Myth #6: It costs too much to be an investor

Finding deals yourself; conducting your own diligence; negotiating a deal; paying attorneys to create a suite of transaction documents; paying accountants for tax returns each year; chasing management teams to provide the information to monitor your investments; finding ways to assist your companies to grow; and figuring out how to get your investment back again. The cost of that in terms of time and capital is high. So, yes, it can be expensive to be an angel investor.

In VentureSouth, we do all this centrally, and define the price for it. The time commitment from members then becomes a couple of hours a month for meetings (for active members) or zero (for passive fund investors). The cost is the annual membership fee or fund management fee (for the deal flow, diligence, negotiation, and administration) and carried interest (for monitoring, assistance, and exit). You can learn more about our costs here, here, and here.

Doing this for over 200 people leads to significant economies of scale, as you can guess. (One deal for 60 people is obviously much less cost than 60 separate deals would be.)

Is it expensive? It depends on your perspective. Consider our most recent fund, the VentureSouth Angel Fund II. The management fee is 2% of capital per year – not dissimilar from an actively managed ETF expense ratio, and identical to the typical private equity or venture capital fund’s management fee. (The “2” in the “2/20” structure.) The carry is 10% – half the usual “20%”.  

Then factor on top the value from being part of a group – the networking from being part of a group of business and community leaders, the intellectual challenge of evaluating companies, the satisfaction from helping entrepreneurs realize their dreams, education opportunities, and free food at meetings – and the membership fee seems pretty reasonable.

Categories