The ‘Spoke Wheel’ Approach To Taking Your Company Public
A public corporation, just as a private company is composed of several contributing factors that dictate the outcome of its success. If you visualize your corporate entity as the ‘hub’ of the wheel and each spoke as a ‘contributing asset’ to the company you’ll find that the more spokes in the wheel, the more weight the wheel can carry as its strength rests on scores of unified connections working together, each with one simultaneous point of interest, the hub.

These hub connections can be anything that contributes to the overall success and perpetual, yet controlled, growth strategy of the company such as: a dozen strategic partnerships that act as growing distribution channels for your product or service, finance alliances that take care of your growth capital needs, multiple legal professionals that you can tap into for advise and corporate strategies, dozens of companies within your industry that focus on a different element of the industry but cooperate as a referral source for new business and on and on.

Your goal, in creating a solid, strategically aligned pre public and post public corporation is to keep building spokes and bringing on partners and executives that can instantly contribute to adding more strategic alliances and growth enhancers to your ever evolving and emerging corporate wheel. If you are a public company, partnerships that you should have heavily represented in your model should be securities attorneys, market makers and broker dealers, several publicists with different areas of media focus, viral publicists, investor relations facilitators and service providers etc. Don’t forget the political contacts and padding contacts. By ‘padding’ I mean contacts that may serve no active role other than having some big names affiliated with your company that can gain attention within and outside your specific industry genre.

Taking Your Company Public? The Political Realities Of Going Public
Our firm takes small companies and industry genre leaders public in the United States. We specialize in the OTCBB, A to Z facilitation as well as NASDAQ IR and strategies consulting. We work with global corporate entities from Greece to China, from South America to Europe. I say this not to boast or market myself but to give you some comfort that what you are about to read is based purely on experience and absolutely objective and if you are about to take your company public or trying to turn-around or restructure your public entity, this information will be of tremendous help to you.

I see companies rise and fall before and after the ‘going public’ process. Some companies have great ideas and constantly struggle, some are hardly worth their weight in pocket fuzz but thrive and to understand why we must step back and look at a public and pre public concept as you would a globe that you can set on a desk and spin slowly over and over again. Stand on the desk and kneel on the ground, stand on your hands if you have to and the point of this exercise is to look at your public entity from every imaginable angle searching for any and all chinks in the armor.

Think past the basics of going public. Any informed CEO, COO or CFO of a pre or post public entity will comprehend the basics: you’ll have a first round seed capital raise, you’ll need a solid board of directors and solid executives with an appealing pedigree, your company needs a viable and yes, ‘recession proof’ product or service. You need a solid pre public corporate publicity strategy to make your company stand out like a blinding beacon with strategies that wrap around the corporation as well as each executive to increase the market awareness of their existence in the industry power structure and of course you’ll need solid and massive post public investor relations to stabilize and grow that stock price.

Now here is something that you may not have taken into consideration but is a necessity to filling in the gaps of your corporate profile as well as strengthening those invisible inferiorities in the corporate armor. Political power structure contacts are a must. Yes, political in every sense of the word. I mean you need strong contacts in your operating country’s political electoral system of influence to gain access to those ‘no bid’ contracts. It’s a mandatory evil that separates the men from the boys. Get to know lobbyists, congressmen, political attorneys, senators and most importantly get on a first name basis with the direct executive assistants for each of these players as they are the ones that will make the introductions.

Your face needs to be seen in the papers and journals alongside of these power players. Your name needs to be mentioned in cigar filled rooms where these individuals congregate. Don’t think for a second that hard work, blood sweat and tears will get your company to the next level; it’s all about connections and the public conception of you and your company.

Simultaneously you need to take into consideration the social political conception of your company. Truth be told, celebrities and corporations get involved with charities and socially conscientious callings such as Poverty Awareness, Haiti Financial Assistance, African Relief and like strategies not necessarily because they have a spiritual awakening and want to make the world a better place.

These companies are piggybacking off of the free press and the social idea that free money to charity somehow justifies the means in which they earned it. Free handout charity affiliation has a way of wiping the slate clean and telling the public that if they buy your product or use your service they are, in some strange way, making the world a better place and instantly something that was once considered a guilty pleasure (such as a $5 coffee and $8 scone from Starbucks) is now a socially responsible action because .02 cents per $20 net profit intake goes to pay for coffee beans that grow in a third world country that is trying to ‘get by’ and grow organic, whatever.

Going public is one thing, staying public is something entirely different, staying public and profitable is almost unheard of. Increase your chances of success by looking at all the angles!

Do you have stock but don’t want to sell it? Do you need cash now and want to use your stock as collateral for a loan but don’t want to lose your investment? Do you have bad credit but need cash now? If you answered yes to any of these questions it sounds like you’re a good candidate for a non-recourse stock loan. Many companies claim to offer loans against stock collateral but very few companies are able to back up their claims with cold hard cash. Most stock loans have the same basic requirements: the symbol must trade at least 50,000 shares per day (this qualification is very easy for most public companies), must be a major platform like OTCBB, NASDAQ, London Exchange etc (basically anything but Pink Sheets, but then again, who in their right mind would invest in pink sheets?) and the company needs to have some solid trading history; that’s it!
Anyone that has stock can easily use this security as collateral for a very reasonable loan that can extend up to 10 years and sometimes even longer. If you own stock, you should never feel hard up for cash. You can use your stock to collateralize a loan with an LTV of 60% to 80% depending on the stock. Use your stock as collateral for a business loan, pay off your credit cards, take a vacation. If you are a principle in a public company and your business needs fast cash use some of your company stock for that much needed cash for corporate expansion, equipment or executive bonuses.
“Advantages of a stock loan program are: Non-recourse, Credit check and financials not required, Rates based on the 90 day LIBOR, Provides cash for qualified emerging markets and start-ups and Loan payments are interest only!”

Serious Corporate Publicity That Will Transform Your Company Overnight!
We get calls all day, every day from companies that talk about ‘wanting’ real corporate publicity that will transform their company but few have the stomach for what it really takes and even fewer have the financial dedication it takes to obliterate their competition and take their rightful place at the top of the food chain.

Of course it’s important to cater to the traditional media (TV, radio, newspaper, industry journals, etc) but the genre of publicity that wins every time is viral publicity consisting of video, social and news bookmarks, article submissions, press release submissions and photo/logo sharing sites. The reality is online publicity is where you’re going to completely annihilate your competitors and claim your rightful position.

When you take into consideration the ultra powerful medium and stealth of viral publicity, all other promotional genres cower in comparison. Online your pre public or post public company will claim instant viewers and a cult-like following that TV and radio can’t even remotely compare. Billions of searches take place every day and it is the viral publicists job to do what SEO and traditional publicists can’t do and that is get solid search engine ranking while simultaneously bringing in powerful results that are targeted and strategically placed.

Forget pay per click, it’s a waste of your time. crush everything in your path with viral publicity that claims power positions on the natural search results on all search engines. You must have a solid combination of mediums at use to take control of targeted keywords and industry genres.

So the next time you tell your self-proclaimed publicist or seo agent that you need publicity that will claim your position and deliver virtually instantaneous results for your company, you’ll understand why there is silence on the other end of the line…because they have no clue as to what it takes to get serious results that will rip and shred everything in your path. The powerful combination of viral publicity and massive exposure will force-feed your concept to the willing masses who are pleading with a company in your industry to step up and spoon-feed the very info that your company is offering.

Stop wasting time and money with so called ‘solutions’ that don’t work. You need a publicist, investor relations specialist and SEO demigod that will take you by the hand and pave a way for your company to succeed.

Investor Relations Services: How To Truly Dominate The Public Market
If you have a public company or are in the process of taking your company public on the OTCBB or any other reputable exchange the reader must realize that going public is the easy part, having a successful public offering and preserving the longevity of your public entity is another topic all together. As a corporate strategies and public offering facilitator our firm is often called in after a company has a disastrous public offering or they’ve teamed up with the wrong service solutions that pump and dump their equity positions.

Here is the problem that most companies make when they are going public: companies don’t budget properly for general corporate publicity or solid investor relations strategies for the first year that their company is public. Investor relations and publicity stock promotion activity should be at the forefront of every public CEO’s mind.

If you are signing a large contract, publicize it with press releases, viral promotion and TV and radio expert panel discussions. When we take on a company for serious investor relations our campaigns are obviously completely customized but here is the skeletal structure of a prototypical campaign: strong viral publicity strategy consisting of video, article and press release submission, social and news book marking, logo and image posts and after this information has assimilated we get the client on prominent TV expert panel discussions with their name, company name and stock symbol on the screen.

Lastly, we then run two simultaneous 30 day stock promotion intensives with a massive injection of investor promotional concepts on both sides each day which consist of newsletters and stock alerts to ultra-active investors and other strategies daily.

The important thing to remember is that the above must happen monthly for the first six months to a year in order for your company to successfully trade. There is no other way around it, you must budget for your investor relations campaigns or your venture simply will not work.

Our firm gets around 200 calls per day from prospective clients and more than half of them are start-ups and the call typically starts off like this, I say “So Tell Me About Your Company” and can usually gage the multiple crucial ‘tells’ from what follows. What I have found is that people who are looking for money typically try to portray the opposite of their actual reality. If they act extremely confident they are making up for overwhelming insecurity and they will eventually crack. If they try to act excessively serious and intellectual they are most likely trying to reinvent themselves and coming from a background where they are not taken seriously. If they try to push the value of their ‘idea’ it is usually in the development stage and just that, an idea, to a VC that means…RUN!

So my job is actually quite simple when it comes down to finding those diamonds in the rough to structure and take public; just have the conversation based on the understanding that I am only hearing half truths and that the person on the other end of the line will say and do practically anything to get the capital that they feel they need. When it comes down to it there are very few entrepreneurs that can actually be taken seriously as a potential start-up that will be successful in raising capital, meet the expectations and deadlines of investors and function as a professional CEO when the company is public.

Oh, another thing when you talk to a VC never start off a sentence with “we are the first in the industry to…” or “we have an invention that is going to revolutionize the way people…” or “I have investors banging my door down to invest…”. These are tell tale signs of people on their last leg and you might as well fax the VC your talking to a bold text message that says “I’m A Loser, I’ll Waste Your Time and Lose Your Investors Seed Capital But Who Cares”.

I can’t tell you how many people have contacted me to tell me about their biotech, underwater, automatic cheese sandwich crust trimmer that they obviously believe is going to change the future of all mankind and when you ask them what their current occupation is, they are on some type of public assistance because 20 years ago they slipped on an egg in their kitchen and haven’t held a 9 to 5 job since.

Here is what I’m trying to say, when you call an angel investor or VC or consulting firm to sell them on taking you public or raising capital for your company, cut through the crap, we hear it every day. Nothing you have to say is shocking or unique, chances are, your undercover, ultra secret underwater basket weaving training videos have already been produced by someone 30 years ago and it was a flop (sorry but this is the reality you need to consider before trying to convince an investor that your basket weaving videos have a billion dollar, ready market and are going to feed the world’s starving multitudes with a 1% donation of the net proceeds). Yes, this article is ridiculous, it’s meant to be a bit silly while issuing a cautionary tale. If you have a truly good idea, I mean one that can make money and you have attracted some investors to help you develop your product or service enough to actually show a modest track record, purchase orders, distributor interest, reseller agents or anything else that would show the investor that your company won’t be an instant flop and that they will have a chance to not only recoup their investment but also make some money, only then are you ready to start posing your opportunity to funding sources.

Take Your Company Public, Our Investors Will Pay For It!
If you own or represent a company that is profitable, stable and are ready to launch to the next level by raising capital as a public company, Princeton Corporate Solutions (www.princetoncorporatesolutions.com) has the most unique turn-key solution for going public that the industry has to offer.

If you are absolutely set on going public and are willing to follow the lead of an established consulting firm with a solid track record of success call us at 267-233-0183. Here is what our simple and fast solution entails: The only out of pocket fee is $20k, our investors pay for the rest and our package includes: corporate structuring, board of directors selection, business plan authoring, private placement memorandum authoring, first round of capital raised by our extensive group of in house investors to pay for your SEC audit, S1 filing and comments, market maker attachment with 211 sponsorship, SEC approval, FINRA approval, 30 days of intensive investor relations so you can dominate starting the first day of trading!

No Other company offers anything even remotely close to this, all inclusive, turn-key solution.
Stop waiting, call Princeton Corporate Solutions at 267-233-0183 or visit our website www.princetoncorporatesolutions.com

Take Your Company Public: How To Virtually Guarantee A Successful Offering
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 début. 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.

Yesterday afternoon it was brought to our attention that there was an email “Spam” soliciting investors sent out to venture capital firms and private investors. We apologize to anyone that got an email about our investor finder service. this email was clearly NOT sent by us but a competitor trying to damage our reputation. We do not, have never and will never solicit investors by spamming. We uphold the SEC investor solicitation standards for ‘investor finders’ and would never pointlessly place our Firm or client base in jeopardy with such actions. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused any of you who received this unauthorized spam. We have placed this matter in the hands of our legal team to get to the bottom of this attempt at corporate sabotage. Thank you for your patience and again, we apologize for any inconvenience.

Why Are You Writing A Private Placement Memorandum (PPM) To Raise Capital?
I feel like I have to put this out there as a corporate strategies consultant with a firm that is completely submerged in the industry of authoring business plans, private placement memorandums (regulation d rule 504, 505 and 506), facilitating direct public offerings to our database of investors and taking companies public on the OTCBB.

When I get calls about private placement memorandums it is typically one of two scenarios: 1. They want to raise capital and they are shopping around for the cheapest PPM author they can find. 2. They have made the mistake of using the cheapest PPM author they could find and now they can’t find an investor that will fund their 70 page stack of toilet paper.

It never ceases to amaze me when companies are trying to convince investors that they are ready for that next step in their corporate evolution, yet they are being penny wise and dollar foolish with the most technical document their company has ever had done. And why do people put the cart before the horse? I mean, why do people write the private placement memo before they know who their audience is? As a rule of thumb you should write for your audience.

A ppm that is being written for venture capital firms will demonstrate and cater to more of an equity control and technical audience whereas a ppm that is being written for angel investors, private investors and small private equity firms who want to be in and out of a transaction will typically want to buy low and sell high and will typically want to invest in companies that are going public in as short of a time as possible.

The investors in pre public companies and other ‘angel’ type investors have a minimal bankroll of $1m or less (usually) so they have to be in and out of a transaction fast, thus the need for a ‘selling shareholder offering’. This is a mandatory prerequisite for a company that wants to raise capital from angels and go public. With a selling shareholder offering you are setting up a scenario that ever investor dreams of.

You are giving them the ability to buy deeply discounted stock and 3 or 4 months later, when the company goes public, they can sell their stock into the market at an offering price that is typically 4 or 5 times what they originally purchased the shares at and the company is happy because the investor created a bridge for the company to go public and then created a public float.

Now, after reading this, you will see why writing a PPM before you know who your audience is and before you’ve contracted with a consulting firm is a critical mistake. Find a consulting firm that is well rounded as a capital raising facilitator and have them help you set a goal as an end result and then build your strategy from there.