Ask yourself this question: could you use an extra $100 million or more in income this year?

If your answer is "yes," you should start a hedge fund.

Before you rush off to Wall Street, let me suggest:

1. Stick to what you know.
2. Close the deals right in front of you.

And you might say to me, Closing deals is not as easy as you think. Buyers and investors in my industry are too darn slow to make decisions.

I agree, it's frustrating. When the buyers stall, it’s a real pain in the eyeball.
 
Who's to blame? We all are. Today, buyers know that if they wait a little longer, there will soon be a better version, or the price will go down.

Time is the enemy of all deals.

If you want to be the person your company can rely on to close deals, then you need to understand a concept that investment bankers call deal control.

When you have deal control, you know when a buyer is going to sign the agreement, you know what he's going to pay, and on what terms.

Sellers who have great deal control are not waiting for buyers to evaluate proposals.
 
They are telling buyers when they're allowed to buy.

And how much they have to pay, and when they have to accept delivery.

Here's a quick example to get your mind thinking about it: A private equity group in San Francisco had been stalling me out for over a month, claiming they were still interested in the deal and asking me to "provide a customer analysis," and that they needed "more time to review the financials." I let them know:

1. They had been taking four weeks to make a decision that usually takes professional investors only two weeks.

2. This long decision period was making me concerned about them. If they couldn't get their act together and meet industry standards, it would scare us away. This framed us as being "normal" and them as being "not-normal."

3. As a matter of preference, we don't want to work with a low-quality firm. So I asked, was this slow decision making process a sign of other quality problems that we would find out about later?

I won't say this alone closed the deal, but it was a professional way to get deal control, and it made them wake up and pay a lot of attention to us.

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