|
banking
relations. Multiple relations.
Know your bankers by their first
name.
3. Some of
us should begin thinking about using our equity and learning about private
placements.
Most of us pull in
our belts and use cash flow to build the business. Regarding your banking
relations, you'll hear time and again, "Shop around." "Get to know your bankers
well!"
Also, at
SmallBusinessSchool we are doing a major amount of work around
the issue of Private Placements and DPOs. You'll never stop working on
your business plan! Discuss how your
intangibles are to be treated
within your financial statements. If you have a sophisticated web site, be sure
to itemize it within an addendum.
We believe that
your business plan should now begin looking more like the SEC's Small Corporate
Offering Registration (SCOR). It is not as sophisticated as an Offering
Memorandum, but it moves us all in that direction. It adds a level of
sophistication to our understanding of our business; and when we can talk the
business and back it up that that document, you will not be "paying" quite so
much for your money.Then, the SCOR can be used for DPOs, ESOPs, M&A, even
IPOs, and certainly as a loan doc.
Tou have many
opportunities here to answer questions online. If you take a few minutes to do
so, and you are registered, you will magically discover that you have written
that SCOR document. We'll be showing you ways to use the Small Corporate
Offering Registration (Reg D Rule 504) document (U-7). As a template for an
expanded business plan, it becomes your investment document whether you take on
debt or you sell equity. With each step our discussion about equity will grow.
It is the foundation of a good exit strategy.
Now it certainly
should be obvious that a business plan is a "must-have." If done robustly,
it'll uniquely push us to get to really know and use our financials. Of course,
you need customers who love or need your products; you need to have the right
people in key positions; and you need systems -- management tools, process
controls, marketing and sales forecasting and tracking, and real time expense
tracking and analysis.
Each of these
subjects is addressed by small business owners within the show.
You might not think
so, but much of the government is on our side. They know small business drives
the economy. Congress is especially on our side. They mandated the SEC to
develop a simplified equity model and the result back in 1991 is that Reg D,
Rule 504, commonly called, "a SCOR document."
As each of us
begins to use the SCOR document (as
our for our business plan template), it will create a discipline for structured
business growth. Then that SCOR can be used to raise as little as $100K and as
much as $1 million within a given year. Plus we will introduce the use of key
critical ratios to discern when-where-how equity or debt capital should be used
to grow your business.
Have a great
story to tell? Does it teach us something more about one of these ways of
raising money? Let us know and we will publish it here.
As we continue to
add capabilities to this site (see the
Future), these could become hot
pages. Eventually we will schedule events so you can meet investors and drop
off into individual chat sessions. We are just beginning this project. Help us
out! What resources have you found to be useful? What resources and interests
do you have?
Send
us a note. |
