Posts Tagged ‘investor relations agency’

IR Strategy – Investor Relations Group – Read This Before Choosing A Firm

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

I recently wasted three months getting to know an investor relations contact as it takes a few months before you’re ready to give up equity in someone else’s company to a stranger for services to be rendered in the future. The process is to first talk on the phone to the IR consultant and make nice talk. At this time you want to just let them talk because 90% of what they say is complete BS and 10% of it is what they wish they could do but up until now have never been able to.

I spent hours talking to this guy. He sounded so convincing, sure he’d dodge the questions about process and ‘how to’ but I figured we’d eventually get to that. We eventually met in New York, at our first meeting he picked the restaurant, he ordered lunch, I bought.

He was so smooth with his tactics and his con was so polished. He was an older gentleman with a very specific and well manicured professional pedigree, pure fiction of course but I found myself wanting to believe that this guy was telling the truth.

He told me how much he loved the company I was taking public and how he believed in what we were doing and how the company’s expansion was going to make such a great story post public to attract investors and create the market on and on. This banter went on for about two months and then as we were getting closer to our opening dated I started to press him for a process to bring together everything that he had been telling me.

I wanted him to show me a track record with trading symbols, only the ones that he mentioned to me that went from .10 cents to $1+ (I should have bailed at that point but I was still curious). I wanted him to break down how he was going to create the market for this company, I just wanted details. A few days had passed and obviously up to that point there had been no exchange of contracts since there was no process to agree to or anything professional from him to solidify the deal only words.

Then our S1 went up and he got an Edgar link. He was furious that he wasn’t on that S1. I got an email from his partner who I didn’t even know existed giving me the digital version of a tongue lashing, all caps, exclamation marks, bold print, you get the idea.

This was when I realized that no matter how objective I was and no matter how many angles I looked at this guy and his company and no matter how badly I wanted to believe that this was the one legit guy in a sea of razor blades and shark infestation that we call Investor Relations it was all just smoke and mirrors. He was a con artist, a confidence man.

I am by no means a new comer. I’ve been submerged in every aspect of this industry for over 12 years and I assist global corporations on the intricacies of going public, staying public and globalizing their strategies but sometimes we believe that we can meet someone that will shatter the prototypical mold of the realities we face every day. Investor relations is the one aspect of the industry that demands you to watch your back.

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How To Make Your New 'Public' Company A Success

Saturday, February 20th, 2010

How To Make Your New ‘Public’ Company A Success OK, so you’ve just spent 5 months to a year in the process of going public. You’ve paid fat fees to auditors, consultants and lawyers, now you’re public…now what? How do you make a success of your new public company? Obviously you have solid executives at the helm and a board of directors advising you on various strategies and setting up new strategic alliances. You’ve eyed up companies to purchase as growth through acquisition is one of the main reasons for being public but how do you keep your stock selling and stable? How can you make it so your company stands head and shoulders above all other priorities of your market maker or broker dealer? You need to make their phone ring by pounding the pavement via public relations and pure publicity.

A sizable portion of your corporate budget as a public company has to be publicity. You need a publicist that will get you on the radio and on television as an industry expert. You need to be mentioned in newspaper and magazine articles. You have to create a presence that forces people to call their brokers to get information about your company and make a move toward stock purchase.

You must take an ‘in your face’ approach to your public relations strategy and your CEO and even your CFO have to take this as their full time occupation until the company gets the traction it needs and then after you have gained traction, take it up a notch with a simultaneous approach of both publicity and product placement to start rapidly building your brand.

After this, again you should take it up another notch by adding publicity solely to market makers and broker dealers. Get published and buy ad space in journals that cater to this crowd. Do the dog and pony show rounds. Introduce yourself. Tell these industry specialists about your plans for the company this year. Leak out some potential acquisition info that can act as a juicy tidbit to get them to dig deeper.

Now you’re ready to take it up a notch again; be seen with the in crowd. By in crowd we mean other professional executives within your industry genre, not competitors but potential strategic partners, get snapshots taken and have your publicist start the hype machine and remember, anything even remotely ‘note worthy’ should have its own press release sent out to the masses!

Need A Corporate Consultant?, call Princeton Corporate Solutions at 267-233-0183We Can Transform Your Business

The Perfect Solution To All Your Business Capital Needs: A Must Read For All Business Owners!

Saturday, February 20th, 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.

Taking A Foreign Company Public: A Must Read!

Friday, February 19th, 2010

Many companies have a unique service or product but either lacks the capital or know-how to go public. Going public slams open the doors to massive global capital possibilities and massive partnering and strategic growth capabilities. A financially broke company should never try to go public to raise money to stay afloat as you’ll only attract the fee based predatory consultants who make their money on individual fee oriented services without the ability to bring it all together in a turn-key solution so in the end there is no accountability.

The prototypical company that will succeed in going public is either a profitable and mature company or a start-up with contracts in place for capitalization and patented and/or proprietary technology or systems that give it a massive edge over competitors. The decision to go public should be based in the desire for rapid growth and capitalization. The qualities of a company that will succeed on the public forum is one with a solid executive staff, experienced board of directors and a service that is recession proof (Yeah I know, what business is recession proof?), and finished with the actual developmental stage with a solid product or service and identified partners and distribution sources.

If you realistically have a chance at going and staying public you’ll attract consulting firms and/or broker dealers and market makers and many times law firms that focus on taking companies public in return for minor upfront fees and a solid equity position. Be careful not to sign on with a company that does not offer a ‘one stop shop’ or turn-key solutions which includes everything if you are going to be paying an upfront fee and equity. Many solid firms will ask for both fee and equity compensation and it’s worth it if they are truly capable of delivering a full range of services.

You should have a polite yet rigorous interview process with the firm before signing on. The ideal situation for a company going public is to partner with a consulting firm or broker dealer who offers absolutely everything you will need to succeed in the pre-IPO and post-IPO market. Expect to pay a fee for corporate structuring, business plan, private placement memorandum and Direct Public Offering to the firms database of investors (if they do not offer an introduction service to investors you should not take them seriously as a full service consulting firm as they are only offering you a sandwich without the bread).

Parts that a consulting firm will partner on if they can truly take your company public from A to Z is the initial Direct Public Offering to an in house group of investors who will invest the capital needed to pay for the audit (though many times this will have to come out of your pocket even if you team of with the best firms in the business), S1 filing and comments, SEC and FINRA approval and ultimately to the point where a market maker or broker dealer is selling your securities to the public. Sometimes it’s good to just hire a company that is strictly fee based for your ‘going public’ ambitions but be prepared to pay hefty fees. If you are a solid corporation with a realistic chance at going public, you’ll be able to tell by the tone that consulting firms have with you when you engage them in the initial phone consultation. If you’re ready to go public, a proper consultant will be able to identify your position in the market place to fill in the blanks.

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