Financing Your Small Business: From SBA Loans and Credit Cards to Common Stock and Partnership Interests by James E. Burk

Product Description
Secure your business's future using the right SBA loan, bank loan or equity financing for you. When it comes to your chances of receiving financing and doing it right, Financing Your Small Business provides you with all the answers you need. It helps you find ways to combine various types of financing and shows you how to get the money you need. Learn:

How to get a bank loan
How to make a better presentation How to get attention with your business plan
How to choose professionals
How to value your business
How to determine your investors' status
How to avoid securities law problems
How to find investors

From SBA loans to venture capital sources, Financing Your Small Business shows you all the ways to get the money you need.

Raising Money Just Got Easier.

About the Author
James E. Burk has been helping emerging companies in their initial stages of organization and growth for over thirty years. Mr. Burk is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin Law School, and is a member of the bars of the District of Columbia and Texas.

Richard P. Lehmann assists clients with a variety of business matters, including corporate issues and securities law. Mr. Lehmann is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia, Virginia and Minnesota.

Excerpted from Financing Your Small Business by James E. Burk and Richard P. Lehmann

A business plan is a blueprint of what your business is and what you want it to become. The business plan describes a serious problem suffered by individuals or organizations. It shows how your solution to that problem is much better-not just marginally better-than those that already exist. The plan shows how you will implement your solution, grow your company, and create ownership value.

Generally, business plans take two forms-one is the plan you write to raise capital and the other is the plan that represents ongoing evolution of your business. You will find that both forms must be updated frequently to incorporate your latest progress and achievements.

This section focuses on the plan you write to crystallize your business strategies and raise capital. Numerous resources exist in print and online to assist you in writing a business plan. These sources range from business plan software like BizPlanBuilder (www.jian.com) to the Small Business Administration's website at www.sba.gov, to classic works such as the Venture Capital Handbook by David Gladstone.

The private placement memorandum (PPM) is a somewhat stylized disclosure document, prescribed by federal and state securities laws. The PPM serves a different function than the business plan. The PPM is a legal retail document and the business plan is a strategic wholesale document. In other words, when you go to individual investors to raise capital, you use the PPM as your offering document. When you approach larger investors, sometime called angels and institutional investors, including banks or financing institutions, they are more likely to ask for your business plan.

A business plan allows you to address the essential issues of your new business, such as the unique benefits and competitive advantages of your products or services, your market opportunity and marketing plan, and how you intend to capture a defensible share of the market. The financial statements (income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow analysis) accompanying the plan will give you, your management team, and potential investors a roadmap of the next three to five years of your business. Your financial projections should not exceed five years, as too much can change in that amount of time. Three years is generally sufficient. What matters is that you select a reasonable time frame during which you can achieve your stated goals.

STRUCTURING YOUR BUSINESS PLAN
Before discussing the contents of a business plan, it needs to be clear that a business plan is a management tool-it is not a legally required document. If you have an existing business and intend to continue that business without specific plans for expansion or other significant change, then you may not yet need a business plan. If you are going to register with eBay to sell your grandmother's china online, you may never need a business plan (although you do need your grandmother's permission or that of her estate).

A business plan should be a living document that evolves with the business and is constantly a work in progress. Business planning is a constant process, not a brief project. Internally, the business plan is a useful management tool when it is continually updated to reflect the marketplace. It should not be treated as a paperweight. Externally, the business plan often secures bank financing and attracts private or institutional investors. When your company is more mature, a business plan may serve as a basis for a strategic alliance, a merger, or an acquisition.

Assuming the business has been determined to be generally feasible, turn to the specifics of the plan. Investors want to know some very fundamental information.

? What is your business?
? What is the market for the product or service?
? How big is the market for the product or service?
? Have you segmented the market into digestible pieces?
? What is the revenue model (i.e., how does the business identify and sell to its customers)?
? What have you done to develop the business model?
? Have you identified all the resources you need to support the revenue model?
? How does the business make money?
? Why is this product or service unique?
? What qualities give it a competitive advantage over existing products or services?
? How is it better, faster, and cheaper than other choices available to your customers?
? What tangible assets does the company own?
? What intellectual property (trademarks, patents, trade secrets) does the company own?
? Who is in management and what are their backgrounds?
? What does the investor get for the investment?
? How much will the business be worth?
? How long will it take to be profitable?
? What is a reasonable risk assessment?

Do not be intimidated by these questions. Very few beginning businesses will have all of these questions fully answered from the start. However, sophisticated investors get hundreds of business plans to read. Your task is to write a business plan that is sticky-a plan that piques the interest of an investor to look further at your business. It has been said that one of the purposes of writing a business plan is to get a meeting with a capital source. A general outline for a business plan follows.

Cover Sheet and Table of Contents
The cover sheet should contain the name of your business, CEO, and contact information (including the address, phone, fax, and email for both). If you have a spiffy logo, the cover page is good place to introduce it. The next item should be a table of contents of the major topics contained in the business plan. Some reviewers like to have the various sections tabbed for easy reference.

Executive Summary
This is the most important part of the business plan because it is the part read first and determines whether the reader goes any further. The executive summary gives a brief synopsis of:

? the company's strategy for success;
? the company's unique business proposition;
? how your business proposition offers a competitive advantage;
? the market you are addressing;
? a description of the product and services offered;
? the management team's qualifications;
? key financial data and a statement of funds required; and,
? a statement of how you will either pay the funds back or how the investors will receive a return on their investment.

All of these brief topic descriptions will be expanded in the business plan. The executive summary should be brief, usually no more than two pages. Typically, the executive summary is the section written last, after the whole business plan is completed.

Statement of Purpose or Mission
This is where you articulate the vision of the company and its management. Some writers have called this the distinctive value proposition of the company-the formula you have devised that delivers goods and services to your customers better than the competition does.

Description of the Business
In this section, you are giving the history of the business entity. For start-ups, the following information is recommended:

? name of the business;
? legal form of the business (corporation, LLC, partnership, etc.);
? state of organization;
? when it was organized;
? location of the business;
? brief description of the owners/founders; and,
? stage of development of the business-conceptual, start-up, emerging, mature.

Description of the Products or Services Offered
Describe your products and services and show how they are related to your mission. What is your business? Be clear. Many business plans do not begin to discuss the actual business of the company until the middle of the plan. Most investors will not be that patient. Tell it up front and tell it in plain language. If the product is highly technical, save the details for inclusion in an appendix. Keep the discussion on a strategic level. The potential financers are probably not yet interested in tactical details.

Management Team
On equal footing with the products and services offered is the credibility of the management team of the company. Investors say that the three most important factors for success in business are management, management, and management. In this section you will be providing a synopsis of the management team and their qualifications. You can include full résumés in an appendix. Investors, especially sophisticated ones, would prefer an A management team and a B idea to a B management team and an A idea.

What differentiates the A team from the B team is a history of solid success and accomplishment. It proves the existence of skills and experience that can mean the difference between success and failure. Do not merely state that the marketing executive spent decades with a Fortune 500 company. Instead, specify the revenue growth and profitability results achieved in products and divisions for which the executive was responsible.

Many start-up ventures have difficulty attracting an experienced management team before their business has been tested in the marketplace. One way to offset any lack of depth on the management team is to establish a board of advisors and populate it with persons well-known in the business and professional community. Often, advisors become more interested in the business and can be recruited to join the management team. Alternatively, they may introduce you to qualified management candidates.

Marketplace and the Competition
The marketplace and competition section helps you understand and define your market, the demographics and psychographics of your target customers, your competitor's products or services, and your business risks.

Describe the target market for your product or service and the trends in your industry. For example, your market may be consumers between 25 and 40 years of age in the Rocky Mountain states or the upscale furniture industry in Chicago. ...

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How To Take Advantage of the People Who Are Trying To Take Advantage of You: Credit Arbitrage by Joseph SB Morse

Product Description
JSB Morse, in the follow up to the popular How to Take Advantage of the People Who Are Trying to Take Advantage of You, focuses on one of the most profitable techniques of the series: credit arbitrage. Credit arbitrage is the method of taking advantage in the disparities between interest rates in the marketplace. Consumers can utilize low-interest debt to actually earn money-this book will show you how. Morse takes a simple, three-step approach to converting credit cards from an expense into a moneymaking tool. Complete with charts and detailed instruction, this manual will help you start raking in the dough with as much effort as it takes to apply for a credit card. Learn techniques on how to acquire 0% interest credit cards or get lower rates on your current credit cards; invest in any number of ways based on personal levels of risk-acceptance with that money; and maintain your accounts to maximize your profits. Morse has made it easy to start taking advantage of the people who are trying to take advantage of you; now all you need to do is start making money for nothing through credit arbitrage!

Get Your Copy Of "How To Take Advantage of the People Who Are Trying To Take Advantage of You: Credit Arbitrage by Joseph SB Morse"

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Where Underpants Come from (Paperback) by Joe Bennett

Where Underpants Come from (Paperback) by Joe Bennett

There are 6.5 billion people in the world. Line them up as on a parade ground, then inspect them like a commander in chief. Roughly every hundredth person you pass will be British. Every fifteen-hundredth or so will be a New Zealander. Every fifth will be Chinese.

Officially China has 1.3 billion citizens. Actually it has rather more, perhaps as many as 1.6 billion. That's as near as makes no difference a quarter of the world's population. It's also five times as many people as America's got.

Having gone to the trouble of gathering 6.5 billion people into one place, do another little exercise. Ask all the farmers to step forward, the people who make their living by tilling soil or tending livestock. Of those, one in three will be Chinese.

Dismiss the people and line up the world's pigs. I have no statistics on British or Kiwi pigs, but every second pig in your line will be Chinese. China produces 49 per cent of the world's pork and eats the lot. The figure for ducks is even more impressive, but they're harder to line up.

To put it simply, China is unimaginably big. And China is booming. That boom has only just begun. Most Chinese people remain poor but are keen to do whatever it takes to become rich. So China looks set to dominate the twenty-first century. And once it has gained domination there seems no reason why it shouldn't retain it for however many centuries are left to our species. China is just too big to argue with. Only India could put up much of a fight and it probably won't.

Already most of us are clothed by China, shod by China, supplied with hardware by China, effectively in debt to China. And yet most of us know very little about China. My experience is typical. I left university thirty years ago, ostensibly educated. My knowledge of China was nil.

Such ignorance has precedents. Until the thirteenth century, when Marco Polo got banged up in a Genoese prison and passed the time by telling tall stories to his cell mate, very few people in the West knew anything much about China. Back then, travel was more difficult and ignorance more understandable. Today China is only a day in a plane from anywhere else, and yet for most of us China remains mysterious. The reasons lie in China itself.

In the Chinese language two characters represent the country. The first is a rectangle with a vertical stroke through it. It means middle. The second looks like a malformed Christmas tree in a box. It means people. China sees itself and has always seen itself as the centre of the world. To the Chinese, China is all. It is the Middle Kingdom with the mandate of heaven. And the non-Chinese bits of the world have never mattered much.

For a couple of millennia China led the world in technology and pretty much everything else. Only since the eighteenth century has the West collectively caught up with China and then overtaken it. But the West's triumph looks like proving brief. China has rejoined the race and is coming up fast on the rails. It will get its nose ahead soon. Then it will streak away. Again.

This book recounts my first experience of China. There are plenty of better-informed books about China, but I suspect this is the only one to begin with a pair of underpants.

1

Becoming Sherlock

Within living memory, men's underpants were simple. They were white and capacious. When eventually discarded they were more capacious, but less white. Today they are less simple. The displays in The Warehouse in a Christchurch shopping mall hold perhaps a hundred varieties of underpants, from satin boxer shorts with scarlet hearts, to hugging hipsters with pictures of racing cars.

I buy six pairs. Five come rolled in a clear plastic pouch and they cost me NZ$8.59. They are the simplest, plainest briefs for daily wear. The sixth pair is for special occasions. They are black with a grey waistband into which the word 'Authentic' is embroidered. There is no vent in the front, but there are two stickers where a vent would be. One says 'stretch' and illustrates the verb with arrows going in all directions. The other says 'double front'. In other words, these pants will accommodate an erection and absorb accidents.

Underpants ought to be a swift purchase because the only consideration is practicality, but it takes me a minute or two to settle on the Authentics. What delays me is vanity. I want the pants to flatter me a little. It is a ridiculous concern. No one will ever see these underpants except my dogs and perhaps the occasional sexual partner. The dogs will take no interest, and if a sexual partner and I reach the underpant stage, then, frankly, it's a done deal. It would take more than pictures of racing cars to halt the momentum. Nevertheless I am clearly not alone in taking aesthetic considerations into account, otherwise there would not be a hundred different varieties of underpants.

The waistband tells me that my Authentics were made in China from cotton and elastane. Another label says 'CLASS' in capital letters, and on the reverse, 'Mens Lifestyle Underwear combines fashion styling with functional features for all-day comfort.' Despite the word 'lifestyle', the euphemisms, the needless capitalization and the missing apostrophe, I have to acknowledge that the label reflects my reasons for choosing these pants. They are conventional and sturdy, which is more or less how I am, but with a hint of elegance, which is how I'm not. But it is how I would like to be. These pants are aspirational. They cost NZ$5.99.

On the way home, with my pants in a bag on the seat beside me, it strikes me as remarkable that underpants can be made in China and transported to New Zealand, passing through the hands of, and making a profit for, I don't know how many middle men, and still be sold to me for just NZ$5.99. And as for the pack of five pairs for NZ$8.59, well, the economics of it is beyond me.

It also strikes me that I have effectively no idea how to make a pair of underpants. I know that cotton grows on bushes in rabbit-tail tufts, but not how those tufts become thread, or the thread cloth. Is the spinning jenny involved? And what about the waistband? I suspect the involvement of elastic, and that presumably means rubber, but what is the relationship between rubber, elastic and elastane?

My ignorance of underpants is representative of a far wider ignorance. In forty-nine years I have learned next to nothing about the commercial and industrial processes on which my easy existence depends. If some cataclysm were to reduce society to a few survivors, I'd be the one sitting on a heap of rubble with his head in his hands and no idea how to start again.

Back home my dogs follow me to the bedroom, where I pose before the mirror in my Authentics. The dogs display every bit as much interest in the pants as you would expect. But I have become interested in the pants, so interested that I send an email to my agent in London. 'Jim,' it says, 'I've got this idea for a book and I need someone to tell me it's a crap idea.'

I explain that I want to find out everything I can about a single pair of Chinese-made underpants, to trace them all the way back, if possible, to the source of their raw materials. In the process I hope to discover everything I can about the commercial world on which we all depend but about which I know so little. At the same time I want to learn something about that ever-growing giant called China. And it seems such a fine idea to me that without waiting for a reply I set about the research.

'Welcome to The Warehouse customer service. You're talking with Kim.'

'Kim,' I say, 'I've got a bizarre request', and I sense her steel a little on the phone. 'I'd like to talk to the person who buys your underwear. Not your underwear, of course, but, well, you know what I mean.'

Kim laughs. 'I'll put you through to the girls in Clothing,' she says.

I don't get the girls in Clothing. I get Sue in Gardening. I explain that I am after underwear. 'I'll put you through to the girls in Clothing,' says Sue. After a brief interlude of tinny rap music I get Kim again.

'Didn't anyone pick up the phone?' she says.

I explain about Gardening Sue. Kim asks what exactly I want to know, and then suggests that I try The Warehouse head office in Auckland. And I realize, suddenly, and much to my surprise, that I'm enjoying myself.

The head office answerphone offers four options, none of which bears any relevance to my request. I press Customer Service and get Kelly. I explain my purpose, conscious that I am refining the line already in the hope of kindling a flame of interest. When I say that I hope to track these pants all the way back to source, Kelly becomes gratifyingly intrigued.

'The bloke you want is Nick Tuck,' she says. 'He travels to China a lot.' She gives me his extension number. Her last words are 'Good luck.'

Nick Tuck's out of the office but his answerphone promises to return my call as soon as possible. It also gives his mobile number. I leave a message, then dial the mobile. As it starts to ring I picture Nick Tuck in an Auckland traffic jam or in a waiting room or a lift. And if, as Kelly suggests, he is the man I really need to talk to, the man who can set this quest properly in motion, the man with contacts in the great unknown of China, then I want to talk to him in more propitious circumstances than a traffic jam. I put the phone down.

The following morning I get an email from my agent. 'Joe,' it says, 'it's a crap idea. Best, Jim.' Well now, Jim knows his stuff. But I persevere, partly because it's costing me nothing, partly because I am enjoying feeling like Sherlock Holmes, but mainly because I am genuinely curious. I want to find out about these pants, and I also, just as strongly, want to find out what finding out about these pants will be like. How far will I get? And will I be allowed to see the mysteries?

Over the next few days I ring Nick Tuck's land line several times but get no answer and I don't leave the same message again for fear of seeming demanding. Eventually I ring head office again......
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