Clarifying Her Business Plan Expands Vision

The entrepreneurial itch came to Barbara Bentree four years ago out of her conviction that the wrong people did children’s television.

At the time she worked as a private-school music teacher and freelance television musical director, and she believed that when children’s programming didn’t bombard kids with commercial messages, it bored them. She thought she could do better.

Her idea--unformed, at first--was to start a company, Turtle Creek Productions Inc., (https://www.turtlecreekproductions.com) to produce television programming, videos and film entertainment for children. Like most entrepreneurs, she had no money to make it real. Also, like most entrepreneurs, she had no idea how Southern California’s angel investor community works.

She’s still learning, and the story of her education in the ways of angel financing shows that the effort to raise angel money for any start-up can lead to unexpected consequences.

In Bentree’s case, the consequences were positive. She learned that her idea was bigger than she thought. She also learned that you don’t need an MBA to launch a start-up, and that the more carefully you think your way through your idea, the better you get at persuading angel investors to open their checkbooks.

Most of all Bentree learned that angel investors like nothing better than to tinker with a good idea and find ways to make it better.

In the beginning, four years ago, she pitched her idea in Hollywood and got nowhere. Hollywood is a club: If you’re in, you’re in, and if you’re not, you’re not.

“People liked my idea,” Bentree said, “but they said: ‘If you want to see these things produced, bring $500,000 to the table and we’ll talk--and we want to own the product.’ ”

Bentree wanted to produce and own her properties. She changed her strategy, scaling down her plans and deciding to pursue financing for a video series only. She also decided to seek her angels where she taught and lived--Pacific Palisades. She wrote a business plan and began calling on the parents of her students, many of them wealthy people, hoping that some might turn themselves into angel investors to underwrite her dream.

“I had made myself visible in this community over the last decade, teaching music to children and doing community projects,” Bentree said. “So I could show my idea to people who knew my work and who knew that I would do what I said I would do.”

Once again, she didn’t get far. People she trusted--her attorney John Martin, who practices near Los Angeles International Airport, business coach Robert Chun of RSC & Associates of West Los Angeles, and Nevin Sanli and Mary K. Lee-Wlodek, president and vice president, respectively, of Sanli Pastore & Hill, a business-valuation consulting firm in West Los Angeles--urged her to rework her business plan. (It projected a 40% return within two years--not enough at a time when mutual funds returned that much in half the time.) Her prospective Pacific Palisades angels, tinkering with her idea, joined the chorus. Think big, they told her. Show us what good children’s programming might do over five or 10 years with an international audience.

Note the irony here. Bentree started out thinking big and got nowhere--then scaled down her plans only to find people urging her to think big. The difference, of course, was that her original idea was unformed, as she came to understand when she began reworking her business plan.

“I saw that my original idea wasn’t complete,” she said. “And when I made the changes people suggested, I saw there was a lot more in it than I had understood. And when I carried out the financials over 10 years, that really energized me, and I felt increasingly confident about presenting my idea to heavy-duty people.”

In short, in clarifying her idea, Bentree discovered its true dimensions, and this gave her a new passion for it. She tapped six angel investors for $200,000 in seed money, and she is in discussions for as much as $3 million from other sources including corporate sponsors like those that underwrite public television.

Will she succeed? Four years ago, Bentree said, her idea seemed worth far less, and so did her own capacity for launching, much less running, a complex business enterprise. Now the question is whether to use the seed money she already has to get something into production or hold out for corporate money and do bigger things.

“Back then, the thought of raising even $100,000 seemed huge,” Bentree said. “Then $600,000 seemed huge, and that’s small in comparison to $3 million.

“But so much of this whole process has been opening my own mind to see the bigger vision. In Hollywood, you can chase opportunity or you can make something happen. Raising $2 million or $3 million would delay production, but people keep telling me it’s easier to raise that kind of money than it is to raise half a million.

“Should I take what we have and get something made? I don’t know. But I’m a teacher. I want a classroom. I want an international classroom.”

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Next: Why your first angel investor might not be your best.

Juan Hovey can be reached at (805) 492-7909 or at jhovey@gte.net.