You can avoid paying professionals by not using them. If you use them, you must pay them. You are wasting your time trying to hire professionals without paying their retainer. If you don't use professional help, it will cost you millions of dollars when you sell your company.

Going to your doctor doesn't ensure immortality. Using a professional doesn't guarantee results. It's why quackery exists in every profession. The Equity Finance Industry is overloaded with quacks, swindlers, confidence men, stock promoters and crooks. Money attracts worst element in Society. You'll find stock promoters running many public companies. You'll find quacks pretending to be merchant bankers. You'll find swindlers as stock brokers. You'll find crooks running investment funds. You'll find confidence men as investment gurus. Equity Finance is a minefield. Less than 2% of investors and honest business owners survive trip across this minefield.

There isn't a guaranteed way to raise risk capital. Consider every option in your search for funding. Some options are pure scams, like Prime Bank Guarantees (PBG). Some options are cost effective, if you have talent and contacts to make them work, like a SCOR offering for president of local country club. Many financing options require professional help, like taking your company public.

You must consider two issues in selecting your path through Equity Finance Minefield. Does potential financial reward offset costs? Is Professional Help you will rely upon honest and competent?

There are three ways that public company insiders can convert their equity into cash.

1. They can sell their stock to public. This is goal of insiders in most OTCBB and Nasdaq Small Cap Companies. It's summarized in axiom "Pump & Dump." The stock is promoted as insiders sell their shares into public buying. The SEC has spent 60 years trying to stop this practice. We have insider trading rules that ban it. Yet, insiders' goal, in over 80% of OTCBB companies, is to dump their stock on public. This strategy is unprofitable for promoters. It's not that promoters face undue risk from an SEC investigation. The odds of a high flying turkey being investigated are about one-in-ten. The profits for insiders in "Pump & Dump" schemes are small. It costs money to promote stock. The insiders illegally pay outside promoters with part of their free-trading shares. The average "Pump & Dump" company insider nets less than $150,000 from stock promotion. For example, Canadian media believes Bre-X Scandal was biggest mining stock scam in history. These newspapers reported that only one insider made more than a million dollars from it.