Scandinavian Sparks Blog

Banks can be like a pendulum – they swing from one extreme to another without spending much time in the middle. After several years of aggressive lending, banks are pulling in their horns and battening down the hatches. The consequences are felt by businesses of all shapes and sizes, but smaller businesses are hurt more. Access to capital means being able to finance working capital, buying equipment, or financing an acquisition. When the banks get more risk adverse, capital becomes dearer.

One of the ways to mitigate banks’ decreased risk tolerance is to bolster the company’s balance sheet with private capital. This certainly is the case for acquisitions. Banks will require more junior capital to support a transaction.

But what do you do if you do not have the capital to firm up the capital structure to convince the bank to lend? You could walk from your plans, but if growing your business, purchasing that new piece of equipment or making that acquisition is the right thing to do for your business, then you must find another way.

Accessing the private capital market is an alternative. What do I mean by private capital market – I mean tapping into the vast amount of capital available from private investors. Just like investor preferences in public stocks and bonds, private investors come in all shapes and sizes. Whether you are seeking debt financing or equity financing, you will be able to identify investors that are looking for investments that line up with your offering.

Fortunately, there are what is called Reg D exemptions under the Securities Act of 1933 that allow small businesses to issue securities to private investors. Reg D spells out the circumstances under which smaller companies can offer and issue securities without having to register them with the SEC. These exemptions make the regulatory part of issuing securities considerably more streamlined than if Reg D did not exist.

The various rules under Reg D include Rules 504, 505 and 506. The general application of the different Rules is a function of how much money is being raised:

- Rule 504 applies to offering up to $1,000,000
- Rule 505 applies to offerings from $1,000,000 to $5,000,000
- Rule 506 applies to offerings in excess of $5,000,000

Part of the process of issuing securities under Reg D is preparing a private placement memorandum, or “PPM”. This document presents the transaction to the prospective investors with all of the information an investor would require to make an intelligent decision on your offering. For you, the issuer, preparing an accurate private offering memorandum and complying with the requirements of Reg D will provide the issuer’s officers and directors some liability protection regarding disclosure.

You have a couple of choices when it comes to writing your PPM. One is to have a securities attorney draft it. Hourly rates for securities attorneys will vary depending on experience and location; however, it would not be unreasonable to pay $300 per hour for a good securities attorney. At 40 hours to complete your PPM, you can expect a $12,000 legal bill just to draft your PPM.

The other option is to do 98% of the work yourself. But how you ask? Work from a professionally prepared private offering memorandum template. In most cases, if you can use Microsoft Word, you can edit the template. A professional template will include disclaimer legends; a summary of terms; risk factors; a discussion of the company including products, customers, market, industry and competition; capital structure; forward looking statements disclaimer; tax discussion and more.

If you have a medium-large or larger business or organization, you can realize significant savings by using T3 voice services, as well as improve the communications overall in your offices.

A high-speed digital Internet connection, the T3 line is capable of transmitting data at about 43 Mbps when the whole pipeline is used. The line is divided into several pieces so that several people can use the same connection.

Although the T1 lines can be divided into 24 channels, more divisions can be made on the T3 connection. The T3 can be divided up to 672 channels that can still be split as you would use it for telephone lines or Internet connection.

The long distance t3 require installation so you can not just purchase it out right for your usage. Companies are required to have fiberoptic cables that run into the telephone center and only from there that the lines can be divided into channels that would be used in the office.

There is one business number and this would be used as the main T3 voice service line. The extensions or other numbers or DID numbers can still be dialed from outside the system.

Computers can run on an always-up connection but only when there is enough bandwidth when the phones are being used. The T3 is a very stable system because the phone company constantly monitors the service.

Using a DS3 voice line in a business that you intend to keep in the same location for a long time would help you be able to save as well as enhance the quality of communication in the office.

Instead of running traditional phone service, you can use a VoIP-style system, which reduces overall costs mostly because it makes dialing phones inside your own system free – any business that makes many long distance calls to remote office locations will see those expenses vanish. It may also be cheaper to use T3 voice services than traditional telephone service provided by the phone company.

It’s not just your phone service that will be improved. With T3 service, you have enough bandwidth to broadcast real-time video through the internet with excellent quality. Your database systems will see improved function because of the enhanced intranet running in your company, and especially if you have a central database that serves stores you’ll see a real change in how efficiently and quickly things move.

Your business would be improved in the long run. Through the T3 service, redundancies and downtime are eliminated so it would be easier for employees to communicate with each other through the enhanced features of the T3 voice service.

An efficient system that also helps a business incur savings, there is not much to ask for.

Article by Van Theodorou, he will slash your business network long distance by 43%. He also has a video discussing the biggest challenge facing small business today at http://www.vidilife.com/video_play_1260518_Business_Long_Distance_Providers

In this day and age you’d expect business to be booming wouldn’t you? Well in some cases it is - but in others, there are a lot of businesses going under. Why is that? Simply put, take a good look at the rising cost of everything. Every time you turn around the price of something goes up.

Once the prices start going up like that it’s difficult, if not almost impossible to pass the rising costs to consumers without losing them. What a vicious circle. You have a product they want, but customers have a price point where they will do without (unless you offer an essential product like gas - and that’s another story) and will walk away without forking out their money.

If you feel your working far too hard and need a holiday, check out these Cape Town villas which are sure to do the perfect job for your soul!

There is much discussion throughout usenet, chatrooms and forums about dropshippers, and I have sat through many heated threads about the subject. Many will tell you that drop shipping is a scam, it don’t work, you’ll never make any money… But I know these things just not to be true, as I have talked with those doing it, work with those who do, and am the webmaster of the site belonging to someone who manufactures and drop ships his products. I have also used this method in the past.

First of all, using drop shippers is not a get rich scheme, or is the answer to all of your problems, and, like any home based business, requires some research and some work, but done correctly, can be very profitable.

Let me explain the proccess in a nutshell.

First you decide what you are going to sell online. You then find a drop shipper that carries the product. You place the images and descriptions on your website or auction. When you make a sale, you send the order on to your drop shipper, who in turn sends the product to your customer. The profit that you make is the difference in the price that you charge.

Deciding what to sell is one of the most important decisions that you will make, and this is where many trying to get into the business fail. You must take the time to research the market. This research involves finding out these things…

Wholesale Distributors Tips

1) Pretend for a moment that you have decided to sell remote controlled coffee makers, (I am using this as an example, as one of these sounded real good yesterday morning. Pardon me if I sound like your Junior Achievement teacher in high school.) and Is there a lot of people selling these handy little devices? If there is, this just might not be a good thing, as an oversaturation of a product makes it difficult, or impossible market to compete in.

You can find this out by going to eBay, or to search engines and looking at what others are doing. An over saturated market such as home electronics is just about impossible to compete in, without cutting prices, and right square into your profits. This is why someone selling rolling pins or dog shampoo might just make a killing, while the guy selling car stereo systems is not selling anything but a pretty cool website.

2) Are there people actually buying Remote Controlled Coffee Makers? One way to find out, is by going to eBay and looking at how many bids and clicks that those who are selling these coffee makers are getting.

Of course there are many other ways to research this, such as market research software, and I will get into these in a later article. There must be a market to sell your products to, or you are just chasing your tail. This part is called “demand”. Demand for the product that you are selling. This is why those home based businesses that are involved in “niche markets” seem to thrive.

3) Where can you get these coffee makers. are you getting them from the manufacturer or authorized wholesale distributor? If you don’t you might be getting ripped off. Research your Sources! Do they drop ship? If not, then you will have to stock your inventory. You can save a grip of money by doing this, if you have the room to do this. Buying in bulk can save you money, if the shipping fees (do the research first!) don’t eat all of your profits.

4) Do the math!!! Figure in all of your costs! After you have decided what to sell, you must figure what you are going to sell it for. Once you have added in selling fees (if you are using auctions to sell), you must consider shipping fees (if you are not using drop shippers), taxes, and any overhead that you might have. License fees and hosting fees, if you own your own site.

(I hope these things that I have mentioned here do not discourage you, because these are the same things that you need to run any business. If these things do overwhelm you, you might want to consider affiliate programs for your first internet venture, as they cost nothing).

With all this considered, you should still be able to make a profit with the product that you choose to sell. If the math don’t add up to profit for you, then you should find a different product to sell.

I have only touched on the basics here, but I hope that this article has helped you understand how drop shipping works.

By the way, find out - maybe if you apply for government grant it can help this type of activity.

When we’re using new services and tools, often we’re bothered about the costs. These days you’ll note that it’s like a rule that every new service is costly, and most of us don’t even bother to use it until the price doesn’t go down.

The same preoccupation with all new things that involve cell phones has found it’s way to the reverse cell phone look-up service as well. These cell phone look-up services allow the customer to search for any cell phone or standard number and find its owner.

So any idea how much you should pay for cell phone trace as a consumer? Well, the answer is $0, if you do not require reverse cell phone lookup. But always remember that the price of whatever thing that is for a trade is actually not determined by its genuine worth but relatively on how much people are prepared to shell out for it.

You should always make an effort to compare and contrast the services of the regular directory assistance and a reverse phone lookup service. The cost to make a call to directory assistance is so insignificant that you will likely not even detect the cost on you monthly telephone bill.

Conversely, with the drop in prices, recently few of us have bothered to use our old phone books anymore. Directory service is really quite cheap. It’s also very quick and saves us from the laborious task of perusing a phone book. Also, the Internet phone number search is free and fast too.

Actually getting the information that you require by using the cell number must be free or at any rate should be very cheap. At times, just like it is difficult to find ordinary phone number requests, you may have difficulties finding the information. You will see that many cell phone numbers are unlisted just like standard landline phones.

There are no other alternatives for finding this information that you seek. Utilizing paid services to find out an unlisted phone number is your best bet, and reverse cell phone lookup is just one example of this. Although you may have to invest a bit of money and time to get what you need, the end result of obtaining the information you need will be well worth what you spend.

Now could be just about the time to invest in property, either by home buying as Cash House Buyers or by investing in a home buying or analogous property company that has a sensible survival plan to take it through the Economic Situation

It’s ironic that falling property values have at least somewhat led to the present Economic Situation. This is in turn creating a crisis in confidence amongst Bank Shareholders, because they know that if they hang on to those shares too long when others flee, the share value will inevitably dip below the critical value which renders the bank’s capital inadequate for loans and deposits on its books.

At this moment a rescue package has to be put in place, and that means either nationalisation or takeover by a competitor. At this point the unlucky shareholders have forfeited all negotiating rights. The rescue has to go ahead, and the government or the buying Bank can’t pay more than the then current distress value of the shares.

So, where can you safely place your hard earned cash to work for you in these troubled times?

Well if you make sure you have more than sufficient ready cash to get you through anything the next 2 years can throw at you; why not use some of the remainder in becoming or investing in home buying either as Cash House Buyers or by investing in a home buying or analogous property company that has a sensible survival plan to take it through the Economic Situation

If this looks like foolishness, consider this; in the UK, simply to keep the Market stable over the next ten years; three million new dwellings are needed. At the present rate of building, we’re not likely to see more than a third of those constructed. This shows that the medium and long term prospects are excellent for investing in property, because it’s much more probable that demand will outstrip supply than the reverse happening.

Cash House Buyers and Home Buying Companies typically buy properties at 80% of market valuation, because the sellers are more than happy simply to find somebody to “sell my house”. This ensures that they have a reasonable margin to pay for all their own costs, insulate them from the market falling a few more percent in the short time they own the property, and allowing a discount to make the sale happen quickly.

If you don’t fancy the Cash House Buyers function for yourself; you’ll see lots of good opportunities turning up to invest in Home Buying Companies. Many Home Buying Companies have used loans to allow them to maximise their property portfolio, and so significantly improve their Return On Capital Employed. Now they need to cut back borrowings, and they require an injection of cash to do that and to make sure they can service their remaining debts until the market stabilises and begins to prosper again.

If you’re considering such a move for your cash; do all the due diligence, and especially make sure that your investment will be enough to ensure the company’s survival, and will give you enough of a voice to make sure that it does just that.

Corporate awards can be seen in two ways. First they can be considered a marketing opportunity - a way to gain golden media coverage as a result of the recognition such an award can bring. On the other hand awards can be seen as a way to raise the competitiveness, products and services of the players in an industry. It can also help to promote charitable work or green ideologies.

As explained at corporate recognition awards the basis for selecting which organizations are to be awarded may differ from country to country or industry to industry. However, some of the judging criteria are the same the world over. Safety of the organization, and that includes employees is one of the criteria utilized often - more so if a organization does not report any hazardous accidents like fires, especially in factories.

The business’s general operational standards; and this includes its equipment, employee’s tools of work, record-keeping skills and the general overview of how the company is run is yet another way to identify whether a business can be rated the best against the other organizations in the same industry.

The manner in which a organization utilizes technology is also another criteria for organization recognition programs. Some companies may have the technological advancements and lack the proficiency while at the same time another may have the proficiency but still utilize old-fashioned methods. Company programs should focus on making them count in the activities of the world markets and should be relevant not only to a company’s patrons but to the larger community.

Company recognition award ceremonies themselves are excellent places to identify one’s competition, make great contacts and secure important business.

Many business owners know the following situation: They sent invoices to a person, and a few days later the mail is returned to sender because the addressee has disappeared. Now the problems begin. You want to find the current address quickly and cheaply. Fortunately there are companies which are specialized in address investigation: Personensuche Anschriftenermittlung

A very good company for finding the new address in Germany and Europe is Supercheck in Cologne. They offer address research online with very high success rates and at low prices. Here are some benefits which are offered by this succesful vendor:

Clients do not have to pay a membership fee. They only bill every single research at a very reasonable price. If they have to do official research at the authority databases they do a new inquiry each time so that the customer does not get outdated search results. Supercheck does not only do address investigation in Germany. They also offer their service for finding disappeared people in most other European countries. They are able to find addresses virtually anywhere in Germany and Europe - for instance here: Personensuche in Deutschland. Supercheck has a very high success rate because of their sophisticated 3-level-research system. They double check each address by sending a real paper mail to them before the client gets the result.

The new addresses are delivered online and can easily be checked by the customer. And only the real researches have to be paid. There is no membership fee and no minimum quantity of researches. Supercheck clients order more than 2.5 million address investigations per year. There are already more than 13,000 customers using this system. So they are one of the leading players in this market. Finding the new address is very cheap with this system. Customers like business owners could not do the research on their own at lower costs. When the address is found the customer is notified via email.

Here is my reason for writing this article about LifeLock and Debix.

The other day two friends were debating which was better Debix or LifeLock. I actually listened closely to this debate as I too was thinking about purchasing identity theft protection. This is what I learned from that conversation.

Life Lock is the best known when it comes to identity protection services. They do all the work for their clients even though many things could be done yourself for free such as placing and renewing a fraud alert. Lifelocks marketing ploy is to proudly display CEO Todd Davis’s social security number to show how confident they are about protecting your identity. This is how I first became conscious of them.

Life Lock is also able to continuously make a name for itself because they have been recognized by multiple agencies. LifeLock has some add-onprivate to ensure it is not being sold. TrueAddress verifies with databases that your address has not been stolen by a criminal.

LifeLock the only identity protection service who can effectively protect children. Life Lock is ISO 27001 certified which shows that their security procedures at company headquarters in Tempe, Arizona is first rate. Their investment in security makes them able to provide real protection of the information that people turn over to them. LifeLock was also the first to offer the $1 Million identity theft insurance offer.

Debix, another identity protection company gaining traction in the identity theft racket, is almost as good as LifeLock. They also put a Debix Safe Phone Number in your credit file, not your phone number. This keeps personal phone numbers private. In addition, during the credit approval request process, reporting fraudulent credit requests is easy to report to law enforcement by just pushing a button on your phone. Simply hit star to be connected to a licensed investigator who will help you contact the appropriate authorities.

Did you know Debix has a patented system that offers a secure interface for identity protection? Their utilization of fraud alerts is simply the best. With Debix you also get an audit trail in case an imposter impersonates you.

Both Debix and LifeLock place fraud alerts for you and order your three bureau credit report. They also remove you from junk mail and credit card lists. Debix also removes you from telemarketing lists.

The differences are Debix’s innovative fraud alert technology and low price $24/year compared to LifeLocks additional services including Erecon, TrueAddress, WalletLock and, of course, the $1 million of identity theft insurance.

I presume this helps you evaluate which company you should use. In my opinion you get better identity protection with LifeLock but at $24 a year Debix is definitely worth considering. Afterall it is $75 cheaper than LifeLock.

Barack Obama was born on the 4th of August in 1961, an African American citizen from Hawaii. His father, the elder Barack, came from Kenya and was taught by his own father to herd goats and do work on the farm. Barack’s mother, Ann Dunham, was a true blue American who grew up in Kansas. During the Depression, while his father was signed up for the World War II, Ann took a job at the bomber assembly line. She afterwards studied on the G. I. Bill. Then her family bought a house through the Federal Housing Program and left for Hawaii where Barack would be born.

Barack then moved on to Chicago in 1985 in order to pursue his civic plans. He became a community organizer with Christian groups who seek to uplift the conditions of the people residing in a town beleaguered by crime and high unemployment. Barack believed in the cause of these groups but after some time he wanted to see changes effect a wider populace. He then concluded that those changes must become definite and binding to all. From there, he aspired to change the nation’s laws and politics.

Back at the University of Hawaii, Barack Sr. and Ann met. Ann was a student there while his father had a won a scholarship to the United States. Sadly, Barack Sr. needed to return to Kenya for personal reasons. This resulted in the young Barack being raised by his single mother in Hawaii and in Indonesia for several years. Afterwards they moved to New York and there he graduated from Columbia University in 1983.

After being accepted into a student career at Harvard, he earned his law degree. Even from there, Barack has proven his abilities and became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. Following his studies at Harvard, he went back to Chicago and practiced his profession as a civil rights lawyer and taught constitutional law. His strong morals and attention to detail led him to run for the Illinois State Senate where he won and served for eight years. It should be thouroughly evident in this Barack Obama biography study that the man did indeed earn his ground.

In the State Senate, Barack learned the value of unity and working together. Although it has been a challenge for him to work with both the Democrats and the Republicans, he learned to set aside politics to be able to create programs and projects that will immensely help the working families. A good example of this was the state Earned Income Tax Credit, which provided more than $100 million worth of tax, cuts to families across the state in just three years. He also valued childhood education and pushed for its development and expansion in the state. He also tried to initiate changes in the penal system through working with law enforcement officials and coming up with the resolution of standardizing the video recording of the federal investigations and interrogations in all capital cases. This was due mostly to the large number of instances when death row inmates were found innocent.

Come 2004, Barack Obama Jr. became the third African American, since the Reconstruction, to serve in the United States Senate. This was a truly revolutionary bid, this is precisely the purpose we see a Barack Obama biography today. Barack’s first act to be passed was the one he authored with Republican Senator Tom Coburn—a measure that was built on the aim of renewing trust to the government by allowing citizens to go online and learn how and where their taxes are spent. He also became the lead voice of the move to reform political ethics and remove corruption in Congress. He also became a champion of the veterans in the Senate. He moved to help the Illinois veterans obtain their disability pay while seeing to it that measures that will take care of the Veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan were completed upon their return.

In conclusion, Barack has been truly the champion of the people of America. He had serve the advancement of people from all ages and has participated willingly and with conviction in their causes. In spite of all these accomplishments, Barack remains humble and not self-serving. With his wife, Michelle, and two daughters, Malia and Sasha, he aims to be the initiator of change in America and balance the social order in America.