About
Business Opportunity Watch
3.
How does Business Opportunity Watch do its evaluations?
4. Do you include some good opportunities in
Business Opportunity Watch as well as ones you give a low
rating to?
5. How can you properly evaluate an opportunity
when you do not even see the manual or the course or attend
the seminar?
6. So it's a good method of analysis to investigate
the earnings claims etc. in the sales material: but why don't
you do a thorough job and examine the manual, the course,
the seminar etc as well?
7. OK, but why don't you try out the business
opportunity or the system or the course yourself to see if
it works?
8. Obviously the editor of Business Opportunity
Watch was an auditor and so she tends to have an audit approach,
but isn't this a bit OTT for a business opportunity costing
a few hundred pounds?
9. Surely if you keep questioning whether opportunities
are any good and whether the claims made are fact or fiction,
you risk being sued for defamation?
10. Why did you change from the hard copy BOARD
magazine to the online Business Opportunity Watch?
11. What business qualifications does The Editor
have?
1. How do I know the Rating Scores are unbiased?
Because the only
income that Business Opportunity Watch and its editor receives
is from people LOOKING FOR a business opportunity, not from
people SELLING a business opportunity, as follows:
-
We do not receive any
income from advertisers; and
-
We do not
receive any income from recommending business opportunities;
and
-
We do not
join any business opportunities; and
-
We have no
affiliate or commission links for any business opportunities.
In fact, you won't find any links at all on this website.
This is because you can get special software to hide the
fact that a link is a commission one and you can make
it look just like an ordinary one. So, by having no links
on this site, you have no doubts about our independence.
2. How do I know the
Rating Scores are reliable?
The editor, Marian
Owen had 17 years of professional experience in the field of
auditing, accountancy and taxation followed by 12 years of investigating
business opportunities for the hard copy magazine called The
BOARD, and now her research and investigation work for Business
Opportunity Watch since March 2007. As a result of all these
years of researching and analysing business opportunities she
has developed a highly-attuned "nose" for sniffing
out the scams and the genuine opportunities.
She also takes great
pains with her research. So she normally gets it right.
Our Rating Reports
tell you everything that our research has uncovered about an
opportunity.
3. How Does Business Opportunity
Watch do its evaluations?
Evaluations are
done by examining the claims made in the advertising material
for the opportunity.
The claims are
of crucial importance ...
The claims are all
the promises made in the advertising material about what the
product will do for you if you purchase it. In extreme cases,
for example, the claims may be that you will achieve high earnings
for only a little bit of work which is so easy that even a monkey
could do it.
This approach of
investigating the claims means that the editor digs into the
foundations of the offer.
The claims are of
crucial importance because they form the contract with you,
the purchaser - they are the promises which lead you to purchase
it.
If the claims are
dubious and cannot be substantiated, then the offer is probably
not worth the asking price.
Business Opportunity
Watch starts off by assuming that the claims are false
The editor, Marian
Owen, has a background of 17 years in auditing, accountancy
and taxation, followed by 12 years of reviewing business opportunities
for the hard copy predecessor of Business Opportunity Watch,
which was called The BOARD magazine.
She generally starts
off by assuming that the claims made for a business opportunity
are false, particularly where they sound too good to be true,
and then she tries to find any evidence to prove that they are
true.
The standard
audit approach ...
This is the standard
approach of Business Opportunity Watch, and indeed it is the
approach of any auditor engaged to evaluate a proposed business
purchase: an auditor knows that his work is relied upon to prove
the existence, the valuation and the ownership of key assets
(whether they are physical assets, or assets such as know-how
or profitable contracts, or more general claims of profitability)
and so his work is designed to obtain this proof.
When auditors fall
short of this standard of care and just accept assurances from
directors instead of proving the existence, valuation and ownership
of assets, disasters can happen. This has been seen over the
years in the cases of some notable corporate collapses and extraordinary
write-downs of asset valuations.
Digging into
the foundations ...
You could liken
the claims for a business opportunity to the foundations of
a house, and you could liken the package which purchasers receive
(e.g. the manual or the course or the stock-in-trade etc) to
the rest of the house. The package may look very good indeed.
However, no surveyor worth his salt would be satisfied by merely
going into a house and looking round and thinking it looked
fine: he would also investigate outside to make sure that there
were no signs of faulty foundations. The editor of Business
Opportunity Watch goes deeper than this: she digs into the foundations
as a matter of course because they might be faulty but not showing
signs above ground as yet.
If the foundations
are faulty, or if they are non-existent, then the house is unlikely
to be worth the asking price or may not be worth purchasing
at all.
The editor has found
this to be a highly reliable approach: if it were not, she would
have changed it long ago.
4. Do you include some
good opportunities in Business Opportunity Watch as well as
ones you give a low rating to?
Yes!
The editor makes a point of finding several good opportunities
for each issue.
5. How can you properly
evaluate an opportunity when you don't even see the manual or
the course or attend the seminar?
Two business opportunity
promoters have said that they think it is "ridiculous"
that the editor carries out due diligence work on business opportunities
based on the claims in the sales material and does not examine
the manual itself, or the course, or go on the seminar.
It is not ridiculous
at all: on the contrary, examining the manual, or the course
etc is a superficial approach UNLESS this examination does not
just conclude that it is a good course etc but also answers
the question of whether the claims made in its advertising material
(eg that it will enable you to earn money easily and quickly)
are fact or fiction.
In its Rating Reports,
Business Opportunity Watch assumes that the manual, the course,
the seminar etc are comprehensive and well-written - because
they normally are - and simply zeroes in on the claims.
The reason why Business
Opportunity Watch takes this approach is because the real reason
why you are thinking of buying this course etc is not because
it is a good course but because it has promised that it will
enable you to earn money.
The approach of
focusing on the sales material and the claims and promises in
it (such as, in a number of cases, high earnings for only a
little bit of easy work) exposes any improbability and lack
of substantiating evidence.
Analysing the
claims of high earnings in the cold light of day ...
By picking the claims
out from the sales material and analysing them in the cold light
of day, any fictitious ones become more evident.
Fictional claims
may not be evident to readers when they are contained in long
sales letters written by clever copywriters who know exactly
what buttons to press to by-pass the intelligent consumer's
brain. And, in a long sales letter, these psychological buttons
are pressed repeatedly to an extent which aims to be irresistible.
So that's why Business
Opportunity Watch investigates the claims.
6.
So it's a good method of analysis to investigate the earnings
claims etc. in the sales material: but why don't you do a thorough
job and examine the manual, the course, the seminar etc as well?
Because in many
cases this would cloud the issue and would not add to the analysis
of what is being offered.
The issue is this:
Why you would
be prepared to pay, say, £250 for a manual or a course
or, say, £2,000 for a seminar marketed by a business opportunity
promoter about spread-betting when similar information is available
free from the spread-betting companies?
The answer might
be this:
Because the free
online courses and the free seminars available from the spread-betting
companies make no claims about their information being "special"
or about how much you will earn or how easy it will be.
By contrast, often
the business opportunity promoter tells you in his marketing
material that:
1. this
information is "special information" that enables
him to earn a lot of money spread-betting; and
2.
that it will enable you to do the same; and
3. that it's very easy and quick to earn money with
his special system; and
4. his marketing material probably tries to convince
you of this by talking about his great, moneyed lifestyle
- a posh house, exotic foreign holidays and a flashy car;
and
5. he may show you some information which he says is
evidence of his earnings, such as screen shots from his spread-betting
account; and
6. he may display various testimonials from his customers
which say that the manual/course/seminar
is great and/or that they have earned money from it.
All of these points
1 to 6 above are the business opportunity promoter's claims
about what he is selling and what it will achieve for you.
So this takes us
back again to the claims, which are at the heart of everything.
It is only the claims
of profitability and how you, too, can easily earn money which
persuade you to pay £250 or £2,000 for something
which you can get elsewhere for free.
Examining the
course etc would not answer the question...
If Business Opportunity
Watch examined the course or the manual or went on the seminar
and concluded that it was a very good course/manual/seminar
this would not answer the question of whether you should pay
the asking price for it when similar good information aand advice
is available free or at a much lower cost elsewhere e.g. the
free online courses and the free seminars available from the
spread-betting companies.
It is only because
of the claims of high earnings etc which are made that business
opportunity promoters can inflate the prices of their products.
Big claims about
easy money normally mean big prices, so that's why Business
Opportunity Watch concentrates on the claims.
In her reviews,
the editor of Business Opportunity Watch ASSUMES that the course/manual/seminar
is comprehensive and well-produced because THEY NEARLY ALWAYS
ARE.
After all, with
the amount of information available in books and on the internet,
wouldn't you - the reader - be more than capable of researching
and producing impressive-looking courses on a range of subjects
yourself?
Let's imagine that
you researched and produced a comprehensive course and you sold
it with a story about how, after years of searching, you had
stumbled across a system which enabled you to easily make a
lot of money. Don't you think that you could charge a high price
for it and still sell a lot more than if you sold it at a lower
price in a straightforward fashion as a piece of comprehensive
research without any claims about earning money?
7. OK,
but why don't you try out the business opportunity or the system
yourself to see if it works?
There are practical
reasons for not trying out the system or the opportunity ourselves.
For a financial
trading system, the general view of financial traders is that
you have to allow six months to show that a system delivers
consistent profits.
As for business
opportunities, most businesses would take several months of
commitment before they became established.
So, in both cases,
trying it ourselves would mean delays in doing the Rating Report
and would mean that only a few Rating Reports a year could be
done.
By contrast, an
important advantage of the claims examination approach is that
Business Opportunity Watch can do a Rating Report on an opportunity
at an early stage when it's first advertised.
The
result from one test would not be reliable...
Furthermore, the
result from one test with a business opportunity would not be
a reliable indication of what the average person could expect
to achieve. For example,the editor of Business Opportunity Watch
has certain strengths and certain weaknesses and a certain lifestyle
which could mean that she would succeed or fail at a particular
opportunity when another person with different strengths and
weaknesses and a different lifestyle might well have the opposite
experience. Or she might succeed because she established the
business in a particular area of the country whereas someone
who tried to establish it in a different type of area might
fail.
The only type of
opportunity which will succeed or fail totally regardless of
the abilities and circumstances of the purchaser is clearly
not a business at all but rather an investment which should
be registered under the Financial Services Act; if it is not
so registered then it would be highly inadvisable to invest
in it.
The best form of "proof of the pudding" evidence...
Of course, the actual
resuts typically achieved by people operating a particular business
or a financial trading system or a gambling system are the best
form of "proof of the pudding" evidence. That's why
Business Opportunity Watch emphasises in its Terms and Conditions
that you should always ask to be put in touch with several people
who are already operating the opportunity.
Even then, care
needs to be taken to ensure that the people you contact are
truly independent and are representative of the typical results
achieved with the opportunity. The best way to do this is to
ask the company to provide you with a list of the people already
in the opportunity from which you can make your choice of, say,
half a dozen to contact.
With franchises,
this request would not normally cause the company a problem,
and in any case you could probably easily obtain the list of
franchisees elsewhere (such as from Yellow Pages) since franchisees
normally operate with the same trade name as the franchisor.
Other types of opportunities
are a bit different, though, and it would be understandable
if the company did not want to hand over to you full details
of its list of customers. So what you could do is ask the company
for a list which just showed the names and telephone numbers
of, say, ten people who had agreed they could be contacted from
which you could make your selection.
8. Obviously the editor
of Business Opportunity Watch was an auditor and so she tends
to have an audit approach, but isn't this a bit OTT for a business
opportunity costing a few hundred pounds?
This is another
question which has been put to the editor by a business opportunity
promoter - or, to be exact, by the legal advisors to a business
opportunity promoter.
The answer is that
all business opportunities and earnings opportunities should
be rigorously examined, whatever their purchase price, because
what is at stake is much more than just the purchase price.
What is at stake
is also the purchaser's time and money trying to set up and
operate the system or opportunity. And, often even more importantly,
the purchaser's sense of pride and self-worth could suffer a
serious blow if he or she comes to realise that they've been
had by a pig-in-a-poke.
The promoter
has the upper hand in the form of "knowledge power"...
There is an imbalance
of power between the promoter and the consumer, with the promoter
having the upper hand, particularly in the form of “knowledge
power”, while the consumer often has little knowledge and
also bears the risks in respect of his purchase.
Business Opportunity
Watch attempts to redress that balance by carrying out Due Diligence
Work on an opportunity and, in particular, the claims made for
it and by highlighting areas of doubt or of missing information
about which questions need to be asked.
Asking questions
before purchase is the key way in which you, the consumer, can
give yourself more power.
A businessman thinking
of buying a business will produce a long list of questions and
will require AUDIT VERIFICATION of ALL CLAIMS made by the vendor
in an established procedure called “Pre-Contract Disclosure”.
Even for the smallest
business, the accountancy and legal fees involved in Pre-Contract
Disclosure will amount to several thousand pounds. Asking all
these questions does not imply any doubts about the integrity
or competence of the vendor: it is simply recommended, prudent,
pre-purchase business verification procedure; or, in other words,
DUE DILIGENCE WORK.
Steer clear of
any business opportunity promoter who is not prepared to answer
questions...
It is Business Opportunity
Watch’s recommendation that any business opportunity promoter
who is not prepared to answer questions from prospective purchasers
should be steered well clear of, since it implies that he or
she does not have a good answer to the questions and/or does
not welcome people with a business-like approach to join his
or her opportunity. The risk that the promoter is only looking
for gullible greenies is too great for prospective purchasers
to take.
It is the promoter’s
job to present his opportunity in the most favourable light,
and it is the job of Business Opportunity Watch ’s editor
to expose any flaws which her Due Diligence Work discovers in
this presentation.
That's not OTT:
that's standard business practice.
9. Surely if you keep questioning whether opportunities
are any good and whether the claims made are fact or fiction,
you risk being sued for defamation?
"Yes"
is the short answer; being sued for defamation is an occupational
hazard for anybody who publishes contentious material.
That's one of the
reasons why, with Business Opportunity Watch, it's important
for readers to accept that although the Rating Reports typically
highlight a number of areas of conflicting information for an
opportunity and questions which need to be asked and the Rating
Report itself may be critical and may have a low rating or even
a zero rating, THIS DOES NOT SUGGEST THAT THE PROMOTER OR HIS
COMPANY OR HIS ASSOCIATES ARE ANYTHING OTHER THAN HONEST AND
TRUSTWORTHY AND COMPETENT.
It simply means
that, as a result of the Due Diligence Work, there are questions
to be asked in line with time-honoured TRADITIONAL AUDIT PROCEDURE
in order for prospective purchasers to be able to make an informed
decision on whether or not the business opportunity is workable.
The risk of being
sued for defamation is also the reason why the Rating Reports
in Business Opportunity Watch aim to be comprehensive and to
give the reader the full facts which the editor has uncovered
and a full explanation of the conclusions reached.
Sometimes, this
means that some of the Rating Reports are unavoidably long.
Being sued for defamation
is not the only occupational hazard facing anybody who publishes
contentious material. Underhand methods such as anonymously
smearing the publisher's reputation are also a possibility.
This recently happened to the editor. See pages 21 to 28 of
the July 2007 issue for details of a smear campaign conducted
by a business opportunity promoter.
The person behind
it - whose identity is unknown - went to great lengths, which
included sending a photographer to take a picture of the editor's
house in France, and publicising this picture together with
the exact address. Just as with investigative journalists, a
lack of privacy could expose her to threats. Indeed, she felt
that this was an attempt to make her feel physically threatened.
In the extreme event
that any promoter is thinking of arranging for physical action
against the editor, this will back-fire. Arrangements have been
put in place so that if she is suddenly unable to continue her
work then all the contents of Business Opportunity Watch and
The BOARD will be made freely available on the internet without
anybody needing to subscribe.
10. Why did you change from the hard copy BOARD
magazine to the online Business Opportunity Watch newsletter?
The
content and the method of analysis of the opportunities has
stayed the same for The BOARD Magazine and Business Opportunity
Watch. The principle of being unbiased through being financed
only by readers' subscriptions and not by any advertising revenue
has stayed the same, as well.
The
change from the hard copy BOARD magazine to the online version
was made as a result of the threat of a lawsuit for defamation
which brought the realisation that any corrections or apologies
needing to be urgently communicated to readers could be done
very quickly and at zero cost with an online publication.
Increasing
costs of printing and postage were also a consideration, particularly
because the editor did not want to increase the subscription
price in view of the fact that many people looking for an opportunity
to earn extra income are doing so because they have financial
constraints.
The
name was changed to Business Opportunity Watch to give an immediate
idea of what the publication was about.
11. What
business qualifications does The Editor have?
This is another
question which has been asked by a few opportunity promoters.
It isn't a question
that's ever been asked by someone looking for an opportunity.
It seems that what
opportunity promoters mean by this question is this: has Marian
Owen become wealthy operating a business herself and, if not,
how can she say that she has the necessary credentials to advise
other people on what businesses will earn them money?
It's a rather strange
question to ask, because most business people who are thinking
of buying a business appoint accountants and lawyers to carry
out investigations of businesses they are thinking of acquiring.
Whilst some accountants and lawyers in public practice also
run other businesses, they do not get the investigation work
for a proposed business aquisition because they have made money
running other businesses; they get it because of their professional
qualifications and their experience in investigating business
acquisitions.
Anyway, the answer
to this question is that, no, Marian Owen has not become wealthy
operating a business herself. Her background is 17 years spent
in the field of auditing, accountancy and taxation followed
by 12 years of investigating and assessing business opportunities
for the hard copy magazine called The BOARD, and now Business
Opportunity Watch.
So she has a good
professional background plus years of experience in the specific
job of sniffing out good and bad business opportunities.
