As part of our expansion we are going to be offering our client base and future clients a dual listing on the OTCBB in the United States and the dominant European exchange, Frankfurt Exchange in Germany.
As a journalist I find myself ghost writing books for self absorbed executives and politicians and never able to take credit for it. I usually get a call from the executive’s publicist and they want me to write a bunch of garbage about his soft side, his humanitarian side or his golf swing. The article is written, published, the clients happy and I feel like a sell out with no journalistic integrity because in this industry, to pay the bills means to compromise and do things you don’t like. This interview was different, completely different.
Today, companies are truly moving forward or crumbling, there is no in between. I hate clichs but this is reality. By now, unless you’ve been living in a cave you’re highly familiar with the successes, failures and genius of global securities guru Warren Buffet and monopoly mastermind Bill Gates. They’ve changed the face of business and all who come to the scene now seem to be some morphed hybrid of the two as neo consultants and corporate strategists draw their inspiration from all or a portion of ideologies and processes originated from these two men.
In the strategies of war, how does a new regional military power or upstart guerrilla troop solidify their position? They identify their adversaries and eliminated them. How is business any different? The truth is the strategies are identical while the actual elimination process differs. War is fought with bombs and guns, economics is fought by crushing an idea or believe system that perpetuates the money machine behind a company, take away the public believe system based on the concept put out by a company and you’ve eliminated their ability to survive.
Economics and Politics eventually converge and entwine into one unique process of strategy called ‘Globalization’. And in the world of globalization there are the tacticians and the strategists just as in a corporation there is the board of directors and the ‘C’ level executives or in Politics there is the lobbyist and their puppet politician. Both political and corporate spectrums have their controllers and their talking heads and an agenda that is assimilated from the top to the bottom but the ‘top’ to the public is actually the bottom and the invisible are always in control. Let me explain.
If you’re a board member, CEO, COO or CFO in an industry that is as cut throat as pharma, bio tech, technology, software etc industries you most likely have hired a strategies consultant to step in to help you gain a much needed edge over your competitors.
Before you decide to go public allow me to paint a picture for you. You’re on a crowded beach, the water is warm, the waves are calm and you decide to break away from the crowd and confidently swim a little further than everyone else. All is calm; the sun gently warms your back as one stroke after the next takes you further from the beach and closer to the distant horizon. A few minutes later the sun is covered by clouds and like a bomb ‘BAM’ a crack of thunder, lightning lights up the sky and buckets of rain begin to pour from gray clouds. You look back and the entire beach is deserted.
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.
When a corporation grows stagnant and lacks growth and the financial reserves are drying up the company’s C level executives need to give the three thousand foot analysis and look at all angles of the corporate entity as objectively as possible to find leaks and chinks.
So many times corporations look outside of their company to grow by way of mergers, acquisitions, licensing etc. Most companies lack the discipline to look inward and examine the elements inside the existing company to synergize and expand. Here is what I mean. Let’s say that you’re large landscaping company and you offer three services under this landscaping umbrella consisting of: hard-scape, lawn mowing and landscape architecture.