Is China more pro business than Obama?

May 18th, 2009 | tags: Board Services

Friday I attended the annual meeting for the RENN III Fund (one of my former clients). One of the speakers was Beau Johnson a noted expert on doing business in China.

What will $75 Oil mean to us?

May 18th, 2009 | tags: Board Services

I was asked today to comment for a national publication on the statement by T. Boone Pickens: “In an interview with FOX Business Network at ACG InterGrowth, T. Boone Pickens predicted oil will hit $75/barrel by the end of the year.

How do companies maintain margins in this economy?

April 2nd, 2009 | tags: Board Services

I was asked the question yesterday

How NOT to build an advisory board. . .

February 23rd, 2009 | tags: Board Services

My son wrote a post on his blog “How NOT to build an advisory board. . .” which I think should be of interest to all board members. If a company selected board members the way the government does I think they could be sued for dereliction of duty.

ACG Texas Capital Connection

February 19th, 2009 | tags: Board Services

Today I attended the ACG Texas Capital Connection in Dallas. A great program as usual. Over 1100 attended, clearly a financially knowledgeable group. The morning speaker asked is the economy was going to get worse, all 1100 raised their hand that it would. Hope we are wrong. Another interesting fact was that out of the 100 companies in the capital connection room, I could only find 5 lenders. Normally lenders are around 25% of the companies. Not a good time to get money.

Ruin Your Health With the Obama Stimulus Plan

February 10th, 2009 | tags: Board Services

Everyone should read this post Ruin Your Health With the Obama Stimulus Plan: Betsy McCaughey !

XYZ Adopts Shareholder Rights Plan

January 30th, 2009 | tags: Board Services

“XYZ today announced that its Board of Directors adopted a Shareholder Rights Plan. The Rights Plan is designed to enable all of the Company’s shareholders to realize the full long-term value of their investment and to provide for fair and equal treatment for all shareholders in the event that an unsolicited attempt is made to acquire the Company.”

You may have seen a number of these “shareholder Rights Plans” or as we used to call them Poison Pills. Interesting that companies that used to be very proud of not having anything that would hinder an acquisition now are rolling out poison pills with vigor. I think board members should think long and hard before voting on one of these plans for a company that may well be in Charter 11 with out a white knight to buy them out. The shareholder may end up with nothing.

RDSeismic LLC – Rapid Deployment

January 29th, 2009 | tags: Board Services

People have been asking for a update on my new company RDSeismic LLC. Well things are going very well. We just received our first order, nice to have a real customer, great folks who even paid in advance to help us out! . in addition we should have our Beta units ready to put out in the field within 6 to 8 weeks. Justin Farrelly and the team at Vercet LLC are working full bore on final design and software, Ricardo Molina at Amphenol Steward Enterprisis is working hard to get us the first shipment of the new connectors they have designed. Pip Sivakumar is waiting on use to get the final design so the team at MTI can start production. More info soon on the RDSeismic website, the designer should start work on the new site next week.

RDS as we said really simpleThe RDS unit really simple!

Is Oil

January 29th, 2009 | tags: Board Services

If you have not found enough news to depress you, Matthew Simmons presentation on Oil is a must read.
Matthew R. Simmons presented “Is Oil

The answer to the question what is Alex doing?

January 29th, 2009 | tags: Board Services

People are always asking me what my son does. Clearly a simple short answer to that question just never works. Now I will just point them to this blog post:

What am I doing?