The Beacon Value Proposition
1. Where practicable, Beacon clients will be selected based on their stated intention to be listed publicly within one year of signing a Beacon financing agreement.
2. Beacon Investment Partners, LLC (BIP) has the unique international resources, including associates and consultants, to bring portfolio growth companies public within a year of their application and then to facilitate their capital formation requirements for years to come. This can drive deal flow from entrepreneurs experienced with conventional private VC financing.
3. The BIP-managed and conservatively leveraged Beacon Business Development Company (BBDC), which provides client funding, will have a portfolio which combines mezzanine loans with warrants and select seed-stage equity investments which may carry EO-IPO warrants. This balanced-risk portfolio will provide a “margin of safety” against possible bad debts by offering investors upside growth potential seldom found in a BDC. The shortened time to go public makes the warrants more valuable because they too become tradable publicly and their price will become publicly determined that much sooner.
4. Investors in the NASDAQ listed Beacon BDC common shares can expect to realize favorable dividends compared with S&P index stock funds or with venture capital fund earnings. The Beacon BDC expects to pay monthly dividends that compare favorably with those other Business Development Companies whose dividend rates are in the range of 8% to 12% per annum. Also, as a Registered Investment Company (RIC) the Beacon BDC dividends will not be taxed federally prior to being distributed to BDC investors. Over the last decade there have been only about 50 initial public offerings per annum. Consequently, the great preponderance of warrants issued to competing BDCs have not yet become publicly traded. Contrastingly, Beacon BDC-owned shares and warrants in its clients are expected to soar in value as they become publicly traded. Moreover, this “marked to market” value of a portfolio of listed assets will serve to protect Beacon’s investors against Net Asset Value discounting while NAV discounting plagues Business Development Companies whose clients remain private. The expected result – insulation from the market risks from irrational exuberance and generations of relatively high risk-adjusted rates of return.
5. By offering the liquidity of a NASDAQ listing, the Beacon BDC can provide clients with permanency, unlike venture capital funds that have a 10 year life because they are private. The BIP-managed BBDC will thus be free of the problematic and increasingly disruptive 10 year life expectancy written into virtually all venture capital funds’ operating agreements.
6. Select entrepreneurial growth companies with BBDC backing can avoid the eight-to-ten year wait they are experiencing today with venture capital funds confounded by a paucity of favorable exit opportunities ever since the implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. In addition, the standard benefits of being public in Toronto and/or in Frankfurt are highly significant: valuation, liquidity, recruitment, compensation plus a broader selection of attractive option for raising growth capital – allowing entrepreneurs both more time to and more reason to concentrate on exploiting growth opportunities.
May 12, 2011