Welcome to the VCS Group! If this is your first visit, we wanted to tell you that our mission is to promote and present Canada's leading small cap companies to investors and financial professionals looking for investment opportunities. We also want to be totally upfront with you about one very important fact which we hope does not come as a surprise or a shock: all the companies on the VCS Group website have paid a promotional fee to have their stories presented here. Yes, believe it or not, we are a business, not a charity or a hobby, just like the company you own or work for. To pay our employees and suppliers, we charge a fee to our clients to present their stories to investors and financial professionals, in order to provide a living for ourselves and do our part to keep the economy moving forward. We hope you’re okay with that? Okay, now that we’ve got that dirty little secret out without losing too many of you…

In return for a fee, our part of the bargain is to promote and present the stories of each of our client companies in a comprehensive, easy-to-use-and-reference, and transparent manner. We like to believe in a professional manner as well, though we leave that up to you to judge. Our goal is to provide you the investor with the information you need to know about our clients’ companies so that you can make an informed, effective investment decision about whether or not to invest in the company. We believe that the companies that belong to the VCS Group are leading companies worthy of your investment consideration.

How do we define what is a leading company? We couldn’t afford to pay high priced analysts to make forecasts and predictions, but we needed some way to determine what could be considered a leading company and so we came up with a framework for doing so that hopefully makes some sense as a worthwhile system for evaluating a small company as an ongoing business with some chance of future success. Hopefully it makes some sense to you as well and if so, we welcome your comments on our approach. If it doesn’t make sense to you and you have a better approach, we still welcome your comments and can’t wait to hear about your better way. If we like yours better than ours, maybe we’ll switch to your method. For now however, here’s how we define a leading small cap company. We call our approach the ‘Seven Point Profile’, because we think every small cap company with a chance of success has to have:

• Purpose - every successful business needs to have a clearly defined goal that provides vision, focuses, guides and motivates the people in the company towards the achievement of a practical, worthwhile objective.
• Projects/Products – a successful company must have projects, products or services in demand by at least one sizeable market, and the company must be able to produce and deliver its offerings to the market in a timely fashion at a profit. The goal of any and every business is to find and keep customers, for without customers there is no business.
• People - a company is just that - a group or ‘company’ of people who have come together to achieve a common goal that they all believe in. To achieve the common goal, the people of the company must have between them the needed skills, experience, motivation and dedication that can be brought together and focused on achieving the objective.
• Potential - successful companies have to have a quantifiable potential market of sufficient size to justify scaling up economical production to fill the defined market need.
• Plans - successful companies must have effective, well-thought out strategically defined plans for successfully capitalizing on the potential market, producing their offering or carrying out their project, and delivering it to a waiting market in a timely and profitable fashion.
• Performance - in most cases the best guide to a company's future success is its track record or the track record of its people in the past.
• Power – to capitalize on its potential and make its big dreams happen, every small company needs some cash in the bank to fund its plans, and ideally, some serious, long term investors who are committed enough and believe in the company’s plans to provide initial and ongoing funding, and if required can provide help through their experience, guidance and direction to ensure that the company has every advantage and benefit it needs to become successful.

There a three more things we think you should consider before investing which we call “The Three Reasons Why You Should Look at the Company”. The framework above is useful for giving you a profile of a small cap company, but in order to really move forward, we think a company has to put the Seven Points together into a winning and unique combination that will make it stand out. If the company has put together a winning combination of the Seven Points, then there are usually at least three unique reasons why an investor would want to take a look at the company.

Those are our 10 Principles of a Leading Company, made up of Seven Points and Three Reasons. We don’t make any claim that small cap companies that fit the framework are going to be winners, but companies that fulfill the 10 points should have a good chance at being successful while companies that don’t have all or most of them will probably have a tough time making it. Every company you will see presented on the VCS Group is presented using the 10 Principles framework.

Good luck and good investing! We welcome your feedback, and suggestions for other companies you feel should be included in the VCS Group.

May you be an informed and successful investor,

Peter Norman
Publisher