If you are like most successful entrepreneurs, your company's cash reserve is not keeping up with your growth. And your company's growth has surpassed-or is about to surpass-the amount that friends and family, credit cards, and bank or other borrowing can provide. You probably need in the range of $250,000 to $5 million.

You face a challenge in deciding among your options. You may choose to obey the SEC and state securities rules or to ignore them in the hopes they do not apply in your case. If you take the path of just selling stock privately, you risk creating an investment that creates the right of any investor to demand his/her money back in full, with interest. And worse, you also invite potential civil and criminal sanctions from regulators tasked with protecting the rights of investors. If this is the first of several rounds of projected financing, you also risk having all future offerings poisoned for formal investors.

Should you choose to register the offering with the SEC, you will undertake a complex SEC registration process costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorney, accounting, and other fees. You probably will have to register your offering in each state in which you sell stock, incurring other fees.

Or, you may list on ACE-Net and use an attorney to scan your completed application. If so, you will secure one of several exemptions from SEC registration procedures while advertising nationally at a fraction of the cost and time required to do so in any other way.