{{first_name}}, I was 35 years old when I learned that Cold Stone Creamery’s “Cold Stone” was actually a freezer strapped to a hunk of metal.
….and that was a year ago.
I really hope you're honest and you reply to this email letting me know that you too were not aware that a freezer was attached to the bottom of the metal countertop at Cold Stone Creamery.
And if you already knew…
You probably scored high on your SAT and have a higher IQ than most.
Or you just have common sense…
It never occurred in my mind's wildest imagination that a “cold stone” would need to somehow…stay…cold. And not just be cold.
Perhaps The Waterboy completely convinced me that Adam Sandler’s "glacier water" ice chunk could stay frozen forever without melting.
We Had to Try It
Just knowing this made me want Cold Stone. But I wanted to build it myself, and I wasn't going to spend $8,600 for a Franken-freezer metal slab.
No…not joking:
So Chelsea, the kids, and I got together and made a plan.
We would take the random leftover granite slab in the garage and throw it in the freezer.
Then we'd go to the store and grab all the types of ice cream we wanted and all the fixings.
It wasn't exactly like Cold Stone Creamery because the ice cream started to melt pretty quickly. Even though we put it on a very cold, but not infinitely cold, granite slab.
Surprisingly, it's a fun family activity and needless to say the granite slab was totally useless, but made us feel like pros...so we didn't actually have to go apply for a job at Cold Stone Creamery.
Needless to say, we had a bowl…or two. And frankly, all we needed to do was put the ice cream in a bowl and put the fixings on top and just stir it with a spoon.
But it was a lot more fun with the bench scraper and a forgotten granite slab.
An Embarrassing Discovery
An embarrassing discovery I recently made about money was really no different from this last week's ice cream escapades.
The Anchor Investor Mindset
The Assumption: You need to pitch hundreds of individual high-net-worth investors one by one to fill a round.
The Slab Reality: Finding one aligned anchor investor or single-family office converts soft circles into real commitments faster and smoother. The rest of the round simply fills in behind the momentum of that first anchor.
This week gave me a front-row seat to capital being deployed, operators stepping up, and deals making real progress.
But watching that success forced me to take a hard look at my own numbers. I decided to compare the raw volume of my outbound hustle, the endless calls, emails, and LinkedIn messages…against the quiet hours spent behind the scenes sifting through data, reading signals, and meticulously aligning investor mandates with the right opportunities.
What I found was a massive blind spot.
Over the last few months, I’ve put far more energy into cranking up the message count than I have into carefully curating targeted, highly aligned investor networks.
I was leaning on brute force instead of surgical accuracy, and honestly, that's a mistake I'm actively fixing.
Why Going Deep is 100X More Effective Than Going Wide
The Underlying Formula
If you want to express it logically:
When Mandate Alignment approaches zero (spray and pray), high volume still equals zero deals.
When alignment is near 100%, every interaction compounds into actionable deal flow today or sometime in the future.
I hope this was helpful to you.
If you ever need help putting together outbound campaigns and building the ultimate investor relations outreach team, I'm your guy.
If you have it handled, I would love to hear what you're doing and I don't mind trading notes.
Book a call with me anytime or simply reply to this email.
Have a great evening,
Andrew LeBaron
P.S. If you'd like to build a newsletter like this one to attract and raise capital, book a call with me here.
Target returns are projections only and not a guarantee of future results. Actual results may differ materially. This is not an offer to sell securities. For accredited investors only.