To request investment, we need to present the details easy to understand

  • Name of the project
  • Duration
  • Potential buyer of the solution
  • Potential sales or licensing cost
  • Industry or Department
  • Responsible owner for the project
  • Investor
  • Project Manager

  • Financial reference number (for accounting purpose)

Executive Summary

  • value proposition – that is, a short statement that conveys information about your target customer, their problem, your proposed solution, and the benefits your solution offers to the customer and the investor.
  • What are we going to do with the money received?
  • Why are we doing it?
  • What if we don’t do it?
  • What are the risk if the investiment delayed?
  • What are the potential events that could risk the investment?
  • What is in it for the investor?

Risk & Mitigation

  • Finance Details

  • How the investment will be splitted to spend
    • Salary
    • Contractor fee
    • Infrastructure fee
    • Licensing fee
    • Marketing & Sales
    • Travel & Expense

Notes:

  • BUY - CAPEX

  • LEASE - OPEX

  • Differntiate the Capital and Operational fund

    • Depreciation

Decision makers view

  • Benefits
  • Opex
  • Capex

Differnce between CAPEX vs OPEX

Best Practices

  • Research the market and competition
  • Gather information about investors or supporters
  • Show financial references (from last year, from similar projects etc) for investor to make decision.

Investor types

  • Angel investors
    • fund for partnership or stock.
    • could help with their platform/skills and mentor
  • Banks
  • Venture capital firms
    • Just money and focus on ROI.
  • Corporate investors
    • Big company wants to explore new way of doing business.

  • Peer to Peer and personal investors

Research the investors

  • What is their focus?
  • What they want to explore?
  • What are recent rejections and why?
  • What are recent approvals and why?
  • Public information or commitments to the community/customer.
  • What is their vision/goal for the near term?

Challenging Investment Requests

  • Maintenanance
  • Quality Assurance
  • Security
  • Insurance
  • Audit Process
  • Certification
  • Compliance

Data gathering tips for above investment types

  • Cost of repeated work - from time tracking tool.
  • Cost of poor quality solutions and support - from ITSM tool.
  • Number of failures in audit and effort spent to detect in the past - from ITSM and incident management team.
  • Reference of missing insurance and impact faced - adhoc budget request or running over budget.
  • Reference of industry failures of not having enough security and compliance measure - blogs.
  • Rate of winning customer projects (bids) while having certification from industry or reports from reputable research team (ex: Gartner)

References

  • https://djangostars.com/blog/writing-investment-proposal/