By Lisa Canning

None that we have met.

The desire by Mexican SMEs for more capital to grow their ventures into global businesses is a common headline and recently confirmed by Deloitte in their 2015 Mexico Competitiveness Report.   

While crowd solutions are viewed by some as an innovation, according to the University of Cambridge over $156B in capital has been raised for business in 2015 alone.  Anhuac and AFICO are not going to let $156B of crowd investment and customers go elsewhere when Mexican SMEs are ready to supply global markets.

Thanks to the University of Anhuac and AFICO.org, with funding support from Inter-American Development Bank and NAFINSA, proactive steps are being taken to learn how to source crowd capital and customers.  On July 12-13^th, 2016 the second CrowdFunding workshop was held in Mexico City for Mexican entrepreneurs, investors, and ecosystem support organizations, led by Crowdfund Capital Advisors (CCA); the pioneers and global leaders of crowd solutions.

CCA and their education partner IAEOU delivered a practical working session that revealed how ventures can raise capital for investors in Mexico and globally that they will never meet face2face, using proven crowd methods.  The founders of CCA are the authors of Crowdfund Investing for Dummies and a predictive credit scoring tool to help investors and ventures connect, for capital.

Jason and Woodie (short for Sherwood) of CCA shared with workshop participants:

• A diagnostic for entrepreneurs on their readiness for launching a crowd campaign
• How entrepreneurs should select a crowd platform to achieve their objectives
• Investors were shown examples of successful and unsuccessful campaigns and learned techniques for screening venture proposals
• Essential elements of a crowdfunding campaign
• How to produce a video that engages investors and customers
• Lessons learned from both successful and unsuccessful campaigns
• Campaign waves: first wave (people you know), middle wave (pioneers), last wave (followers)

Feedback from participants included:

• 94% found CCA explained the range of crowd solutions VERY helpful
• Storytelling was key ingredient of ALL successful campaigns
• Support for entrepreneurship and SMEs was refreshing but limited to a few progressive regions – big request was to build entrepreneurship education into high school, university, vocation and skilling for those 30+
• Having CCA & IAEOU helped frame the roadmap for achieving IADB targets
• Participants sharing that their awareness of crowd mechanics PRIOR to workshop was limited  with a wide range of participant’ awareness, only a few participants had actively been involved in crowd campaign, and a handful had made purchases or invested using crowd platforms
• Participants encouraged the University of Anáhuac and AFICO to continue with regular workshops, webinars (thanks IAEOU/CCA) and promoting Mexican crowd platforms and success stories

While the feedback was overwhelmingly supportive of the workshop, the participants unanimously agreed that a campaign of education, awareness and crowd support was needed.