Do you want to obtain non-dilutive funding and are looking for options? Funding consultancies can support companies in the search for funding. These are the options that you must take into account:
1. DIY (Do It Yourself). Lots of work, limited chances of success unless you spend time investigating and understanding the evaluation criteria in depth. Be careful with free advisors (eg. Paid by government bodies) as they tend to be over optimistic with your chances and are usually too encouraging. They are useful but because they don’t have skin on the game, they are usually too soft and struggle to put all the issues of your proposal in front of you. Usually the only option for small grants. You can today use GenAI to help you in the process!
2. Freelance grant writers. A very good and cost-effective option when your company has all the other aspects covered (eg. Commercial strategy, project management and planning, IP, finance…). Not many freelance writers will have all these skills.
3. No-win no-pay proposal factories. These are a good option when you believe your chances are low, or when you don’t have any budget! Some of them provide limited support and focus on preparing a first proposal draft and coordinating the submission. Most of them employ a horde of junior consultants. There is also the risk that if you win the grant you may not be able to pay the fees (10-15%) and you’ll face even more penalties. These companies work as finance partners. They finance the effort to be done and follow a ‘portfolio approach’ meaning they know 1 out of 10s or 100s will be funded and will allow them to pay for all the unsuccessful. That’s why success fees are so high.
4. Senior consultants. Smaller and specialised consultancies who carefully select the cases and advise you not to do it unless your chances are very high. With a very limited bandwidth for proposals, they need to carefully select their customers. Most can’t or are not willing to work under a no-win no-pay fee structure since they don’t have enough critical mass, ie., if a consultant does 2 proposals for a call with 5% chance, both may fail but she will still need to pay her mortgage.
Also, if you hire senior consultants you will get advice that will go beyond the grant: how to improve the development plan, the value proposition, the team, the regulatory roadmap, intelectual property, the cap table… in the end a very cost effective solution for obtaining access to business consultants and experts.
This article was first published on LinkedIn by David Arias.
Image by hartono subagio from Pixabay
