Taking A Company Public – Mergers And Acquisitions – When Organic Growth Isn’t Enough
In a perfect world public and large private companies could experience rapid growth by simply treating their client base right and taking and gradually making more transactions to increase revenues to subsidize the additional costs of more locations, employees etc. This is fine if you’re only trying to build a company worth a few million and then fold up when you’re ready to retire. But if you are looking to build a legacy company that you can hand down to generations, create jobs, expand globally and constantly have a steady stream of purchase and merger offers as a safety net, you need to grow through acquisition and the best way to raise the capital for this process is to go public.
Going public is a technical process where the post public promotion referred to as IR or Investor Relations is the key to stabilizing and growing your share price. Limit the volume of shares for public consumption, pump out maximum publicity, make brokers and investors comb the planet to find available shares and force the price to grow by leaps and bounds by creating demand. When you need funding use PIPES and pay off the loan so the PIPE firm doesn’t liquidate the shares onto the market, get those shares back.
I had a client email me a letter he got from a Do It Yourself investor relations firm. They claim to be able to train CEOs of public companies to take care of the IR campaigns for companies on the London, OTCBB and Pink Sheets. The claim that they can teach you to never need the services of an IR firm again and my response to this client was….Um…Are you an idiot? I guess I was a little upset since I own five percent of the company that he was proposing this DIY solution for IR.
Here is the deal. You need to three basic things to have a solid investor relations campaign. First you need a Pump solution. Don’t confuse pump with pump and dump. Remember, you always want to limit the shares put out to the public but you need to pump public demand and hunger for your shares to keep the price where it’s high enough to use as collateral for loans to subsidize growth without having to release more shares onto the market. Next you need volume. Keep the shares that are in the market place moving. Hold corporate shares to your chest and keep the shares in the public moving, without volume you won’t be able to do anything with your stock. Don’t mistake the concept of creating volume with releasing shares into the public to create cash. Last but not least you need to be in the public eye. You need to have a publicist that will get you on industry expert panels on radio, tv, blogs, podcasts and every publicity medium in between. Get your CEOs face, company name and trading symbol on the bottom corner of everything including but not limited to the bicep and forearm of every sales executive in the company. Ok maybe that’s a bit much but my point is an organization that stands together behind their CEO is an organization that will survive and thrive.
These were just a few of the points that one needs to consider when going public, trying to stay public and promoting a public company. In this industry the old conviction of . . . Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see is the golden rule.
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