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Welcome back to the fuel your legacy podcast. Each week we expose the faulty foundational mindsets of the past and rebuild a newer, stronger foundation essential in creating your meaningful legacy. We've got a lot of work to do. So let's get started.
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As much as you like this podcast, I'm certain that you're going to love the book that I just released on Amazon, fuel your legacy, the nine pillars to build a meaningful legacy. I wrote this to share with you the experiences that I had while I was identifying my identity, how I began to create my meaningful legacy and how you can create yours. You're gonna find this book on Kindle, Amazon and as always on my website, Sam Knickerbocker calm.
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Welcome back to fuel your legacy this week. We have another guest from England man I just love We are criss crossing the globe with our guests here but Julie Barbara, she is the CEO and founder of spark
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consulting. She's a specialist in preparing startup investment companies
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really to go get investors really to get started. And that's one of the main concerns a lot of entrepreneurs is how do we fund our dreams? How do we fund this thing we believe is going to be the next big thing. And so in that tune, she authored her first book. Are you investor ready, and it's going to be coming out in the spring of 2020. Depending on the month, it may already be out here, which is exciting. I don't know exactly. When your books coming out. Maybe you don't either. Well, I had to have
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I released the book and so I know how that happens. Sometimes you think, Oh, it's gonna come out this month, and then it's the next month and then the next month, so I totally get it. I'm sure my listeners have been like, oh, when Sam's book coming out again. When's it coming out again? Well, what's gonna be Christmas? I don't think we're gonna have it ready by Christmas.
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And so yes, it's always an interesting thing. But that's how authorship goes making sure it's ready for the public. So go ahead and
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Julian let us know kind of where you came from why you You're so passionate about helping other people get their dreams out to the world and and make those dreams become a reality show. Um, so my, my career has really been
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20 years in large corporate financial services, working across consultancy regulators, banks,
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and doing a mix of
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strategy work and
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delivering big change across big organizations, and also working in innovation. So helping those organizations to change how they act and the way that they do things for the better hopefully.
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And that
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I guess I've been an organizer since I was kid
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I've always been a list maker and an organizer. And I've always loved
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change, positive change. Since I was a since I was a child as well. So my favorite books even when I was
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reading the children's classics when I was six, and seven and eight were things like the children of the New Forest, which was all about children who had transplanted from the life that they knew and dropped down somewhere else where they had to make a new, a new life for themselves and, and that always captured my attention, that kind of newness and that possibility for for change. And so through my whole career,
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that's kind of always been something that's, that's present in in all the roles that I've had.
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And then kind of towards the end of that 20 years in large court
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I'd got married, I'd had my son who's now four and a half. And I really started to hit the point where
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the standard corporate life wasn't feeling like it fitted anymore. And when with the lifestyle that we wanted, I wanted the flexibility to be around for my family when I need to. And 25 days of standard holiday doesn't really allow that to happen.
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And also, standard hours standard needing to be in the office, a set number of days a week, all of those things. Were starting to feel pretty constricting.
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And then alongside that, where I was doing innovation work in some of these large corporates, some of that involved being on panels were a startup company.
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came in and pitched to these large corporates for either investment as a as a corporate venture capitalist or,
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or for corporate sales. So they were trying to sell whatever they, whatever their service or product was to the, to the large corporate.
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And I was getting increasingly frustrated because I was seeing them have this amazing opportunity in front of massive global organization. And they've got that far. And then they would fall on their face, because they weren't ready. They didn't understand enough who they were talking to, they weren't aware enough of what that audience would worry about. And so that, you know, really hampered them and, and really prevented the large majority of them from progressing, which, when you've managed to get to that point where we're a large, a large global corporate has said come
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And and talk to us to then mess up at that point is is awful. And so so that kind of combination of
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getting frustrated at those startups wanting a different lifestyle.
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And a lot of what I've done over those years in that large corporate job,
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involve pitching to corporate boards, and persuading corporate boards to dedicate large amounts of money to various programs and projects and what have you. And so I know I understand what it takes to to reassure people enough to make people feel that what you're asking them to invest in, is important enough will actually achieve what you're saying your will, to make them give you that give you the money and so I decided to
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To kind of test my perceptions, and I went round and started interviewing startups who'd successfully raised investors across the full gamut
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from everything from family offices, angel investors, VCs, crowdfunding platforms. And to find out what they said, was what they looked for, what were the things that worried them? What were the things they wanted to see what were the things that that would make them throw their hands up in disgust and walk away?
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To confirm whether you know that the things that I was looking for were the same things, whether there were commonalities across all of those what the differences were. So and then in doing that, that actually built up into enough content that I decided to turn that into the book which you mentioned, are you investor ready, which will hopefully
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be out in March.
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But we will like you say, see what that release timetable turns out to be. So So that led to me
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launching, launching spark consulting. And so now I get to work with a wide range of startups, everything from Tech to healthcare to food and drink companies, to product manufacturers.
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And I get to work with them and really help them to, like you say, turn their dreams into a reality by helping them achieve the funding that they need. So
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yeah, so it's really exciting for me.
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That is incredible. I think that this is, I kind of alluded to this when I was doing the introduction for her but this is really one of the main concerns of a lot of individuals. It's
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How'd they get funding? I've been through it my time myself at times where
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if you're a certain type of business, and there's no collateral, there's nothing. It's just an idea. No bank is going to give you money. Like there's certain people that are like, how do you get invested in yourself? And there's a book, one of my favorite books, I think, by I believe it's by Brian Tracy. And, and I think it's called the secret of closing a sale. I'm not positive, but he talks about
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the concept of
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every day, you have to think of yourself as a company and you're the CEO of your company, and every day you're attempting to sell other people's stock in your company. And the reason I bring it up and framing it that way is
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as you're saying, Listen to this. You might be a mom sitting at home taking care of two or three kids, you might be a dad who loves his job working as an employee for somebody else. You might be somebody who just isn't really doing much and he might be a teenager or high school student.
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No, but just because you don't have this a company per se to bring to market and go and pitch to somebody, the skills, the things that people are looking for. I'm gonna ask more of these, but I'm guessing they're very similar across the board in many areas of life, not just what I put money there. But you have to think about yourself, if you're single and looking for a spouse,
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you've got to know what they want. You got to do your research. And then once you find that out, you've got to present in a way that that person is going to say, yes, these are the skills of learning how to present are just as incredibly important as what each person needs to see for them to put their trust in you because ultimately, money is just value and doesn't matter if you're in Britain or in Australia or in Africa. It doesn't matter what the monetary exchange is, it's just value and if somebody is going to put value on the line
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For your dream, you've got to make it a persuasive argument.
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Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, definitely. And, and
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it's really, that the really key thing is, is being able to be objective, being able to look at either your company or yourself in and understand how other people would see what you're doing. And and, and be able to understand the things that they would worry about the things that they would want to see.
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And then you can you know, once you know those things, then then you can really figure out how you can a assess where you're at. So has my company
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kind of got ticks in all those boxes are actually other gaps and do we need to do something about that before we go and try and get investment.
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And be then you know, you can make sure that that when you're
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When yo
