On Jan. 14, 2011, a group of Ukrainian managers trained by USAID LINC met with a group of investors in Kyiv’s President Hotel, using their newly acquired skills to try to secure funding for their investment projects.

Just saying “Trust me!” may help in contacts with electors but not investors. An investor wants to know a lot of things before making up his or her mind to open his or her purse for your project. What is the nature of the project? Who and how will implement it? What are financial implications? What are your target markets, and who are your competitors there? And so on, and so on. The problem is, few people know how to approach investors and present their investment projects.

The event, organized and facilitated by USAID Local Investment and National Competitiveness project (USAID LINC), brought managers of eleven Ukrainian companies from Crimea and the oblasts of Luhansk and Odesa face to face with representatives from the investment community: investment funds, business angels, banks, asset managers, and other investors. The meeting was arranged as a series of presentations, followed by questions and answers, with lunch and coffee breaks, during which the Q&A sessions continued at full swing but in a less formal way.

The projects presented covered a variety of industries, including agriculture, cable production, chemicals, water supply, tourism, IT, and energy conservation.

The participants on the side of demand came to the President Hotel from Kyiv’s suburb of Irpin, where they had spent four days coached by USAID LINC experts in how to prepare and make a right presentation to investors.

According to Ken Nachbar, USAID LINC Enterprise Competitiveness Advisor, who is in charge of both activities, a total of 70 businesses submitted their investment projects, of which 15 were selected for the workshop. Twenty-two managers of 13 companies turned out for the training, and 11 made their presentations at the meeting.

Both the workshop and the meeting received a good feedback from the participants. All trainees interviewed stressed the usefulness of the activities without reservation, and most of them added that now they felt more confident and better prepared.

Oleksandr Oskolenko, financial director of the gardening company Vesna, evaluated the workshop quality by saying that he thinks “trainings must be just like that [the workshop].” He also praised the professionalism of the trainers and pointed out that there had been several experts. “It was very important that they worked with each of the projects,” he said.

The high professionalism of the trainers was also marked by Yulia Danylchenko, deputy head of the Development and Quality Department of Zarya, a chemicals company. She said “it was obvious.”

Serhiy Moyseyev from Zeleny Svit, who specially characterized himself as a “realist,” said that after the workshop the level of his estimate of chances to obtain an investment “has grown immeasurably.” “I think the training I underwent here is sufficient to make a normal presentation before potential investors,” he said.

According to Volodymyr Demyanenko from Promdex.com, a web-based trade platform, the workshop helped the trainees structure odd bits of information they had already known. “[The training] helped us put in order our thoughts and determine our strategy of investment search, and probably, even encouraged somehow to try better,” said Mr. Demyanenko.

Oleksiy Dubiley, director for economy and finances of Odeskabel, the Ukrainian large-scale cable maker, said “every training is new use” because time moves on and circumstances are changing. As for the meeting with investors, he said communication at events like that is always useful, even when is does not lead to any concrete offers immediately. “We exchange business cards. We get into their database and develop our own one.”

The investment supply side participants on the whole were also quite positive about the meeting, although more restrained in their comments, as investors should be. All of them had attended more than one meeting with investment seekers, and whether or not they liked any specific project, they surely could be viewed collectively as a panel of judges for the quality of presentations. And most of those who gave their comments to USAID LINC rated the quality as “not bad,” which in Ukraine is an equivalent of “decent.” Only one of them, the Raiffeisen Bank Aval head of corporate business regional sales, Yaroslav Onyschuk, remarked on an insufficient project finance and payback stress in the presentations. Nevertheless, he said it was a drawback of the analysis behind a presentation rather than the presentation itself.

However, nobody of the investors complained that the meeting was waste of time. Quite to the contrary, some of them stated explicitly that it was useful and even noted specific projects for further investigation, whereas Oleh Zhadan, CEO of the asset management company Dialog Plus, and Svitlana Zubrytska, country manager with the microfinance company Oikocredit, urged USAID LINC to go on organizing similar events in the future.

Comments by participants:

PHOTO ALBUMS:

Training in preparation of presentation to investors (Irpin, Kyiv Oblast, Jan. 12, 2011)

Presenting investment projects to investors (Kyiv, Jan. 14, 2011)