18. Small business advocacy: Small Business Index of Learning Companies. A major thrust of the shows has been to have our small business owners talk about their business plans, financials, key critical ratios, their equity and liquidity models, and their succession plans. We call it Exit at the Top or Step 8 and each step has a corresponding page about money. We have done three episodes of the show about it. A major focus was on business valuation and the answer to the question, "What am I going to do now (that I am wealthy and no longer have a job)?" These shows are:

• Selling Your Business: It's never easy.
• Publicly-traded businesses are buying small businesses.
• ESOPs and other Employee Ownership stories
• Exit Strategy? Equity and liquidity model?

In each episode we are attempting to give our viewers "insights and ideas to maximize your business value, build your team, and make a difference." (from the homepage of the website)

In episode after episode our stars are people who do it. More can. So we explore all possible equity models. We have worked with state securities commissioners to explore the equity options with a Direct Public Offering.

We have completed one episode of the show and many segments about the SEC's Small Corporate Offering Registration (SCOR).

We have worked with the authors of about forty "category-killer" business textbooks by Thomson Learning (and from 1998-2000 we worked with about 20 authors for Prentice Hall). This group has become our support network and they validate and extend our content.

The university-based servers enrich this relation. The entire case study, not just the clips in the textbooks, become available as streaming video to all the students and faculty. These schools are all also anxious to provide continuing education for small business owners within that market area.

We are working with the Risk Management Association and the Philadelphia Stock Exchange to do a program about key financial ratios and business valuation. We also continue our development of upload / download programs for the users of most popular financial software systems (i.e. Intuit, Sage and Great Plains cover 70% of the small business market). These tools will be incorporated within new courses within Learn Online.

Additional templates are being developed so particular answers are formatted as an outline for an ESOP program and as a SCOR document. Market-by-market, wherever we have installed an edge server at a university data center, we are glad to make these programs available to our partners as premiums. To test its merits and value, we have begun to offer the current LearnOnline courses as a premium for our sponsors.