For the economically nave and entrepreneurial utopia seekers, this isn’t an article for you. Press that ‘X’ at the top right side of the computer screen and open up a new browser and go to the official Obama page where you’ll get the lies you need in order to feel like your corporate concepts actually have a place in reality.
For those of us who are more comfortable with the truth and understand that the gentle lapping shore is nothing more than a typhoon of lava spinning uncontrollably around you, keep reading. Every second of ever day there is a new crisis that will come to a head via methods by your opposition that is out of bounce and under the belt. They don’t care about your image damage or crumbling client base due to this blatant ‘lie’ or sucker punch aftermath. Your response should be just as dirty and everlasting.
Never allow an individual, client or competitor to get close enough to where they can engage and initiate an offensive but when it happens, you need to take this ‘tap to the chin’ and respond with a sledgehammer to the skull of the opponent. You will need to pummel them from every angle both personally and professionally.
The first thing you need to do is downplay the negative publicity issued by this entity in regards to you or your company. For this you need to take every ounce of legitimacy and industry authority and first call it into question by publicizing concepts that will confuse the public as to the company’s ability to follow through with their claims, next inject cancer into the cell that carries the message attached to this company so that every area of coverage that this company has becomes infected with the message that you put out.
Find out, first about the individual that has taken it upon themselves to publicize their negative opinion about your company, next who is his direct management, who is the executive over this management and next who are their most obvious strategic partners and who is their most critical distribution or sales alliance and finally are they public or a private entity.
With the above information you should chart the entity with a plan for annihilation, this offensive must be quick, strategic, planned to the ‘t’ and without mercy. And finally this devastation must be via third party and as public as possible. The best way to get this done is by calling up localized competitors who have been affected by the market presence of this company and organize them as a regional militia that will infiltrate the entity and follow through on your behalf. To get them to the point of action, show them the advantages of owning the regional market share of this target. Offer them economic supplementation for their efforts. Use an outside social media vendor to help this militia gain the regional advantage and distribution mechanism under their name via your social media vendor. You need to stay in control of the social media distribution so that the information release is timed perfectly.
The attach must encompass the individual personally that initiated this process against your company. Every ounce of legitimacy they have must be called into question and then stamped out of existence so that their presence can’t possibly be perpetuated in the industry by getting another position in this particular niche. Then work your way up the management chain, each time mentioning the initiator that put this into motion.
Corporate crisis management is not a defensive but a war strategy offensive. It’s not an act of ‘reaction’ it’s the act of obscene annihilation that is swift, public and a demonstration to others of what will happen if they try to cross you.
In life, real life (not this politically correct utopia brainwash content they are force-feeding our children with in school to cripple their minds) is truly, absolutely survival of the fittest. Make no mistake intellectual battle lines are drawn and at the end of the day there are two educations a child gets today: School and Home.
At school children are taught that if they play along with the group, all is well, they’ll get good grades and if they say no to drugs, fall on bended knee before the teachers they will make it. A child’s education at home must be about applications, strategy and considering the public education game a playground. Understand that when you send your child to school they are submerged in a ‘follow the leader’ subculture that goes like this: go to class, study, ready, test well and put your napkin on your lap at lunch get into college and get that piece of paper that convinces intellectual halfwits that you’re qualified for that $30k paper pusher job, fall in line with the student loan suffocation mechanism to allow the government to take their piece of the action and you’ll be fine.
As parents, we need to have a strong, updated comprehension of this because we place our children in a position where they are tied down and force-fed by self proclaimed intellectual scholars yet the reality is they teach because they cannot do (yes I know I’ve said this before but keep reading). Those who can apply the tactics taught in school go from tactician to strategist. A strategist is able to apply the tactics studied in university class rooms to their current and immediate environment, ‘teachers’ also referred to as ‘tacticians’ cannot.
Train your children in the Machiavellian ways that have been demonized by those who are afraid to lose control but mastered by those in control. Throughout elementary and high school training it is your job as a parent to show your child how to apply what they are learning in school as the instructor as their educational facility is unable to do this as they are a tactician not a strategist. Strategists own the companies that tacticians work for. Strategists are on the board of companies and have C level executive stations while hiring and firing an ongoing ocean of tacticians. How can you tell if you’re child’s teacher is a tactician as opposed to an educator with the full package? They treat the halfwit concepts of the new ‘political correctness’ as if they were laws passed down from Mount Olympus and constantly use backwards, mean nothing terminology such as hyphenated ethnicities which is nothing more than one additional strategy used by the powers that be to separate the citizens of this nation even more in turn securing more of a strangle hold on the minds of our youth, they take a kumbaya approach to communication with a ‘there is no wrong answer’ process to confusing the balance of a soft maturing mind, they’ll teach about Victoria, self proclaimed Queen of a so-called ‘United’ Kingdom with no mention of the ongoing British attempts to infiltrate this country with chaos missions during the civil war, the war of 1812, multiple invasions from Canada early in the history of our Nation and ongoing via economics and our current legislative and trade system.
Its war and we are battling for the minds of our children in order to keep them from entering into the zone of the mindless drone. They will brainwash your child all day in school, instead of handing your child over to more negative influences by allowing them to sit in front of the idiot box for four hours per night, give them books to read like the Art of War, The Prince and other books that will train them to assimilate this lame public/private school education into practical, strategic concepts that will set them apart, above and beyond their peers.
As a journalist I find myself ghost writing books for self absorbed executives and politicians and never able to take credit for it. I usually get a call from the executive’s publicist and they want me to write a bunch of garbage about his soft side, his humanitarian side or his golf swing. The article is written, published, the clients happy and I feel like a sell out with no journalistic integrity because in this industry, to pay the bills means to compromise and do things you don’t like. This interview was different, completely different.
I met James Scott at Earl’s, a fine dining establishment for Bucks County’s upper crust. The waitress was a snob, I was invisible to the bartender and the experience of waiting for him to arrive was a pride swallowing nightmare that is difficult to put into words then James walks in, polished, confident and ready to get down to business. “Why is my friend still standing” he snapped at the waitress walking by, “I’ll be with you in a…” before she could finish, he interrupted, “we’ll find our own seat, you’ll find us and bring us menus, Steve follow me”. We grabbed a table and to him, this was normal. “If you wait once you’ll spend your life waiting. So what can I do for you?”
I was expecting someone older, in their 50’s or 60’s, he was in his 30’s with a chip on his shoulder to act as warning to any opposition, anytime, anyplace that you may start an argument or debate, he’ll finish it. I became drawn in immediately. He received a call as we sat down from a congressman in the north east and spoke with such confidence, eloquence and authority I felt as though I was sitting in front of an 80 year old statesman that’s been born and bred into the political strategies game.
When he hung up my first question was “Where do you get your confidence to talk to power players with such comfort and ease?” He looked up at me with a glare that was focused and made me feel he was looking into me as opposed to at me and replied, “I think confidence is all relative to what you know and what you know you know” with a grin, he crossed his legs, ran both hands over his slacks and continued, “I made it a habit early on to say as little as possible so that when I was ready to talk I had the attention of the entire room. I made sure that I studied the attendees and read through the body language and speech patterns of everyone there to find the leaders, followers, supporters and skeptics and after collecting all this information I could determine who I needed to address in the room. After 12 years of studying body language and voice patterns it becomes a process of analyzing the situation at hand and responding with an objective strategy that can be applied to the situation. I gained confidence from the successes of using this process time and time again.”
“How do you define this unique area of consulting that you specialize in? There are only 3 or 4 other consultants globally that have the contacts to both economic power players and political lobbyists and special interest groups. How do you keep everyone happy in such a stressful environment where crisis management is typically the job you’re being hired for?”
The waitress arrived at the table, it was 10:35am, some people were still having breakfast, I ordered a coffee, he ordered a vodka tonic, double Belvedere with extra lime as if drinking in the morning was normal behavior. He answered “My core consulting genre is strategic facilitation. I started with public and pre public corporations by setting them up properly to go public, then my firm would take them public, put together a post public investor relations process to grow their marketability to investors and then help them expedite their growth with acquisitions and merger identification and facilitation.” He continued, “I began getting involved on the political side as I would be contacted by a lobbyist group that was working with a congressman or senator who had issues they were trying to sort out and there was no one to call so they would typically get referred to me from a board member of a company I structured and they would say something like, ‘our candidate is having a similar issues that the CEO of ABC Inc was having and we wanted to see if you could come on board to help us work it out . . .’ and that’s how I started getting involved on the political side. Politics just like general corporate and economic strategies have many similar threads. I just try to use the experience from one project for the next and so on. I guess more than anything now I’m a fixer but I’m working more with lobbyists and special interest groups.”
I asked him what prompted the change from focusing on corporate strategies to lobby and special interest, “Well, at the end of the day politicians are the visual identification for an agenda. The agenda is typically started by demands from the localized constituency. Lobbyist and special interest groups spend millions of dollars researching statistics and geographic layouts to find the areas of the country/world that their prototypical support base resides. The next move is to identify the political power-base in that region and initiate support planning. If the political figures are open the next thing is localized job creation and general economics. The convergence of the two in a way that is conducive to instantaneous capitalization and results is where I come in. I work with lobby firms because that is where the real power is, not the actual politician.”
Again, every word was pronounced perfectly, his vocabulary was authoritative, his eyes didn’t blink, his posture was perfect and I have to admit, I couldn’t find a single chink in his armor. There wasn’t an ounce of pretentious or insecure put-downs or belittling of anyone and in talking to him I felt myself gaining more and more respect and admiration for him.
This 30 something ‘kid’ has more global political pull than even the most seasoned politician yet he was comfortable in his skin and completely calm. His breathing was paced and as I looked for the prototypical nervous habits such as a bouncing foot on the floor, sweaty brow, nail biting etc, none were present. He was, in every sense of the term a W.A.S.P without a single trace of insecurity. I was in awe and when I think about it now I believe I took something away with me that day. I’m 54 years old and I have to admit, I look up to him. That may sound strange and it’s even stranger to admit this after I’ve been writing on economics for 25 years.
As we wrapped up the meeting (he only set 20 minutes aside for me and time flew by) his next meeting rolled in. A Chinese oil company needing his strategies to help them out of some issues in Africa. “have a seat gentlemen” he said “I’m going to walk my friend out and will be back in a moment.” He walked me out and we shook hands and he said, “I know you’re a journalist and you’ll want to ask me how I want to be portrayed in the article and I would say this, just go with your gut. I have nothing to hide and my reputation is more about what I am able to accomplish for my clients as opposed to what potential clients read about me. Just write for your readers and it will be fine.” He put his left hand on my shoulder while his right hand stopped shaking my hand and just held it for a moment and then he walked away.
That’s it. That was my interview with James Scott, CEO of the almighty Princeton Corporate Solutions. We didn’t get into the juicy family topic because he wouldn’t mix work and family, we didn’t cover any controversy that surrounds him because there is none, there are no legitimacy issues with him as his cell phone has the world’s most influential professionals and political organizations on first name speed dial.
What I took away from this interview is one thing. The economy is in shambles our government is a disaster but there is a part of me that feels safe and secure knowing that James Scott is involved in the process. We need people like him to help the power structure keep order and to make the moves by these groups solid, strategic and strong enough to help us rebound the devastation we are now experiencing. We need leaders who were born to lead to take us as a people by the hand and tell us that it’s going to be OK and to just focus on our jobs and family, there are qualified people working in the shadows that don’t need nor want special recognition or their names in lights. James Scott is the silent leader that enables crumbling economies to rise again and hopeless corporate organizations to thrive. Keep an eye out for him; chances are he’s turning around a company or an economy near you.
In the strategies of war, how does a new regional military power or upstart guerrilla troop solidify their position? They identify their adversaries and eliminated them. How is business any different? The truth is the strategies are identical while the actual elimination process differs. War is fought with bombs and guns, economics is fought by crushing an idea or believe system that perpetuates the money machine behind a company, take away the public believe system based on the concept put out by a company and you’ve eliminated their ability to survive.
Corporate branding, marketing and all promotion centers around piercing the minds of the public to inject an idea that ultimately triggers them to have an emotional need for your service or product. Few purchase decisions are spontaneous but for those that are it’s a matter of putting making something available with the threat of taking it away.
When injecting an idea in the mind of the involuntary recipient it must be like a candy coated indigestible as opposed to a spinal tap entry. Smooth and easy as opposed to painful and forced. Some sugar coatings take on the identity of a comedic TV commercial where laughter is the mechanism used to bypass the critical faculty while a sappy emotional segment may work for others.
The key to obtaining and maintaining one’s position is to identify your immediate competition, deal with them and once this is facilitated move on to the next potential threat. For the immediate competitor one elimination strategy that tends to work regardless of industry is to analyze the regional market in which you find a competitor of equal size who is in direct competition with you and then find his localized upstart or micro competitors and via third party strategically align your agenda with their promotional tactics. Help them to collectively and unknowingly pinpoint and weaken specific products and services that pronounce the actual threat to your company. Phase two is to make yourself known to them via this third party introduction and buy equities in these companies and contractually obligate them to use this capital for designated promotional solutions that will grow that regional company. You want this money to be used to infiltrate the region with your services/products and have the new partners go into their established client base with mailers, phone calls and in person sales calls and introduce your company and solutions to them.
Your initial competitor will begin to lose traction (assuming they are a public company) and their stock price will begin to fall, you want to begin buying stock in this competing company but not enough to stimulate or increase the share price. A combination of multiple subsidiary elements ganging up on this one particular company in addition to your firm buying equities in a plummeting stock will deliver to you the control you need in order to remove this entity as an obstacle to your growth.
As the company lessens in market share and comes into a new phase of financial hardship, help the process along by now adding the sell/buy process to damage their stock that much more (obviously, before initiating this phase talk to legal counsel for advice). Now that the stock is at a critical volume and price you can step in and flood the market with the stock that you purchased to send them into ‘penny stock’ domain, the kiss of death for any company that wants to stay on or eventually qualify for the NASDAQ (don’t look at this as losing money, you should see it from the perspective of gaining long term market share) and when the company is close to shutting their doors, you can step in as the savior with investment capital, acquisition proposal or workout a subsidiary type merger.
By this time the company is so weak they have no choice but to accept on of the above options thus, you’ve accomplished the elimination of a competitor while creating a virtual monopoly in this regional based strategy. There is a template strategy that straddles political and economical situations. The template is the same while it needs to be adapted with a customized process.
I wish I could say that I wasn’t writing this article from experience but that would be a lie. I wish I could say that chemistry is never an issue between the consultant, S1 attorney and newly elected board members but that would be nave.
The truth is some attorneys who perform great on some public offerings are an absolute nightmare on other transactions. Some board members with a gargantuan size portfolio of contacts are worth the aggravation on some deals but on others fall flat on their face as they try to take the whole company to the ground with them. The reality is qualifying an attorney for the process of an S1 filing goes far beyond whether they’ve got time and experience under their belt. You need to ask the more difficult questions that are almost impossible to test for such as, how do they react in stressful situations? Are they open to stepping outside of their comfort zone to engage in cutting edge filing strategies to speed up the offering process? Do they help with the fundraising? Are they able to refer a PCAOB auditor and a market maker to file the 15c211? These are things that need to be addressed with your S1 attorney but are difficult to actually test beforehand.
Each lawyer is different and all I can say is sit down with them and drill them with a million different questions from a multitude of angles to test their knowledge and their patience. Watch their facial expressions, hand gestures, eye and forehead shift. Look for a bouncing leg or foot and other nervous habits and what questions did you ask to trigger this nervous twitch?
The same techniques can be used for qualifying a board member. The only way to get the best idea of whether there is a fit is to push them to the brink during the interview?
Be careful with this as many qualified professionals could easily take this challenge as disrespect and they’ll walk so don’t be rude or arrogant but with a placid look on your face and a calm voice, drill them and drill them hard.
Many consultants in this industry, myself included had to learn this lesson the hard way and took a lot of time and effort to correct the mistake of bringing on the wrong individual for the solution we were seeking. This is an extremely high stress industry and the environment is constantly at 100 degrees.
Concentrate on being calm, forward thinking, compromising on some issues and uncompromising on others, write down 10 pages of questions and when you sit down with the candidate ask all those questions and other questions that come to mind during the meeting. Test them, push them and get the right person for the job.
Valuations, S1 Filing, Taking Your Company Public and Investor Relations Solutions Free Video Download , Take Your Corporation Public and Globalize Your Business call Princeton Corporate Solutions at 267-233-0183 The No 1 Industry Blog We Can Make Global Growth Happen For Your Company
I deal with S1 attorneys all day every day and most of them are entrepreneurial, hard working and interested in helping you in any way they can but there are also a lot of bad ones out there. If you are taking your company public the last thing you want is a broke as a joke s1 filing agent.
I recently had the misfortune of working with (for a very short time I might add) a New Jersey lawyer who had us all convinced by her pepper gray hair and fluency of legal jargon as a second language and quick calls to what she had us convinced where big shot investors who had millions to put into this and other transactions we brought her way.
During initial negotiations she and I sat down in a coffee shop and went over her equity position and fees in the transactions that she’d be working on for us and it was pretty simple and straight forward. I would have my team organize and structure the company and transaction and she would simply file the s1 in exchange for 2% to 3% equity. Pretty nice payday for minimal work and gaining equity in an average company producing $5m+ per year.
Ah yes, but when it sounds too good to be true it is and when it seems too easy of a negotiation…it is! When she sent us the contract she felt the need to add a few percentage points to the tune of 7%, making a total of 10% equity and she also was charging an extra $10k to fill in the blanks on your prototypical PPM doc. Why did she jack up the price? Her response was, “This S1 will have comments”. I almost died laughing. Of course it’s going to have comments with the SEC, that’s why it’s called the ‘comments’ stage.
We talked her into taking 2 payments for the $10k, half upfront and half on completion but we really should have dumped her right there. She didn’t want to keep her word on that either so I paid her the last payment before the fee was due and just got rid of her.
Turns out she never filed an s1 before and her whole act was a sham. She was desperate for cash and nickled and dimed us the whole time. I laugh about it now but it wasn’t funny when it happened. We lost over a month of transaction time because she couldn’t tell the truth.
The client was going public on the OTCBB with a valuation of around $5m, her suggestion was to raise capital pre public for $1 per share because the company would have a hard time qualifying for the NASDAQ if it started at anything less than $1. This company was years away from even considering the NASDAQ as an option but her in experience and need to prolong the deal to rape us for fees was so blatant and careless that she did everything she could to add as much confusion to the deal as possible so that no one knew what was going on, therefore she got away with a lot and was able to pick our pockets for weeks before we got rid of her.
The moral of the story is this: not all attorneys are rich. The truth is, most are very modest as far as their earnings. There is too much competition these days so there are predatory lawyers out there that will lie, double talk, triple talk and run you around in circles. All the while the clock is ticking and they are billing you like it’s going out of style. Watch your back with the dead broke S1 lawyer.
S1 Filing, Valuations, Take Your Company Public and Investor Relations Free Video Download , Take Your Business Public and Globalize Your Business call Princeton Corporate Solutions at 267-233-0183 Check out the Public Market’s Number 1 Industry Blog We Can Make Global Growth Happen For Your Company
Ok so your company is growing and to keep that growth perpetuating you need capital. You’re a solid business; you have nice profits, hey, why not take your company public? Just get a structuring consultant, PCAOB auditor, line up your post public investor relations and don’t forget to find a good S1 filing attorney that can get back to the SEC during the comments phase and get you to FINRA for a trading symbol ASAP.
You meet with the attorney; she’s a sweet little old lady in her late 50’s. She tells you how great it is to work with you and she loves your company. You decide her office is too far for your first face to face meeting so you meet her at a slurpy shop. She gets a large orange tasty freeze, you get pineapple and she grabs the bill and there you sit, slurping away as you chat about how your company is about to go big time. First you’ll conquer the OTCBB, then the NASDAQ blah, blah, blah.
You get to the awkward part of the conversation where you start to discuss fees. She tells you she loves your deal so much that she’ll do it in exchange for straight up equity, 3% of the company and she’ll even throw in 10k and 10q filings and general contract review for one year after you go public at no additional fee. After all, your company is worth $10 million, you’ve spent 9 years building the company; it seems she appreciates that and you grab the contract and feverishly sign and initial all pages. You slap the pen down, take one last gulp of the, now melted, pineapple tasty freeze and you slap hands, heck you run around the slurpy shop throwing high fives at anyone willing to get into the madness.
You drive home with dollar signs in your eyes and a week later you get the ‘real’ contract, you realize that what you signed in the slurpy shack was just a letter of intent and this paperwork has numbers that you never discussed such as ‘10% equity’, ‘$10,000 PPM Fee’, ‘DPO’, ‘100% Restricted Shares’. You think there is a mistake so you reach for the phone to call this sweetheart lawyer who bought you that luscious slurpy to remind her of your conversation about 3% equity, no upfront fees, IPO and Free Trading Shares. You dial the number on her business card “beep, beep, beep” ah nuts you called the fax number. you dial again and this time you get through, she picks right up and says in a sweet voice, “oh how are you? I was just talking about you to my neighbor with Alzheimer’s and a lazy eye from her recent hip replacement surgery which was supposed to be a consultation for an eye exam so she could get contact lenses…”.
You tell her that you got her invoice and there must be some mistake, “oh no mistake sweetheart, those are my fees” she says. “But you told me something completely different at the Slurpy Shack! You told me that I only had to give up 3% of my company to your firm and that there were no additional fees because of the revenues from my company and that we would do an IPO instead of a DPO because I needed capital to run my business post public”.
“Oh I’m sorry”, she says, “those are my fees, your deal will take a little more work than I thought”. You look at the phone and hang it up. You’re dreams are shattered, you just paid off a big line of credit so you don’t have the $10k and you can’t give her 10% instead of 3% that just doesn’t make sense and why in the heck would you do a DPO when you need the capital in the public markets to fund your business in a way that only an IPO can? This attorney just doesn’t get it. Instead of giving you what you need, she’s giving you what her limited technical capabilities enable her to give. She doesn’t even know how to do an IPO, only DPO’s and she needs the 10K upfront because she’s not even writing the PPM, she’s outsourcing that. She lied, she misled you but hey, all is fare in love and S1 filings.
Congratulations! You’ve just been through ‘S1 Attorney 101′. Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see and when you get a great deal with from an S1 filing lawyer, pinch yourself because you’re only dreaming.
For companies wanting to go public the basic understanding is to find an S1 attorney that will look out for your best interest and make the process easy. But what you’re not thinking about is the sub-sector of predatory attorneys that just look at you as easy prey. They’ll jump into your company, distract you by confusing you with technical jargon, fast talking and stressful scenarios that could never happen and when you’re not looking they’ll carve out a nice fat piece of equity on top of their excessive fees that pile up as they rob you blind with their insularely fees.
Qualify your S1 lawyer the way you would a blind, deaf, mute, quadriplegic proctologist before you go in for surgery. The fact that they can do what you’ve read in their promotional material is possible but most likely won’t happen, not that it can’t happen it’s just they can’t make it happen. Got it?
Be wary of S1 attorneys that will try to confuse you and distract you from your original goal. Let’s say it was your goal to go public on the OTCBB, the attorney who wants to take you for a ride will distract you with statements geared towards far fetched issues to scare you into submitting to their, not so far off, actions of adding fees, slicing off equity and other things of this nature. A perfect example is an attorney who gets involved with the client’s PPM share price with oppressive authority. If you’re company has a valuation of $3m they are trying to tell you to sell shares pre public for $1.00 or so which is absolutely, completely unrealistic, especially when you look at existing in the post public arena. They will tell you that at .20 cents per share pre public your pre revenue company will never have a chance to get on the NASDAQ (NASDAQ should be the furthest thing from your mind at this stage as you should be focusing on your pre public share price and post public IR). If the predator S1 lawyer sees you’re organized and have a solid comprehension of the process they will take away your confidence in those around you to gain more dependence by you. They will tell you that you can’t pay your IR firm the way you’ve already pre negotiated or that they are dirty or whatever.
When it comes to the PCAOB audit they will absolutely insist on you using their guy even though he charges twice the amount of other firms that gave you a quote and you can rest assured that the markup is their commission for scaring you into using this firm.
At the end of the day the predatory S1 attorney will confuse you, up-sell, over charge, scare, belittle and whatever else they have to do to make sure that at the end of the day they can get away with charging and taking everything without having to deliver anything and it will be structured so that the blame falls on you for not fulfilling the obligations set on you by the attorney. Good luck out there!
Before you decide to go public allow me to paint a picture for you. You’re on a crowded beach, the water is warm, the waves are calm and you decide to break away from the crowd and confidently swim a little further than everyone else. All is calm; the sun gently warms your back as one stroke after the next takes you further from the beach and closer to the distant horizon. A few minutes later the sun is covered by clouds and like a bomb ‘BAM’ a crack of thunder, lightning lights up the sky and buckets of rain begin to pour from gray clouds. You look back and the entire beach is deserted.
The lifeguard shack is empty and the waves begin to build. You’re trying to swim back to shore but the current violently drags you out further into the ocean. You fight to stay afloat as one wave after the next crashes upon you. Your lungs fill up with water, you’re muscles cramp and just as you’re about to give into your fate, the rain stops and the water becomes calm. You can gather just enough energy to begin to swim back to the beach. All of a sudden you feel a bump on your thigh and then a sharp pain on your foot as you’re drug down into the darkness and as you fight to free yourself you notice that you’ve unknowingly swam into the center of a starving school of sharks and they take turns gnawing off pieces of your flesh.
Your arms, back, legs, neck, face, chest and feet all shredded by the razor sharp teeth of sharks. The blood only attracts more sharks of different colors and shapes. All you can do is kick, punch and scream to keep your limbs intact then suddenly you feel sand beneath your feet, you’ve reached the shoreline and you craw with every ounce of strength you have left toward the abandoned lifeguard shack. Once you’re on land you look out at the ocean and the entire expanse of the water is teaming with sharks. You look down at your body and though in one piece has been ripped to shreds.
This is the most accurate description I can give of what it’s like to try to go public or expand globally without the proper game plan and consultants watching your back and helping you contemplate your chain of moves as you go forward. There is an entire industry out there that is just waiting for you to step off the path and into the shadows so they can get a piece of you. Wasted capital here, wasted capital there, it all adds up.
When taking your company public or planning a product or service expansion into outside geographic proximities why go it alone? Seek out qualified consultants that can navigate you through the shark infested waters so that you can achieve your goals quickly and with as few bumps in the road as possible.
When companies contact us about going public they will typically start out by saying something like, “I’ve been watching your videos and have been following your company in the media for a while now” or “I’ve been reading your articles about globalization and going public over the past few months and…”. My point in stating the above is this, I’ve never had a company that calls and says, “We were going to get a corporate line of credit but figured we’d go public instead”. Companies that are going about this the right way will have spent time preparing their company to go public and they’ve taken the appropriate initiatives to set up post public finance options, investor relations and other efforts that are conducive to their company performing in the aftermarket.
As an IPO consultant it’s not my job to sell the company on why they should go public. It’s my job to question their motivations and play devil’s advocate to try to test their theories and inject factual information that will either make them more confident with their decision or talk them out of taking this path. Proceed with caution. If you get an IPO facilitation firm on the phone and they are absolutely in love with your company, idea and plans from the onset of the conversation, chances are you’re going to regret it in the end as this consultant has too much time on their hands and sees an easy ‘fee oriented’ target.
Going public is a mutual effort and can only work if both sides are going to make out financially in the end, not upfront. Consultants that charge front heavy fees are typically not going to be around in a stabilization or advisory capacity once you are public which means you’ll almost certainly fail to raise the public capital you’re seeking. Instead, find a consultant that levels out their fee structure with a general retainer fee and most of the compensation on the back end. Retainer fees of $40k to $50k are common among established and legitimate consulting firms. You’ll also have the PCAOB audit which will range from $10k to $30k and the S1 filing and comments fees for legal should be tied into the back end with some general expense compensation during the process. Your market maker attachment and 15c211 filing should also be included in back end equity by the consultant.
As far as equity compensation keep in mind that if a consulting firm wants to take all upfront fees and makes no mention of the post public equity distribution then they are taking you on as a client for the wrong reasons. If they believe in your concept and truly want to get involved to assist you in a well rounded, strategic offering they will insist on an equity stake of 5% to 20% depending on how much pre public structuring and strategies as well as post public work must be done.
In going public your company can become a globalized, stable industry powerhouse but attaching yourself to the wrong facilitator upfront can damn your efforts before they begin. Find a well published, full service consulting firm that will take control of the situation so you can focus on your business and not have to worry about the intricacies that can destroy your offering potential.
categories: taking a company public,advantages to going public,advantages taking company public,ipo consultant,ipo consulting,take company public,take my company pulbic
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