1. Building the material and doing the outreach
We started with the story. Compass talked about itself as software for community lenders, but investors needed to hear the market behind it. Small businesses cannot get credit, local lenders already have the relationships to reach them, and Compass is the layer that lets banks lend through those lenders. We rebuilt the pitch around that, and built a three-year financial model with every assumption written out, so an investor could see where each number came from.
Then we took it to market. We screened the investors active across the region, cut the list down to the firms whose mandates actually fit, sorted those into tiers and approached them in batches rather than all at once. We set up the calls, joined them and followed up after each one. That gave the founders one clear story to tell and a pipeline they could actually see.
2. Supporting diligence and answering investor questions
As investors moved past the first call, we handled the diligence with them. We opened data rooms, worked through their question lists and kept the follow-ups moving as firms took the business further into their own process. We kept one FAQ behind all of it, so when a different firm asked the same question weeks later, the answer was already agreed and the same one we had given before.
That kept the answers consistent across a lot of conversations at once, and saved the founders from starting over each time. It also showed us something they could not see from inside a single meeting. The questions kept repeating. Firm after firm liked the market and the model, and then hesitated in the same place, which told us what investors wanted to see before they would commit.
