Posts Tagged ‘how to take your company public’

Are You Taking Your Company Public: What Qualifications Your Executives Need To Attract Investors

March 8th, 2010

If your company is about to start taking steps for a public offering you will most likely want to bring in employees that will help season your business plan and private placement memorandum for your initial rounds of capital. The human resources section of your PPM is crucial and on your business plan your ‘key executives’ portion is critical.

You must be able to justify, many times over, the reason for the existence of this executive in your business. Let’s start with pedigree: This employee must have a traceable track record of success working with similar corporations at the same stage your company is in now, they must be able to prove that they played a key role in their previous employers growth. Next their education; if we lived in a perfect world, college education wouldn’t matter but in the mind of the investor, a university level education is a period of maturing and intellectually achieving the capacity to translate ideas into empirical strategies.

Your employees must have a 4 year degree if they are acting as anything other than administrative support. Community colleges and associates degrees don’t count and it’s better not to include these individuals as key players in your business model as it could bring into question your qualifications to run the company. The employee must also have a portfolio of ongoing education certifications and/or certificates of program completion. A university education is one thing but continuous professional growth is another element that is crucial to demonstrating an individual’s desire to stay on top of growing trends and contribute to their employers overall strategy.

Now, for the most important part; your executive must have a strong portfolio of industry specific contacts that will contribute to setting up and maintaining strategic alliances and partnerships on behalf of your company.

At corporate meetings, after you go over the plan for the day or the week you need to be able to assign each of your executives goals for setting up quality and qualified partnerships that enhance distribution, intellectual capital, publicity exposure etc. Without a powerful contact base one goes from being a excellent executive with VP level horizons to a general employee that needs to be micromanaged by a management team member.

Look at each executive in your company as a light bulb on a Christmas tree. When you roll out your small or medium size business to raise capital you want your tree blazing with blinding lights making you stand out in your industry.

Want To Go Public With Your Company, call Princeton Corporate Solutions at 267-233-0183Take Your Company Public the easy way!

Take Your Company Public: Software Application Design Firms Can Raise Capital Fast!

March 5th, 2010

Are you trying to raise capital for your start-up or corporation in expansion? Have you exhausted your traditional institutional sources and hedge fund contacts? Don’t lose hope just yet! First of all, take all those pamphlets and brochures from banks and other traditional lenders that are lying all over your desk and toss them in the trash…they are absolutely useless.

Banks don’t have your company’s best interest in mind as they are hardly even staying afloat in this economy. Today’s institutional financier isn’t qualified to run a bath let alone a bank. Don’t put your future in the untested hands of a 20 something knucklehead. After you’ve tossed all that useless info in the trash, clear your head and then look at your company and ask yourself a few tough questions: Is your company invest-able? Do you and your executive staff have a pedigree that investors deem as seasoned enough to take their money and make affective use of it and not lose it? What proprietary concepts/technology/patents do you have that give you a larger market share with the proper cash infusion? What is your current capital/debt situation?

If, after pondering these questions you’ve come to the conclusion you honestly, truly have something worth pursuing then the next step is to look at the reality that your company is worthy of a public offering. Stay away from Pink Sheets and be weary of reverse mergers and in reality your company won’t qualify for the NASDAQ so the quickest way to raise public capital is the OTCBB (over the counter bulletin boards).

OTCBB is an SEC regulated platform that has a solid investor following and market makers that can effectively promote your stock to rapidly raise capital. Don’t let these difficult economic times steal your dreams of corporate prosperity and personal growth.

If you have a solid business concept, there is a way to fund it. Look into the OTCBB, it’s your best bet for an inexpensive public offering with a direct path to long term funding.

Want To Go Public With Your Company, call Princeton Corporate Solutions at 267-233-0183Take Your Company Public the easy way!

Take My Company Public”:The True Anatomy of an S-1

March 4th, 2010

Your company is growing. Now you are ready to start raising serious capital and you here the public fund raising markets. Here are the basics of your S-1 filing. Know the lingo before you hire a consultant. Because companies must adhere strictly to SEC regulations, initial prospectuses are similar in their organization. Each S-1 generally consists of the following sections:

Front Section — An S-1 contains a small amount of information not available in a prospectus. In this first section, you can quickly find the issuing company’s phone number and get a vague sense of the future offering price.

Cover/Inside Cover — The prospectus cover outlines the general terms of the offering, including names of the underwriters, number of shares offered, and pricing information. The actual share price is absent from a prospectus until the day of the offering.

Prospectus Summary — Here you will find a brief synopsis of the company’s business and history, a modest discussion of the change in capitalization to occur as a result of the offering, and a useful summary of financial information covering the last five years, if available. If you are screening prospectuses for investment ideas, start here.

Risk Factors — After you have read a few prospectuses, you will become familiar with the “usual suspects” in this section, including “Possible Volatility of Stock,” “Limited History of operations,” “Dilution,” and “Dependence on Key Personnel.” Nevertheless, this section is a worthwhile read to be sure that you understand the challenges facing the company’s management. The discussion of competition can be sobering, but it can also provide a means to compare the value of the issuer against the financial performance and market valuation of its competitors.

Taking your company public should be an exciting and revitalizing time. Don’t take unnecessary risks, hire a consulting firm who can streamline this process and deliver the results you’ll need for success!

Get S-1 Filing InformationWant To Go Public With Your Company, call Princeton Corporate Solutions at 267-233-0183Take Your Company Public the easy way!

Take My Company Public”: Here Is How To Have A Successful Offering!

March 3rd, 2010

So many companies dream of going public both as a growth and exit strategy but unfortunately few succeed with this process. The third party audit, sponsoring of the S1 and 211 by a market maker and SEC comments stage is just one of the obstacles involved with taking a company public. The attempt at going public and actually achieving a symbol are two entirely different things and if you are lucky enough to achieve a symbol there’s a completely separate area of expertise needed to keep your stock trading and to preserve a company’s longevity in the marketplace.

Here are some things you need to keep in mind when gearing up to take your company public. Forget everything that you’ve read and heard and pay attention to what you’re about to read because this is the straight forward, objective reality of the process. First, do not hire an attorney to take you public as they will take you on a long drawn out process to get as many billable hours as possible, instead, hire a consulting firm whose sole business model is to take companies public and take advantage of the relationships that they have with attorneys. This is the first rule: hire a consulting firm that offers a complete A to Z turn-key solution for taking a company through the process of going public, achieving a symbol and preserving the trade with a solid, ongoing post public investor relations strategy.

Next, when you’ve decided on a consulting firm evaluate their team, don’t ask for references to call to research their track record, better yet, ask for symbols of previous clients and links to the Edgar database to check out current deals in the comments stage. The proof is in the empirical track record, not potentially fraudulent phone references that are easily engineered and BS.

Now look at their team. Make sure that the consulting group has a solid legal team, market makers, investor relations team, auditing group and someone well versed in the comments stage response as this can be one of the major hang-ups in achieving your symbol in a timely manner. Also, most important, they absolutely MUST have a solid group of investors to fund the process for equity and to sell their shares into the marketplace post public to create a market for your stock as well as a network of market makers familiar with your deal to piggyback off of the sponsoring market maker’s 211.

About one month away from symbol achievement you’ll want to meet with your consultants to get a solid IR strategy together for a big offering dbut. You will want to set up a strategy for 30 day IR intensives every other month with general corporate publicity strategies in between. I suggest changing your IR firm each quarter to keep it fresh and open up your trade to a new network of investors.

One special note to consider is that when you are raising your initial round of capital from seed investors, the fastest way to do this is to have a fist full of contracts and purchase orders in hand to strengthen your position and publicize this reality with an arsenal of press releases. Its 100 times easier to raise capital if you are showing seed investors a handful of ’soon to be’ cash than to solicit them empty handed.

Obviously there are a multitude of other issues that you need to take into consideration when going public so find a consulting firm that can help you make it happen. Don’t try to venture out into these waters on your own as you’ll be diving into shark infested waters and you’ll almost certainly fail.

For Corporate Consulting or Invest Seed Capital In Pre-IPO Companies, call Princeton Corporate Solutions at 267-233-0183Take Your Company Public the easy way!

How To Find All The Angel Investors And Venture Capital Financing You’ll Ever Need!

March 2nd, 2010

How To Find All The Angel Investors And Venture Capital Financing You’ll Ever Need! The once definitive line that would separate hard money and private/angel financing has merged into a hybrid of sorts in the past few years. As the economy has taken a dive and structured private lending firms have felt the crunch we are finding many of these lending solutions closing its doors and re-opening as privately owned and managed funding options with an interest in both lending and seed investment.

Approval decisions that were once made by a group are not being made by an individual or duo with an eye toward optimal capitalization with both short term and long term agendas. As investors are, now more than ever, trying to get as much bang out of their buck, entrepreneurs are in the precarious position of accepting funding from virtually any and every enterprise that is making an offering. That said, it is more important now than ever to swing open your mind to the possibilities of mass exposure of your opportunity to the investment world.

The best way to do this is to simply put your business in constant and automated ‘introduction’ mode so that you can be found by the moneymen. The best way to do this is to heavily investigate the venture capital industry for executives who have created offshoot programs that have deviated their process from the traditional path of simply approving or declining a transaction.

There are many VC professionals who want to capitalize off of the projects that their firm cannot accept due to underwriting criteria and industrial genre specialization so they are starting these small but well managed financial source databases where members can place their transaction directly in front of thousands upon thousands of angel investors, private investors, hard money lenders, venture capital firms, private equity firms and other alternative finance solutions.

These websites are now the hottest thing in the capital markets and will continue to grow because of the high success rate of individual executives and entrepreneurs who are able to find multiple streams of financing options with the click of a button.

Do You Need Financing For Your Business? Do You Need Angel Investors, Private Investors or Venture Capital, then visit Angel Funding Project’s site and find the best Business Funding Sources In The Industry.

Choosing The Right Investor To Take Your Business Public

March 1st, 2010

So many companies dream of going public to raise massive amounts of capital, as set up for an exit strategy, to make acquisitions with stock and for many other reasons. While your intentions may be pure and with genuine motives, you’re entering shark infested waters of boiler rooms, crooked attorneys and underbelly consultants who have made careers off of taking well intentioned executives just like you for a 24 month rollercoaster ride while they take every penny you have as your company shrivels up like week old road kill.

Just and honest consultants in the ‘public offering’ industry are as rare as the illusive white elephant. This industry exists in a cesspool surrounded by rose gardens; from afar it looks amazing and an image of a dreamland but get up and close and the sludge and odor are enough to make you run and hide. So what do you look for in a consultant? The best consulting firms are the ’boutique firms’ with minimal overhead that keep a low profile and are made up of 3 or 4 ‘partner’ consultants.

These firms typically have the experience of working with the large consulting groups but for one reason or another have decided to leave and go out on their own. The great thing is, these small groups typically have massive contacts and process your entire public offering in-house. Offering a complete turn-key solution that is managed in-house offers a huge advantage because there is accountability and you can actually build a relationship with the people that are making your dream of a public offering come true.

These ’boutique’ consultants will usually stay onboard as growth consultants for the life of the company in exchange for modest fees and a pre-IPO or pre-OTCBB equity position. The large firms will hack you out at the knees and gouge you with fees while they take massive amounts of equity in your company which takes away your bartering chip when you need to offer more stock to the public to raise capital.

The small firms will also work one on one with you to show you how to use your stock to grow through acquisition and other nifty ways to use stock to grow. Seek out the boutique consulting firm and save the attorney for spot audits. Hold on to your cash. Why pay outrageous fees to lawyers when you can pay 60% less with a small consulting firm that will add all the bells and whistles for free and actually get your stock trading, usually in half the time?

Take Your Company Public, call Princeton Corporate Solutions at 267-233-0183Take Your Company Public the easy way!

Investor Mind Control: Is It For Real?

February 6th, 2010

Discovering the ‘thumbscrews’ of investors is crucial to getting them to take action. In over a decade of dealing with global investors there are several elements that I’ve discovered to be universal truths about the mind of the private investor (angel investor, accredited investor).

When talking to an investor for the first time, it’s more important to listen than to speak. It’s more important to ask questions than answer them. It’s more important to discover their needs and wants than to exclaim your own. Your first conversation with an investor should be all about piercing the armor and finding the trigger points that prompt a reaction that gets to the center of their ‘childlike’ state.

What I mean by this is, investors, just like anyone else, has insecurities that are rooted in their childhood and what they are outwardly today, is typically a polar opposite of what they are on the inside. For example, an arrogant, chest beater seems proud and obnoxious on the outside but the reality is that they are over compensating for an insecurity that is rooted in an individual or collection of childhood incidents.

Maybe they were made fun of as a child, maybe they’re father was verbally abusive, maybe their teachers would single them out in class opening them up to playground mockery. When talking to these individuals it’s important to listen to their voice and intonation when the conversation topic changes. Take notes on their psychological adjustments to the conversation. After you feel you have discovered the triggers that induce the ‘pleasurable’ responses, end the call, and set your second phone appointment with them.

On that second call, you want to have your conversation ready to go using the triggers you found in the first conversation. Play off of those insecurities that you found, become their best friend without being chummy but it is your mission on this call to be the “guy that understand me” to the investor. You want the overall tone of this conversation to have the response from your target along the theme of, “wow, this guy gets me” , “I can see investing in this company”.

By using this method and not coming across as ‘fake’, you have become an investment opportunity and a shrink all rolled into one. You want to be the one person that this investor can lower his guard to because everything he says, you seem to be the one person who understands him at his deepest level. You seem to naturally be tuned into his insecurities, emotions, needs and wants. Sound strange? Try this out on the next investor you talk to, I guaranty you will be shocked with the results.

For Corporate Turnaround Services or Investor Finder Services, call Princeton Corporate Solutions at 267-233-0183Take Your Company Public the easy way!

Take Your Company Public Via OTCBB: Use Your Stock Like A Bank

January 7th, 2010

Many entrepreneurs and executives want to move forward with the process of going public merely for the ability to raise capital through the sale of stock. They usually don’t think of the strategies necessary to keep the momentum going such as how much equity to give up initially, how much equity to sell ongoing, how to capitalize off of the use of the securities as collateral for loans and lines of credit and so on.

One of the most profound strategies companies can use to retain company equity while capitalizing off of their public entity is to put up portions of their securities as temporary collateral for loans and to use securities to grow through acquisition of strategic alliances.

Stock should be looked at as cash and designated for appropriate purchasing strategies. Stock monetized through collateralized lending can work wonders as long as the exit strategy is in place and secure. Your attorney should be well versed in this activity and audit the contract for convertible aspects which could strip the transaction of its advantageous nature.

Debt that converts to equity means giving up a huge bartering chip for future transactions. Don’t give up equity unless you have to. There are scores of companies that will lend against your securities without having to give up long term equity. Use this strategy wisely and you’ll never have a problem getting capital.

Also, using stock to purchase strategic partners is more relevant now than ever. Purchasing a company with stock that can be monetized over time is an incredible way to grow through acquisition. Going public on the OTCBB is a quick and easy way to start using the countless capabilities for capitalization with a public entity. Going public simply to raise capital with your market maker or broker dealer would be selling yourself short. Take advantage of the countless ways your securities can work for you.

Go Public With Your Company, call Princeton Corporate Solutions at 267-233-0183Take Your Company Public the easy way!

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