In addition to being a senior advisor at Battery Point Capital, Brian co-founded Seabrook Partners in January 2011. Prior to Seabrook Partners, he spent five years as a Managing Director and National Head of the Capital Strategies Group at Citigroup and then Morgan Stanley following the sale of Smith Barney by Citigroup to Morgan Stanley. The Capital Strategies Group provided M&A services to middle-market companies in the U.S. During the five years Brian ran the Group, it completed more than 110 transactions with aggregate value exceeding $3 billion.
Brian spent three years at Aether Systems, first as Executive Vice President, Corporate Development and later as President, Enterprise Solutions Division, Aether’s largest operating division. Brian was instrumental in transforming Aether from a 20-person private company with an annual revenue run rate of $1 million into one of the leading wireless data companies in the world with annual revenues in excess of $100 million. He was responsible for managing the company’s acquisitions, joint ventures and public equity and debt offerings.
Brian ran the East Coast Technology Group at Smith Barney in New York where he worked from 1988-1998. Brian began his investment banking career at E.F. Hutton in 1986 and later worked for Robertson, Colman & Stephens in San Francisco.
At Battery Point Capital (BPC), Tim specializes in analyzing company and brand positioning, go-to-market strategies, and digital marketing/sales enablement for all BPC portfolio companies. He also oversees our joint venture with The Inforefinery, a leading lead generation firm.
Tim has over 25 years experience in the public and private capital markets, investment banking and asset management. As an investment banker and capital markets specialist, he has raised more than $10 billion of debt and equity capital for companies in the retail, utility, energy, manufacturing and technology industries.
While a capital markets specialist at Chase, Merrill Lynch, and ABN Amro, Tim specialized in corporate finance advisory, rating agency advisory and capital structure optimization for large public companies like Walmart, International Paper, General Motors, and General Electric. As an adviser at Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo, Tim advised entrepreneurs on growing, improving and selling their businesses.
Jay Wright has over twenty years of experience in finance and public markets. As the Chairman, Chief Executive Officer or Chief Financial Officer of three public companies over the past eleven years, he has structured numerous private and public financing transactions. He also served as Chief Financial Officer for TAMSCO, a privately held government contractor, which he helped sell for $83.5 million in 2003, and was a founding shareholder of Chesapeake Government Technologies, which was acquired by Widepoint Corporation (Amex: WYY) in 2004. He has expertise in all aspects of structuring private placements and in creating exits via mergers and acquisitions and open market sales.
Previously, Mr. Wright worked as an investment banker with Merrill Lynch in New York and a mergers and acquisitions lawyer with Foley & Lardner in Chicago and Skadden, Arps in New York. Mr. Wright received his law degree from the University of Chicago Law School and his Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Georgetown University, summa cum laude, where he also serves as an adjunct finance professor. Mr. Wright is a member of the Illinois state bar and is Series 7, 24 and Series 66 qualified. Mr. Wright is the co-author of Finance and Accounting for Nonfinancial Managers, Sixth Edition (Perseus Books, 2010).
Kevin has over 30 years of investment banking experience. Kevin has worked on a broad range of M&A and corporate finance transactions, both domestic and cross-border, including leveraged buyouts, acquisitions, divestitures, initial public offerings, high yield financing transactions and private capital raises.
As an investment banker at Salomon Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America, Kevin’s clients have included corporations, boards of directors, private equity firms and individual owners. Kevin’s transactions have spanned a large range of industries, including packaging, consumer products, transportation, oil and gas, renewable energy and health care.
Representative clients include International Paper, Sealed Air, Chesapeake, Grief Industries, Kennametal, Plastipack, MeadWestvaco, AGCO, True Brew, Spear Power Systems, H2Bev, Shorty’s, and Saratoga Chips.
Our Process & Resources
Through our in-house marketing platform, Scale Partners, we offer a solution for early stage companies.
Who should apply – The Company must be generating revenue, have an established product/service with a short list of satisfied clients (product-market fit), and the capacity to grow (solid onboarding and CX).
The general commission rates in the market can range dramatically, from as low as 5% to as much as 50%. We look at your revenue model, pricing structure, the lifetime value of the contracts, your close rate history, etc.
We have the right to cancel the contract at anytime after the 3 month commitment period. Generally, if either 1) the close rates are low or 2) the response to our efforts is low (low traffic to our site, low content engagement etc.), we won’t continue our marketing efforts. Prior to terminating our efforts, we always work with the client to improve what we can before terminating our efforts.
The termination fee or buyout fee is designed to reward us for taking on a marketing commitment without any (or minimal) upfront fees. We designed it to be a proxy equity stake. It isn’t actually equity and isn’t reflected as such on your cap table.
In a perfect world, we expect the termination fee to be relevant in only two situations – the company is purchased or the Company decides to move all selling and marketing efforts in-house.
Should you decide to hire your own marketing team at some point, you can end the contract and either pay us the entire termination fee at once, or simply allow us to collect commissions on the clients we produced for the next X years, the X being the termination multiple.
In our experience, it can take anywhere between two weeks and two months to get a marketing website launched and ready for conducting campaigns. This is really a function of the complexity of the product or service and the amount of content creation that is available from the Company at the outset.
We designed this program to require a minimum amount of your time prior to execution. Too many marketing companies foist a new and heavy marketing burden onto companies that simply don’t have the staff and experience to participate. There is a reasonable amount of due diligence that will be required upfront so that we can understand the Company and the content we will need to produce.
If the program works well, clearly we expect the Company to reinvest some of the new revenue and profits into a better marketing and closing effort. This could be more of their own content ideas, better UX or CX software etc.
At the start, we will discuss the right CRM system to use, if you don’t have one. Most CRMs have an API that would allow us to easily pass leads into your CRM system that you can then run through your own selling and onboarding process.
If you don’t have one, we will set one up for you but we will charge a nominal set up fee, depending on which CRM system you choose.
We get a lot of requests for certain resources, software recommendations, lists, platforms etc., to help companies in their capital raising efforts. Below are some of our favorite sites, resources, platforms and some materials to help companies achieve their capital raising objectives. If you have any additional questions about capital investment from Battery Point Capital, get in touch with us via our contact form (here).
Foundersuite Tagline: Foundersuite brings structure, speed and efficiency to fundraising and investor relations.
Our thoughts – if you really want to DIY your process – this platform is the best and most cost effective way to access investor lists, term sheets, formation documents, a CRM for running a capital raise (or sale), a place to host your deck and make it available to investors (you can even track views, etc.). It sure beats a $20-30k subscription to Pitchbook.com or Capital-IQ.
Having spent decades in capital markets at the largest investment banks, we have built our fair share of investor decks. We built a simple template based on the classic Sequoia Capital deck. Feel free to download it.
We also have hundreds of targeted decks laying around, let us know if you need a more industry-specific deck, we will see if we can get you one.
Looking for an experienced partner to initiate and manage your outbound process? We partnered with an experienced digital marketing team in order to scale our clients fast. Whether it’s Email, Social and/or Dark Funnel strategies, this team has been very successful with our clients.
“We are witnessing a decided end to the era where sales reps were the channel; now they are merely a channel to customers. Sales leaders reluctant to acknowledge customers’ digital-first proclivities will be outpaced by competitors delivering significant value through digital- and omnichannel sales models, engaging customers in digitally rich learning and discovery.”
…from your salespeople
…independent online research
…from independent buying groups
…independent offline research
…other
We all know this – In B2B, buyers are doing most (80%+) of their buying research independently, prior to talking to sales. This research is done on your website (if you are lucky), industry publications, social media, tradeshows, peers, etc.
Here is the good news: If your website is set up to allow potential customers to conduct their journey without leaving your site (or minimally), you win.
Clear Positioning
Helpful Content
Helpful Tools
(click to view each example)
Nail the basics:
Mistakes to avoid:
Video Strategy Note: 80% of people say they typically switch freely between online search and YouTube while researching a purchase
How To: Marketing & Tools
“An educated consumer is our best customer” Sy Syms
Positioning