My boyfriend is in sales, he does capital campaigns for companies that need investors. He's been out of the business for a while and is just getting back into it. He actually has some really solid investment opportunities available (one is a medical device company, FDA approved, brilliant idea, nothing like it on the market, every hospital will start using these disposable items in the operating room eventually because it improves patient care AND cuts down on OR time; one is a limousine manufacturer who survived the downturn while his competition went under, but now he's flooded with orders and needs capital to ramp up production).
The problem he's having is just getting connected back into the kinds of investors who like these types of investments. My social circle consists of people who either don't have money, or are very very conservative/cautious investors. I know there are people out there who like these higher risk/higher return types of investments. If you're one, I'd welcome any suggestions as to how to help him connect back into those circles.
Your BF must have been out for a really really long time to have difficulty getting back into it. Maybe a little due diligence would help.
The bar for being an accredited investor has been slowly eroded by inflation. A high-income earner (or couple) or someone with a million bucks of capital is not as exclusive a club as it used to be.
For example, the Angel Capital Association has hundreds of chapters throughout America. The chapters have screening committees and they'd like to have one or two startups to present at their monthly/quarterly meetings. I've been a member of Hawaii Angels for over five years and we rarely engage with capital-campaign reps these days because it's easier to network online (through ACA's Gust.com) with other angel investors and startups. The startups tend to be of higher quality, too, although Gust gets more than its fair share of spam pitches. I can think of a half-dozen "fundraising guys" who have pitched their deals to the screening committee, but I can't remember even presenting any of them to the members.
Angellist (
https://angel.co/ ) has greatly leveled the playing field between angels and startups. In fact it may render the field of "capital campaigns" irrelevant. TheFunded.com and Venture Hacks do a similar job of helping entrepreneurs find investors.
YCombinator and TechStars accelerators have further helped entrepreneurs educate themselves on startups and raising funds. Your BF could connect with local programs to see how he could help or how he could contact their investor members. Ideally he'd have something to contribute to the training or the mentoring before making his own pitch.
Frankly, if these startups are so good then they should be capable of obtaining funding without sales services. Hawaii Angels sees about a dozen medical devices a year and selects maybe one or two for further due diligence. That's on an island thousands of miles from Silicon Valley or Boston or Houston or any other hotbeds of medical-device development, so I suspect that good med tech startups are pretty common on the Mainland. Maybe the due diligence will help them break out from the pack, but if they could break out of the pack then they wouldn't need someone to run a capital campaign for them.
Manufacturing is a different issue. While the limos may be a great product, there's not necessarily a big payoff for an angel investor. But again if the limos are so good then they'd hypothetically be able to tap into capital through more conventional methods. The due diligence starts to splutter when you hear "Well, you see, they have some issues with traditional financing because..." And if the limo company hasn't considered KickStarter then it needs to do some more due diligence of its own.
Entrepreneurs are rightfully cautious about using capital campaigns because they tend to connect startups to isolated angels who invest without benefit of the support structure of a group or an accelerator or an incubator. Heck, these angels might only rely on your BF's due diligence for their decision. They may be known as "dumb money" because they offer funds without any other skills or support or connections. These are the types of investors who turn into problem investors when the company needs another funding round or has business problems. Entrepreneurs would much rather tap into angel investors who are business execs or tech gurus or even cleantech activists.
Finally I'd suggest that your BF consult this Google Doc (
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aj1vUsSJW6-5dEFJelFrVFJnalhzUldLNEdnUDdHSnc#gid=0 ) of entrepreneur resources linked from this post:
http://the-military-guide.com/2013/07/25/entrepreneur-resources-for-veterans/ Surely something in there is in his local area, and the staff might be able to help him connect with the investors who are supporting those activities.