Smart Money
Speaker

Steinbeis
Christian, for a long time you and your team have been dedicating a lot of energy and time to young fast growing companies and "Smart Money". What is "Smart Money" about?
Christian
"Smart Money" basically consists of two elements. Venture capital starting at 1 EUR Million per company and supporting the company in the area of business development / sales, both strategically and operatively.
Steinbeis
Why is this combination of support so important for young fast growing companies?
Christian
This basically echoes a saying from football: "Money alone does not score goals". You need a well functioning team and strikers who score goals. For most companies fresh capital and sales are the two most important limiting factors. This is exactly where we help.
Steinbeis
What are you paying attention to in this respect?
Christian
Most of the companies we are working together with have realised proof of concept and they already have first customers. They are in the midst of the next level of growth and they are in need to finance it and they need to accelerate their sales activities. Often we find that the founders are the best sales people of their own product. But it is paramount that the sales successes are reproduced and broadened. This is what needs to be developed, implemented and executed to lift the sales and the organization to the next level.
Steinbeis
Can you give us some more insights?
Christian
This very much depends on the company and their services and products. From implementing sales strategies, cold calling campaigns and wining new key account customers, it often is a mix of actions. Recently we acquired a number of new key customers for one of our companies and we are supporting them to leverage the potential of their new B2B customers.
Steinbeis
How important are your exisiting networks?
Christian
We have direct access to more then 300 owner led and stock-listed companies in the German speaking DACH region (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) on CEO/CFO level. This is very helpful, because we make use of a top down approach enabling us to find and realize sales potential and cooperation potential in a very efficient way. Parallel we generate leads outside of our existing network for the companies.
Steinbeis
Let us come back once more to finances, financing volumes, investment criteria, process and your geographic focus?
Christian
We focus very much on late series A, B , C with financing volumes ranging from EUR 1- 20 million per company. The most important investment criteria are "TTS": Team, Technology and Scalability. The whole investment process takes 2-3 months and consists of three phases: 1. Analysis of investment material 2. Investors' meetings with our financial sponsors 3. Closing and payment of the funds. We have a clear preference for European companies from all sectors.