building some better resource pages for our folks in the next quarter or so. The other thing is figuring out how to get more and more angels, not because of investment, but because of their entrepreneurial expertise. A lot of them really do enjoy being mentors.

Irina: So, what are your limitations? What would you need to accomplish everything that you’d like to do?

Marianne: Well, it would really be nice to greatly increase our staffing and have the funding to really grow and make a bigger impact on the world.

Our challenge is to keep finding ways to build revenues for our organization. I was taught by the CEO in a previous job that non-profit doesn’t mean not for revenue. You can keep working on ideas to build revenue, but you have to have the time to think through those options.

For example, for the Angel Capital Association, over time, the biggest source of funding is sponsorship, working with corporations and firms that have an interest in working with angel investors and the companies they invest in. For education and research, that’s all about grant funding.

You need the help and support of your whole community, your members, your board of directors, your staff and your partners.

There’re opportunities there to build a balanced opportunity for sponsorship and, certainly, for education revenue and some new ideas we’ll be thinking about.

Irina: What about funding for entrepreneurs? When I interview angels – from different angel groups – one would say, “My deal flow is 2,000 deals a month.” When I ask, “How many do you invest in in a year?” He’d say, “Ten.”

Marianne: That I agree with, but I do think that the majority of angel investing that happens in this country is the kind that doesn’t get reported on and happens because there’s somebody in a medium sized community who does one or two deals per year and comes across three or four deals per year. That’s not surprising at all. If there’re 250,000 angels in this country, I think it’s the vast majority of them [who are making deals unnoticed].

You know, we get calls and e-mails from a lot of entrepreneurs, on a weekly basis. Sometimes, if we’ve been in the press, it could be 100 plus entrepreneurs looking for capital.

I would say the vast majority of them haven’t gotten any information and haven’t gotten the resources and the knowledge to understand that they really need to sit down and figure out what is the right type of financing for them.

So, we have focused on having some basic information about that. I think, over time, what we will probably do is develop a resource bank and recommendations on where to send them. So far, we’ve recommended to go to your university entrepreneurship center or a local business coach, some of them connected with a local business type federal government programs. It would be nice to also recommend them to some private sector programs as well.

Irina: Thank you, Marianne. Great insights.

This segment is part 4 in the series : An Interview With Marianne Hudson, Executive Director, Angel Capital Association
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