Dawson Russell is the Managing Partner and CEO of Capital Raise Agency, a full-service investor acquisition, and creative agency. Capital Raise Agency has helped over 100 clients build their brands and tell their stories to the right audience, specializing in creative storytelling in the realm of JOBS Act raises such as Reg A+, Regulation D, and S.
Dawson is excited about the potential RegA+ is poised to unlock for MedTech companies and believes that the partnership with KoreConX is the perfect fit for his company. We were excited to recently sit down with Dawson Russell to talk to him about his thoughts on the industry and what he is looking forward to in the industry’s future.
Q: Why did you become involved in the industry?
A: This is a part of our story that we always love to tell issuers. This is not an industry that we picked out as a “niche” we were going to market into. We fell into it naturally. I started working with my father’s financial advisory firm for about 16 years. The story goes, I walked in and saw their new marketing materials that were sitting on the conference room table and said, “this is awful.” I didn’t realize they had just dropped a lot of their marketing budget on these new “updated” materials. So my father and his business partner looked at each other and said, “well, fix it then.”
After other advisors and broker-dealers started to see their design and marketing, the agency snowballed by referral. Over ten years ago, the first Reg D offering reached out to us to help them re-brand and tell their story in the broker-dealer and advisor marketplace. We helped them raise $60 million, and since then, we have helped 100+ clients build their brands and tell their stories to the right audience.
Q: What services does your company provide for Reg A offerings?
A: We are a full-service investor acquisition and creative agency, in that we provide everything from full-scale branding, marketing strategy, audience selection, website design and development, video production, lead generation, social media, email, native ad campaign management, and more. We always tell our issuers that we really want you to see us as the marketing director down the hallway. Even though we are remote, we want it to feel like we are on your team and not just a third-party vendor. If something creative or marketing-related needs to be accomplished, chances are we have done and can do it for our issuers.
Q: What are your unique areas of expertise?
A: I believe the most unique area we bring to the table is our creativity in storytelling. It all comes down to how you can tell your story to your prospects and investors creatively and relatively. So our unique ability comes from meeting with our clients and understanding who they are, what they are doing, and why that is important to the investor, and then putting the creative elements in place to tell that story in a captivating way.
Q: What excites you about this industry?
A: One of the things we love about this industry is how much it feels like all the vendors, from legal to tech, to investor acquisition, to managing broker-dealers, truly feel like we are in this together. It feels more like we are a part of a giant team, all pushing for the same goal; to help our issuers succeed in their journey through the capital raise process.
Q: What opportunities do you see RegA+ unlocking for MedTech companies?
A: While we only have a handful of experience with MedTech companies in this space, we have heard an overwhelming, repetitive theme that venture capital firms take so much of a MedTech company that it leaves the founders with hardly any ownership of what they dreamed up and created in the first place. RegA+ unlocks the potential to keep their company in their hands and build a genuine following and investor distribution channel that they can reach out to repeatedly as they grow and need to continue to raise capital.
Q: How is the partnership with KoreConX the right fit for your company?
A: We love KoreConX because of the ability it gives an issuer to really brand their entire process from start to finish (from lead to investor) as their own. There are no random KoreConX logos that appear through the investment process, and it makes it such a smooth and easy user experience for the investor from the landing page to opt-in to start the investment process.