An hour on the Internet can protect a potential investor from dumping money down the drain. Hide your wallet until you hit the Internet. Consider the following useful sites:

Six Signs of Scammers and Nine Prudent Protections

I am always dismayed when entrepreneurs spend good money to attend investor conferences (plus travel and lost opportunity costs) but arrive unprepared. What are they thinking? Recently observed examples: A company's spokesman arrived without the PowerPoint presentation, relying on a service provider, who came late. Company representatives looked like "deer in the headlights" when investors asked logical questions, and worse, offered inconsistent answers. A presenter showed up late and left early, with just enough time to deliver the PPT, but he missed the more important networking time, before and after. The conference organizers stated the length of the allocated presentation time in advance to all presenters, but a few hadn't even hit the financials by that deadline - and got cut off. Entrepreneurs didn't send in their attendees' names early enough to be printed in the roster or their summaries early enough to be printed in the book distributed to all attending investors. Entrepreneurs only have one opportunity to make a first impression. Don't blow it. Seeking investment is just as much work, and requires just as much preparation, as any other business endeavor.

When does an entrepreneur need a Private Placement Memorandum vs. a Business Plan vs. a Disclosure Document? Which is for soliciting money from institutions? Which is for soliciting accredited investors? Knowing the difference will help evaluate and choose the appropriate service provider.

In addition to the externally - oriented documents that entrepreneurs develop for investors (PPMs, PPTs, etc), they should develop documents for internal eyes only, that might be called a Rock Bottom Reality Check. This identifies needs vs. wants, to help entrepreneurs evaluate realistic offers of private equity and to distinguish between the lowest investment they would accept and the highest investment they would reject.

I am astonished by the responses I get from entrepreneurial CEOs regarding due diligence questions to "red flags" revealed during the kind of research that any prudent investor would do. The following are probably financial Darwin award winners, but they are all true.

Entrepreneurs give speeches to attract investment, customers, or to showcase industry expertise. Yet many people are afraid of public speaking and are poor at it. Here are the top ten mistakes and easy ways to deliver an effective presentation to an important audience.

Raising equity always costs more and takes longer than entrepreneurs expect, but a reality check and some advanced planning can save both time and money.

Why isn't Houston funding its own future-oriented industries? The pipeline from entrepreneur to funding source is broken, that's why.

Any serious investor is going to do due diligence on your company. You can derail the process if you don't know what he will find out about you, or you can expedite the process by having all relevant files organized and available.

One wry joke among investment bankers is that every unsuccessful entrepreneur has a working wife or a trust fund. The grains of truth behind the joke...

How a NASD licensed investment banker protects both the entrepreneur and the investors, even on the other side of a deal

How entrepreneurs can protect themselves from financial service providers who only serve themselves, by preying on naive business people

After the investor conference, back at the office with a fist full of business cards... how should the intrepid entrepreneur follow up? Don't call without a bit of due diligence on the companies. By visiting the websites and doing a brief Google or other Internet query on the name, the entrepreneur can save a lot of time, separating direct investors from financial service companies and investor-intermediaries, all with names that include such promising words as "Capital," "Equity," and "Investment." Even those companies that are not direct sources of investment can provide informed feedback on the presentation and can offer leads to other contacts of interest. So the entrepreneur should follow up with them as well, engaging in a different kind of conversation than with others.