How do you ask for a million dollars?

IMAGINE the scene: clammy hands and a butterflies-filled stomach. Why? Because you’re about to hit someone up for a million dollars. Two young guys reveal what it’s like.

IT REQUIRES quite a bit of gumption to go up to someone and ask for a million dollars. To just, figuratively, hold out your hand and say “Please sir, I want some more”.

But rather than some dreary Dickensian tale, it’s a reality faced by a group of people every day. That group of people is entrepreneurs.

Yes, entrepreneurs. Those starry-eyed, sleep-deprived and enthusiastic folk who have created a raft of innovations we all enjoy. But the landscape is also littered with even more of those have suffered crushing setbacks that are far less publicised. But what’s one of the most crucial things successful ones have been able to do?

Put their hands out and ask for money.

Unless you happen to be insanely lucky and born into a generous family worth a fair mint, every entrepreneur has to go through the merry dance of asking investors for moolah. To sell their product and persuade the intimidating people on the other side of the table to believe in you as much as you believe in yourself.

Young guns Nick van den Berg and Al Bentley know just what it’s like the have the butterflies fluttering. The pair has just gone live with their investing platform, Simply Wall St. But to get to that stage, they’ve had to front up a lot of moneyed people to claim their share.

“It’s nerve-racking, no matter how many times you go up there,” Mr van den Berg said. “You put yourself on the line. You’ve tested things, you’ve talked to consumers and everyone seems to love it.

“But when you go up there and tell them that everyone loves it so they should pony up the cash, it’s intense. The questions these investors throw at you, and they don’t hold back. So it’s a baptism of fire. To see what makes you tick.”

Mr Bentley said that to prepare, the duo try and pre-empt every question they’re going to get. He said: “We try and think of every question. The more meetings we take, the more investors you’ve met and the more questions you’ve had before, the better.

Al Bentley and Nick van den Berg use 80s music to psych themselves up.

“The first pitches we had, we would come out of them and just be ‘whoa, we need to answer that better’. But it’s just practice. It’s better to pre-empt things than to try and leave a hole. For example, if you have a big competitor, it’s better to mention that upfront than to try and hide the fact that there’s someone else doing the same thing.”

Mr van den Berg likens these money pitches to job interviews: “It’s like that first job you ever go for. It’s really stressful and you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. But you go along with it.”

But his partner, Mr Bentley said it’s more like dating. “You meet these people and you try to impress them and you’re thinking, ‘are they going to call back?!’”.

The first time Simply Wall St had to pitch saw Mr Bentley flying across the country from Perth to Sydney to do it. He was presenting to AWI, an accelerator program for finance-focused start-ups.

“It was pretty intense because I had to pitch to eight people,” he said. “It was a bit like Dragon’s Den and I’d never pitched properly before. We practised a lot and we were pretty confident. The thing is it’s not like to zero to suddenly pitching to investors. We’d been working on it for a year — to our family and friends — so we knew our stuff. Once you know your stuff, you shouldn’t be too scared.”

He said that if you’re not comfortable asking for money or selling stuff to me, as many people aren’t, you’ll have to get over it. “You take money off people for a service. People feel bad about it but I think you have to get over it pretty early on. And if you don’t believe in yourself, or if someone asks how much is your business worth but you aren’t able to explain it, then you have no hope.”

Mr Bentley’s best presenting tip: Think in single sentences. “If you don’t know what to say, just don’t say anything. Silence is powerful.”

For Mr Bentley and Mr van den Berg, it’s not all serious prep work before the million-dollar pitch meetings. Asked if they have a psych-up routine, they both respond, without hesitation: “80s music”.

The pair won’t nominate exactly which 80s pop anthems get the blood pumping, except to say that it’s not ‘Eye of the Tiger’.