How To Take A Company Public – Over The Counter Bulletin Board

There are many ways to use capital without using bank loans, lines of credit and other shady methods like shelf corps and bogus platform scams. If you are truly trying to raise capital for your company here are some simple breakdowns of your options with a quick definition for each one:

 PIPE: Private Investment In Public Equity this is used primarily by mutual funds and private investment firms where they buy discount stock in order to raise capital, there are two types of PIPEs traditional where common and preferred stock is issued at a set cap to raise money for the issuer and a structured pipe issues convertible debt.

 DPO: Direct Public Offering is when you sell equity shares directly to customers, suppliers and employees.

 PPM: Private Placement Memorandum is also known as an offering memorandum takes advantage of Regulation D rule exemptions 504, 505 and 506. This process came into existence with the’33 securities act and popularized in the late’80s, companies can raise money from the public via private placement; there is virtually zero interaction with the SEC after you file form d as long as you stay legal. (most popular form of fund raising).

 IPO: Initial Public Offering: extremely expensive, need SOX 404 audits, must have board of directors, quarterly financial reports to shareholders, report heavily to the SEC and 1 out of every 1000 companies that want an IPO actually qualify. I love participating in these but most companies just can’t qualify for one reason or the other.

 OTCBB: Over the Counter Bulletin Board is an electronic quote system that is the next best thing if you can’t go public via ipo, there is minimal red tape to startups and small businesses and is legitimized by the stringent ongoing reports to the SEC which keeps investor confidence high (these are extremely solid and I suggest this structure to companies when I am hired by their company or legal team as a consultant as a fast, easy way to raise big capital from the public otc)

 Pink Sheet: you can look at pink sheets as the Burger King, while the OTCBB is McDonalds, they are competing otc mechanisms. Pinks sheets are commonly referred to as penny stock and notorious for ‘pump em’ and dump em’ controversies and a lot of crooked people are involved with this platform. This is not a long term process that will allow one’s company to grow, pink sheets companies are typically short lived but it is cheap to set up but not a professional structure that could be upgraded in time to an IPO.

 Reverse Merger: a group funds the filing and creation of a public shell, they then sell that shell to a company that wants to go public, the established company merges it’s entity into the public shell. The sellers retain around 30% equity after they charge an upfront fee of 300k to 1m. 99% of reverse mergers are successful with the merger, but unsuccessful to bring them to trade and the entity basically just fizzles out.

Taking your company public is actually quite simple and inexpensive when you have the right consultant putting the structure together for you. There are countless ways to raise capital quickly and easily. It’s important that you understand your options before you waste time entering into the red tape infested banking system for a loan.

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Take Your Business Public: OTCBB, Reverse Mergers, Pink Sheets

Whether you’re trying to raise debt or equity capital there are still certain unwritten rules that apply that cater to the mentality of today’s investor and funding community. Certainly there are scores of private placement memorandum and business plan chop shops that wouldn’t know how to properly consult with your company or write a fundable document even if they wanted to but they will gladly take your money to throw together a template and try to pass it off as custom work.

The issue is this, it’s not necessarily the consultant, though these fly-by-nights shoulder a large portion of the blame, but the client usually doesn’t even have the proper structure in place to attract a funding source even if they had the most incredible PPM and business ever to hit the venture capital marketplace. Here is a simple (very basic) way to evaluate your company to find out if you are properly structured to attract capital. Have a corporate meeting and ask yourselves the following questions: What type of corporate structure do you have and why did you choose that particular structure? Break down your executive infrastructure, where do your individual executives stand in your industry, do the unthinkable, Google everyone’s names; are the people running your company real industry players? Are all the basic positions accounted for (president, CFO, controller etc)? Next, look at your advisory board and board of directors. If by some miraculous act of God you actually have these two groups represented in your company, how did you qualify them? Sorry but if you have an attorney on your board because he’s, um…well, an attorney, that’s not good enough.

You need an industry specific legal guru who not only spells out the intricacies of your business genre’s regulation but they must also be actively qualifying potential strategic partnerships as alliances for your company. He should be reaching into his client base and actively picking companies that could enhance your company in distribution or in any other way that will have a profitable outcome for all involved. Each of the members must be serving a similar purpose.

Next, on what criteria are you basing your share price or loan amount? If you don’t have a clear cut ‘use of proceeds’ model, you need one. This and many, many other questions need to be asked before you are actually ready to raise capital and in all reality, until your corporate structure is in place you shouldn’t even attempt to write a business plan or a private placement memorandum. If you are serious about setting up your company to attract investors you need a turnaround consultant, you can’t do this on your own. There is an entire industry that centers around structuring companies for their first and ongoing capital raise.

Before you blackball your company by prematurely attempting to raise capital, the critical concepts you need to keep in mind are (precisely in this order): corporate structure, infrastructure, advisory board, board of directors, use of proceeds, business plan, private placement memorandum, investor finder, funding. Look at each aspect listed here as its own item, break it down and analyze every minute aspect of each element and look at everything objectively and eventually your company will evolve into a structure that is fundable and stabilized for years to come.

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Take My Company Public” – OTCBB – OTC Bulletin Board

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!

Over The Counter Bulletin Board Consultants: Beware of the Hard Sell Consulting Firm

Private Placement Memorandum authoring and the process of taking one’s company public are services that require extensive experience and the ability to look at a deal objectively and peripherally to evaluate all the angles to enhance the ability of the client to achieve funding in a timely manner.

Many times, when I’m hired to structure a company before funding, they will be under the impression that my evaluation is a mere formality and they are ready to go. Often I’m the bearer of bad news when I have to break it to the client that their company has more holes than Swiss cheese and 30 to 60 days away from starting the fund raising process.

They will often get a second and then third opinion and usually run into the same thing before they eventually find their way back to our firm. As they call around to consulting firms they perpetually experience the ‘hard sell’ by firms who ‘need’ the business because they lack the rewards and referrals that come with cultivating each client relationship because they take on and spit out deals so fast they hardly remember their client’s name during the transaction.

This mentality dominates the larger firms because of their gargantuan overhead while the boutique firms can take a more personal approach because they have a steady flow of business and referrals because they are not stressed about bringing in the next big deal so they can meet payroll and keep their lights on. The smaller companies that focus on turnaround consulting, private placement memorandum authoring, top tier business plan writing and taking companies public usually take a one on one approach to the consulting process and will rarely pressure clients to sign on because their phone is ringing off the hook with previous clients who want to hire them for the next stage in the evolution of their company’s growth.

This business is all about relationships. Ditch the consultant that applies the high pressure sales tactics and seek out the smaller, more personalized groups that don’t ‘need’ your business but will cultivate and value it.

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

Over The Counter Bulletin Board: How To Have Investors Begging To Invest!

Take Your Company Public: Have Investors Begging To Invest! As the economy worsens and banks continue to crash and the US dollar is losing its place as the world currency American entrepreneurs need alternative funding solutions that cater to ongoing capital needs that take advantage of the international finance stage as opposed to domestic institutional lenders.

Many companies, for the first time, are considering going public as a viable option but where does one start on this trek? How much does it cost? What type of lawyer and consultants do I need? Who sells my stock? Etc.

The reality is, going public is fairly straight forward if you have a product or service that lends itself to an invest-able option to global financiers. The process of a start-up or small/medium size business going public usually begins with the basic business plan (50 to 100+ pages in length) and a Private Placement Memorandum (Regulation D Rule Exemptions 504, 505 or 506).

The company would then do an initial round of funding with accredited investors with a mini/maxi built into the offering circular that makes it possible to reach a simple benchmark that would allow the company to start using the investment cash for growth via public offering using OTCBB (over the counter bulletin boards); this is the quickest and cheapest way to go public being that 99.9% of companies don’t have the liquidity and time in business to qualify for an IPO. There are several things that a company can do to make your capital raise a pleasure and not a nightmare. Start with a solid market maker that will commit to putting forth a dominating effort to sell your shares. The next thing you need to do is put a face and a voice to the company. Hire a publicist and pick an executive, usually the CEO or CFO, set up, daily interviews on radio and TV to promote the company and as you do this you will begin to see instant results. Another thing is to send out articles and press releases focusing on every single positive point, contract and strategic partners, feed that publicity machine. Branding is another powerful aspect to raising capital. Make your brand and image something that people see on online and in magazines. A solid publicist will do wonders for you. Get your press releases going on the wire to broker dealers and market makers and other stock promoters.

Fund raising has been complicated by unethical companies that are looking to create capitalization angles for themselves whether they are the business raising capital or the broker dealer buying and selling their stock. Done honestly, there is no reason a company with a viable business concept can’t be successful in raising capital quickly and easily being sold on the public market.

Take Your Company Public, the easy way Call Princeton Corporate Solutions at 267-233-0183 PPM, OTCBB or IPO fund raising is easy with the right consultant.

Over The Counter Bulletin Board – Take Your Company Public: How To Get The Power You Need

Growing your company sales by adding promotional and sales agents and increasing your marketing exposure is an obvious way to beef up revenues but few companies consider the virtually instantaneous power of strategic alliances. Creating strategic partnerships with ‘would be’ rivals and companies that cater to your business genre can help you rapidly take possession of your market.

If you are a printer, team up with brochure designers, ink and paper distributors, advertising firms and print solution resellers. If you are a solar panel technology company then team up with corporations who have government grants for research and development and other alternative energy groups such as wind energy turbine technology firms, Department of Energy contractors etc. By teaming up with other companies and combining resources. You can stimulate growth in every area of your business. Look at each individual product and service you offer.

Now think of other companies who you can team up with to share resources. Make sure you create win/win opportunities for everyone involved as this is the only way to truly take advantage of this type of partnership. Don’t look at this concept as leaching off of other company’s resources, to the contrary, carefully researched and structured alliances will transform the here and now as well as future business of all parties involved. Strategic alliances will also enhance your appeal as an ‘invest-able’ business to venture capital firms and angel investors.

Think about it. You have a carefully constructed and managed corporate infrastructure. You’ve taken the steps to make sure that each of your ‘C’ level executives has been promoted as the ‘who’s who’ in the industry to speed up investor due diligence and increase customer confidence. You’ve carefully selected a board of directors that will effectively and actively guide you through the turbulent industry environment with their proven track record of success. And you’ve even initiated and solidified powerful partnerships that enhance your business concept and strengthen the longevity of your company.

You are now ready for expansion, investors, venture capital firms, taking your company public, attracting a professional CEO or CFO and practically anything your company is setting out to do.

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