Polo Leteka says “when you run a business such as a fund management business, you are asking people who don’t really know you to trust you with their money and that’s not easy and these are our primary clients and the secondary clients are the ones that we invest in. The primary clients are the investors that write out the big cheques, so you have to go there, know your story and have done your research and demonstrate that you know what you are talking about and convince them that they can trust you with their money and that you will give them a return and that takes a long time.
It took us 24 months to raise our funds from the time of leaving my job and came up with the business plan for the business and going into the market and spoke with a lot of people. Those market engagements helped us understand better what it is that our clients which are our investors are looking for, so we kept on going back to our business plan and refining it to speak specifically to what it is that they see as an opportunity or as a problem that they are trying to solve. This meant we had to have thick skin and we had to persevere and we had to believe in what we were talking about in order for us to stay in the market for so long to get our very first cheques from investors. Even when we did get our very first investor on board which was not easy, it still took some time for other investors to come on board because we didn’t have a track record