Pre Fund Raise Considerations for Traditional Search

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November 19, 2024

by a searcher from La Salle University in Philadelphia, PA, USA

Hello everyone-


I am starting the process of a traditional partners search, we are looking for some insights for budgeting so we know the amount to raise and make sure we can justify it to investors. We know we have two salaries for two years about 400k, we’re planning on getting coworking space about 25k, legal fees 10k, we don’t know what other large or small items to consider. assuming zoom info or a sales discovery system, also probably need a CRM system, likely need travel to see potential deals, etc… What should we be considering and what are their approximate costs so we can budget into our fund raise. Anything you wish you would have considered but didn’t? Thanks for all the help!

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Reply by a searcher
from Harvard University in Jeddah Saudi Arabia
Not sure if the $10K legal fees considers due diligence and lost deal fees, but the numbers I found and learned from existing searchers ranged between $110-$170, and some even went higher. Here are some of the things I am discovering that I will need in my search: website design and development, website and email domain, bulk email system, CRM (i am using pipedrive), LinkedIn Sale Navigator (I am doing my search in Saudi and LinkedIn is a helpful tool in finding leads). For travel, it depends heavily on your search strategy. If you are doing region-focused search, you will probably on the lower end of a budget. If you are doing search across states, I would budget higher for that (also remember travel miles can also help, in case you under budget for that). Since I was one of the very first searchers in my region, I asked individuals in my field about their expenses and did a benchmark with that. In your case, I would benchmark with individuals in my region and others with similar search strategies.
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Reply by a searcher
from The University of Chicago in Miami, FL, USA
This is a two step exercise. First is understanding where does the market currently stand, IE., how much have other searchers in the same region been budgeting. Objective here will be to have an overall range which is consistent with what investors have been funding. Second is defining what your outreach strategy will be like and consider that for the other items. For example, if you plan to travel a lot to conferences, then you should budget accordingly. If you intent to have a high volume strategy, you will need software, tools and interns to do do it. Stanford study usually has good information about this too, but US I've seen around $500 - $550k for solo searcher.
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