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đź’° This Venture Capital King Drives BILLIONS In Revenue!
Learn how Carl Grant mastered the art of blending business success with purpose and fulfillment and helps businesses scale to incredible heights.
School of Hard Knocks
January 09, 2025
What’s good, Hard Knocks Community?💰
Ready for the latest edition of the School of Hard Knocks Newsletter? Today, the spotlight is on powerhouse entrepreneur Carl Grant. Carl is the CEO of Connexa Partners and the best-selling author of How to Live the Abundant Life. With decades of experience driving billions in revenue, Carl has mastered the art of blending business success with purpose and fulfillment. His proven strategies and faith-driven insights have helped leaders and businesses scale to incredible heights.
Today’s Schedule
Living the Abundant Life through Venture Capital: How Carl Grant mastered the art of blending business success with purpose and fulfillment.
From the Hard Knocks Library: The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can't Stop Talking About
In Case You Missed It: James Dumoulin breaks down the biggest lessons learned from interviewing over 1,000 millionaires and billionaires.
Let’s get into it!🔥
Living the Abundant Life through Venture Capital
Carl Grant has been an entrepreneur many times over. He's a pioneer in professional services business development with over 25 years of market-facing experience.
Throughout his career, Carl was considered a trusted advisor to CEOs and a "super connector" who would make high-impact introductions to investors, partners, customers, and key hires.
Carl began his career journey as a member of the U.S. Army. During his time in service, he achieved the rank of Major as an Airborne Infantry officer.
When Carl was in graduate school, he studied venture capital. In the mid-90s, he took a job at a venture fund as the manager of the capital attraction program for Fairfax County, Virginia. At the time, the internet was just getting started and was part of a government defense project known as DARPA.
Northern Virginia was the hub for the internet and Carl was tasked to keep companies there instead of moving to places like Silicon Valley and Boston. In the two years he was in that role, Carl doubled the number of venture funds in Fairfax County, which put him on the map.
From there, Carl was recruited by PricewaterhouseCoopers to be their first business development hire. Although his job was to grow the accounting practice, the real activity was connecting companies with sources of capital. After spending time at PwC, Carl joined New Enterprise Associates (NEA), one of the most successful venture funds in the country.
When one of the NEA partners was leaving to start her own fund, she asked Carl if he wanted to be a limited partner investor and he accepted the offer. This was Carl's first exposure to putting his own money into something and he's been involved in venture capital ever since.
On the service provider side, Carl spent 20 years working for Cooley, LLP as their global head of business development. In that role, Carl grew the firm from $310 million to over $2 billion in revenue.
Today, Carl is the CEO of Connexa Partners and the Co-Founder and President of the SaaS-based private capital platform Capital Raise.
On a recent live call and Q&A inside the School of Mentors community, Carl shared a ton of practical wisdom for today's entrepreneurs. Let's look at some of the top takeaways:
From Friendship to Funding
Many entrepreneurs are uncomfortable with the thought of raising capital or pursuing private lenders. Even at his level of experience and success, Carl says it never gets comfortable. Instead of waiting for when you'll feel ready, he advises to get out there and develop networks within the investor community.
You want to approach these relationships from a "getting to know you" perspective. Don't start the connection off by asking for money. When Carl moved to Austin, he didn't know anyone. He started hosting networking events on boats where everyone was there just to have a good time. Now, some of those people are Carl's most valuable business connections and trusted friends.
In entrepreneurship, relationships make the world go 'round. To build your network, play the long game and really get to know people. When you establish trust and true friendship, your network becomes a natural place to ask people for help and funding for your next project.
The Winning Formula
One of the key drivers of success in business is how much value you provide to your customers. Carl says if you can figure out how to solve a problem one time for one person and that solution can also be sold to other individuals or businesses, you've got yourself a scalable business.
When you're working through ideas, ask yourself if what you're offering is both valuable and repeatable. Once you figure this out, you can take your solution and sell it many times over.
Not sure where to start? Begin by evaluating your current skills and determining the problems you can solve with them. Next, pinpoint the biggest pain point of your ideal audience. Finally, channel your time and effort into developing a unique solution that distinguishes you from the competition.
Scaling to Sell
When working to scale your business for an eventual successful exit, Carl reminds entrepreneurs that anytime you scale, things get harder to manage. When you grow your teams, you also have to clone yourself in the form of managers and put others in charge.
Spend time creating standard operating procedures (SOPs) and proper training programs so your managers are set up for success. Measure performance on a regular basis, hold people accountable, and make changes when people aren't performing up to standards.
When you let others run the show, you're in a better position to make a smooth exit and transition into your next big venture. Make sure to create the right company culture, give your teams what they need to succeed, and be transparent about your vision.
Bouncing Back
Throughout his career, Carl experienced times where he gambled on an investment and lost. He says you have to lose money to make money and have faith that you'll always recover.
During the banking crisis, Carl lost his first $50K, which took him 11 years to save. The loss was painful, but he's since made it back many times over.
As an entrepreneur, you'll inevitably lose money on a bad deal or investment. You can either choose to focus on your losses, or you can look at it as a lesson and keep going. It's all about keeping your mind set on your bigger goals. Allow for missteps along the way, let them teach you the lessons they hold, and stay the course.
Connect with Carl here:
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Words of Wisdom
“The best early-stage venture capital investments appear obvious in retrospect; however, very few of them are actually obvious when you make them.”
In Case You Missed It
Meet the kid who interviews billionaires for a living - James Dumoulin! James has interviewed over 1000 millionaires and billionaires and in our most recent video, he broke down the biggest lessons that he has learned from meeting the world’s most successful entrepreneurs and business professionals. This video is filled with gems from some of the worlds brightest, click below to watch!
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