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On Friday, I spoke with Dave Lavinsky, co-founder and President of Growthink. If you don’t know Dave, he is a major “guru” when it comes to raising capital.

(Dave and his company Growthink have helped over 2,000 clients raise over $1 Billion over the past decade, and he has also taught over 250,000 other entrepreneurs how to raise funding).

So, anyway…in August, Dave is organizing a virtual Capital Raising Bootcamp to help entrepreneurs like you raise money to grow your businesses. And, as part of this program, he put together a really cool report called “The 12 Insider Secrets to Raising Capital.”

Here’s the neat part – I asked Dave, and he said I could share this report with my readers for FREE. So here it is:  12 Insider Secrets to Raising Capital – Download Now.

Being an “insider”, I already got my copy and was really impressed at how much good, useful info Dave was willing to give away for free.  So, I figured you’d like a chance to see it too.

I think you know how this stuff works.  The free report is great – really valuable stuff you can use right away.  If you get the report, Dave will also send you a few more emails inviting you to take the capital raising course, too. My recommendation is, if you want to raise capital for your company, take the course.

Yours Truly,
Mark

P.S. A month ago, I took another course from Growthink called “Dave’s Ultimate System for Raising Venture Capital”.  That was an amazing course.  Look, there are a lot of capital raising “gurus” out there, and I always take the time and expense to test drive anything that might give you a leg up when it comes to capitalizing your company.  I am 100% satisfied with the course I took.  Dave told me this new “Bootcamp” course includes all of information I got and a whole lot more, especially in the area of super-early stage capital, which is the hardest to raise. So, definitely check out the free report. I got a lot of great new ideas just from the free report.  Here’s the link again – 12 Insider Secrets to Raising Capital – Download Now

P.P.S.  I know business capital raising can be really challenging.  I’ve been studying it and doing it myself for nearly a decade now.  So, I just wanted to throw in another special offer – if you end up taking Dave’s course, I’ll also give you 3 half-hour personal capital coaching sessions myself, on top of all the good info and personal attention you’ll get from Dave.  Just let me know.

Last week, I got another call from the Census Bureau.  What I’m told is that revisions to NAICS are being researched by several agencies.  As I was talking, I recalled many other interesting links that can help people understand the already huge size of the “ecosystems sector”.  I’ve included them at this end of this post.

My point in all this is that taking care of the health of ecosystems is already so big that it should be included at the highest level of the NAICS system.  If the Federal government will make this change to the system, it will have a significant impact on the economy because the NAICS category system is used so broadly in everything from job listing sites to investment indexes, and simply seeing that the “ecosystem sector” is top-tier in NAICS will reframe the global dialogue about economy and ecology.

Here are some examples of infrastructure-scale projects that rely on the health of ecosystems for their economic function:

• The restoration of the Catskills watershed that provide drinking water to New York City allowed the city to save billions of dollars compared to expanding their mechanical water treatment system: http://www.epa.gov/Region2/water/nycshed/protprs.htm
• Many huge water-related ecosystem projects like the multi-billion dollar ecological restoration of the Everglades water system in Florida are listed at http://dels.nas.edu/water/eco_restor.php

Environmental Business Journal has a wealth of reports on US and global economic activity in this space: http://environmental-industry.com/

The website Ecosystem Marketplace documents how globally, ecosystem markets and incentives are increasing rapidly to help grow this new ecological economy: http://ecosystemmarketplace.com

The “Rise Report” published in 2003 showed that over $2.6 billion was invested in “double bottom line” Private Equity strategies focused on environmental and/or social benefits: http://www.riseproject.org/uzrise_capmkt_rpt_03.pdf.  This number has grown considerably since then.  The latest “green” private investment figures are available from http://cleantech.com

In April 2009, I submitted my formal comment to the process which you can read about in my last post on this subject. I figured that would be the end of it, but a few days ago, I got a call from a researcher from the Bureau of Labor Statistics who was charged with the task of following up and researching the merits of my proposal.  We had a nice talk, she asked me if I could provide additional names that would be able back up my wishes with some hard facts on the scope and scale of the green economy.

I suggested she contact Dr. Robert Costanza, founder of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont, Storm Cunningham, author of The Restoration Economy, and Lester Brown, author of Eco-Economy.  I also pointed her to the EcoSector Bookstore for more experts & authors on the green economy.

If you have the names of any other experts in the macro and practical size and scope of the green economy, please post them here and I’ll make sure the researcher gets the info you provide.

Mark

High legal fees present a huge obstacle to any entrepreneur attempting to raise capital the U.S.  In the Summer 2009 edition of Yes! Magazine, Michael Shuman of BALLE notes it can cost $50,000 to $100,000 or more in legal fees to prepare  legally compliant securities offering documents for raising seed and early round capital.

SOLUTION #2

EcoSector helps reduce and even eliminate these fees in several ways:

1. High legal fees can often result from an entrepreneur paying a securities lawyer to do non-legal work such as strategic planning, earnings projections, and drafting legally compliant business plans. This happens when an entrepreneur retains a securities attorney before their basic business documentation and capital strategy are in place. EcoSector helps green entrepreneurs seeking capital get properly prepared for their securities attorney, eliminating unnecessary legal fees.

2. Different securities attorneys can charge widely varying fees for identical work products. Most securities attorneys prefer working with huge clients who can pay huge fees and shy away from first round entrepreneurs.  Over several years, EcoSector has developed relationships with securities attorneys who prefer to work with early stage companies, and who have clear, fixed price fee structures.  By choosing the correct attorney, it is possible for an entrepreneur to complete the work Shuman mentions for $5000 to $15,000. EcoSector’s attorney associates can also help entrepreneur raise these fees in a legally compliant way, effectively bringing the out-of-pocket cost to the entrepreneur to zero for a signficant capital raise.

3. EcoSector Industry Association members can help green entrepreneurs defray legal costs by making additional gifts to qualified green entrepreneurs in increments of as little as $1.00.  Learn more about becoming an EIA member…

Michale Shuman of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies wrote in this month’s Yes! Magazine that while local businesses generate 50% of all economic activity, “local businesses receive none of our pension savings.  Nor do they receive any investment capital from mutual, venture, or hedge funds.  The result is that all of us, even stalwart advocates of community development, overinvest in the Fortune 500 companies we distrust and underinvest in the local businesses we know are essential for local vitality.  This situation represents a colossal market failure.”

SOLUTION #1

The EcoSector Portal is actually a carefully designed tool for solving the problem Shuman writes about by helping local investors find and invest in green businesses near where they live. The Portal can be used by community leaders now for free to help them organize and revitalize entire local economies.

If you like this reason, please join the EcoSector Industry Association today with your membership gift of $1 or whatever you like.

Why is it crucial to transform the financial sector? After lobbying Congress for the environment from 1990 to 2000, I concluded that financial sector decisions are even more important than political ones in shaping how people treat our ecosystems.  After all, even if destruction is “legal”, most of it won’t happen without business financing. And, even if the harm is “illegal”, the finance sector provides the money businesses use to either fight government  regulations in court or lobby to “legalize”  harmful activities.

I believe we environmentalists have an urgent need to come together and take true leadership roles in the finance sector if we want to accomplish long lasting eco-solutions. This means adding a whole new set of options beyond today’s “socially responsible” investment funds which totally exclude early-stage investing – the very lifeline between where we are now and the true ecologically-sustainable economy of the future.

Today, I’m kicking off a 10-day campaign to gain 100 new founding members for the EcoSector Industry Association. Several people have already become  paying members. These early members helped crash-test EcoSector’s unique recurring micro-gift system.  Now the technology is functioning beautifully, and it’s time to go to the next level!

Based on the membership gifts so far, 100 new members will make EcoSector nearly self-sustaining, and enable us to carry out vital strategies to reach a national audience with this message.

Each day for the next ten days, I’m going to give one good reason for you and your friends to join the EcoSector Industry Association for $1 or whatever amount you like. I’ll note one major systemic problem a day, and describe how EcoSector solves it. At the end of ten days, I’ll let everyone know the results.

Kiva’s success points to new opportunities to expand social equity and capital parity. On the shoulder’s of Kiva’s success, we can reach some profound new heights for people and the planet.

As you know, I’m pretty focused on growing the green economy. So, I study every funding strategy. Unfortunately, Kiva was not designed to grow the green economy, in the U.S. or elsewhere. In fact, when I last looked, they don’t even have a category for green business, even though this is a rapidly expanding field in many developing nations.

Expanding on Kiva’s Model to Grow the Green Economy

The core feature of Kiva is that donors put money into the system to benefit entrepreneurs. This is a huge breakthrough in conciousness. Before Kiva, most people felt that you should donate money to charities, but you should only “invest” in businesses. This old, default cultural philosophy has really limited the amount of good we can accomplish in the world as a society.

Soon, I’m told, Kiva will add a new program allowing donors to support loans to U.S. entrepreneurs. Here’s where I’m really wanting to see some expansion in our thinking as donors. The news is that Kiva will lend up to $10,000 per U.S. entrepreneur. Truth be told, there are very few green businesses that can really scale up inside the U.S. economy and impact the health of the biosphere with just $10,000 in seed capital. That won’t really even get a startup to first base in a first-world country.

Here’s where EcoSector comes in. We’ve created a gift system that allows the general public to donate a $1 or whatever amount they like into EcoSector’s “launch system”. This money is then used to pay the costs required to get a green business through their first “real” capital round. The fact is, what with securities attorneys and other essential services, it can cost an entrepreneur anywhere from $20,000 to $100,000 to raise their first meaningful round of capital. In today’s default capital system, this seed capital bottleneck is keeping 499 eco-solution companies from succeeding for every one that threads the needle. That means real solutions to our most urgent eco-challenges aren’t getting done.

Don’t take my word for it. This gap is real. Here’s a slideshow put together by a big venture capital firm that tells the same story from their point of view.

While you’re at it, I hope you’ll check out the video above that lays out EcoSector’s launch system in a fun and enjoyable way, or you can see click straight to it on YouTube to learn How to Launch 1000 Eco-Solution Companies by 2016.