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Seriously, all company communications should have a verifiable chain of authenticity. All Adrian would have to do to provide that is add a line to the company web site which lists a Twitter or Facebook account identifier. Unless that sort of linkage is provided, presume that any social media posts preported to come from the company are fake.
Obviously, one cannot have a partial can of energy drink in a case.
6,224 cases X 12 cans = 74,688 cans
It might be that because of the number of cases that come on a pallet, you end up with the odd numbers. In that case, Adrian probably rounded up to 75,000 cans to simply what prospective investors have in their minds.
The primary problem with online sales is that water based liquid is heavy, and in quantities of single cans up to single cases, shipping about doubles the cost of a can of energy drink. That is simply not cost competitive with cans of competitor's product which is bulk shipped.
Think about this for a minute. From a personal safety standpoint, would someone with half a brain who intended to skip out on hundreds of shareholders with hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars of shareholder money have decided first to plaster his likeness in a video on the Internet?
He could have avoided the camera, and remained harder to find, if he used any of a variety of other methods to pitch his company... and ticker symbol.
I really think a more realistic scenario is that Adrian is in very, very deep into a mess of a company, and he wants to legitimately find a viable path to turn things around.
Yeah, in less than a year, he has managed to more than double the O/S, but it is also true that he inherited the other half of the O/S mess from other people.
Someone wanting to just scam money from investors could have probably had an easier time of it by wiping out that ridiculously high O/S of 6 billion back in February.
Adrian didn't do that, and has earned the credit that he has not wiped out all of our positions when it would have been expected behavior from any incoming CEO.
He has definitely made some mistakes over his first year managing the company, but through objective eyes, one can still see how he has learned from his mistakes, and he is slowly improving his performance.
He is still not where he needs to be with regard to savvy performance, and we all knew that he had a learning curve to climb, but I think he is climbing that learning curve successfully. Yes, it is painful to watch, but it is happening.
I really don't know how much more dilution the market will absorb. From my point of view, we are in uncharted territory.
Has anyone else here ever seen a ticker with an O/S as high as 12.5 billion shares?
The largest O/S I can remember from elsewhere was about 4 billion, but then I usually avoid this level of bloat, so I am not looking for tickers with a large O/S.
Legally, there is no reason an O/S cannot get much, much bigger.
During the RedChip conference, Adrian pitched a slide that said he wants to raise $500,000 (which is 5 billion shares at $0.0001).
The slide also said that amount was possibly expandable to $750,000 (which is 7.5 billion shares at $0.0001) which would max out the 20 billion A/S.
If he wants more creditability regarding his plan, I think Adrian is going to have to share more information with prospective investors about the logistics and timing of how a production order gets processed and delivered.
If Adrian is saying he needs half a million dollars before proceeding with the plan for production, how is he getting that cash and having time for the bottler to process the production run by April 1st?
NOTE TO ALL CORPORATE EXECS: setting major milestones to be on APRIL FOOLS DAY is a really, really stupid idea if you want creditability. Choose April 2nd instead!
It might be that he already knows that he is going to get the required funding from financiers already lined up. So, maybe funding is already a done deal.
If that is not the case, inventory in the warehouse in two months frankly seems like an aggressive schedule to me.
I will take another look at the slides in the video, and see what additional information can be derived from them when not having them flash by in 2 or 3 seconds.
Alternatively, he might find a beverage conference in another state to attend that week.
You might plan to do whatever you want to plan to do. However, if the other person is not interested, or already has other plans, you might find yourself standing out in the parking lot while knocking on the locked door of a dark office.
Instead of announcing to this forum, or anyone else, what your plans are, actually including Adrian in formation your plans might be a good idea to have a better chance of getting his cooperation.
How would you respond if I showed up without warning to your place of business holding a camera live streaming to Facebook?
Technically, all of the shareholders own the company.
If you go to the web site for the Colorado Secretary of State, and look at the Articles of Incorporation, you will find all of the different classes of stock issued by DNA Brands, Inc.
What we talk about, monitor daily, and trade publicly through our brokers is the common stock with the DNAX ticker symbol. None of the other classes of stock are publicly traded, so none have a ticker symbol.
The Series F Preferred stock is the controlling block of stock, and Adrian has already alluded to the fact that he holds those shares.
There is also Series G Preferred stock that was created when Adrian took over the company. There are 2 million shares total and the shares have a stated value of $4.00/share. There is a requirement for the company to buy back a certain amount of these shares every quarter. If that does not occur, an interest rate accrues which is added to the buyback price of the stock. I figure this is the instrument which Adrian used to "buy" control of the company. By having the company issue a new class of preferred stock, and configure the issue as a loan, it appears that Adrian probably used company resources to acquire the company.
People who are heavily experienced in the beverage industry are probably very sensitive about their reputations.
If such a person took over DNA Brands, Inc. given its condition as a dormant company at the end of 2015, someone with a really good reputation in the beverage industry would really be putting that reputation at risk. That could be career ending if they were not able to pull a turnaround miracle out of the company.
I think many would consider that risk too high.
Additionally, Mel and company want their own money back out of the company. They are going to get more than eight million dollars from DNA if the company is successful. Very few experienced beverage execs were likely to be willing to pay that kind of money for DNA.
There is good chance that it was Adrian's idea to let him take over the company for no money out of pocket from Adrian with the creation of the Series G preferred stock.
I finally had time to watch yesterday's presention. I am VERY happy to see that Adrian stated that his plan is to target independent retailers first for sales. That tells me that he will not wait to get a distributor agreement before moving forward with production. That is VERY good news.
I am really curious on how long it takes Adrian to receive delivery of inventory once he places a production order with the bottler.
Last year, someone posting to this forum claimed to have pertinent knowledge of the topic, and they asserted that because of normal lead time, it would take many months between when an order was placed and when the bottler could actually deliver product.
At the time, there were 114 QuikTrip stores scattered across the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex.
The Metroplex is the fourth largest metro area in the country behind New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Area wise, it is bigger than any of them.
So no, I did not go to all 114 stores. However, like most chains, the stores operate indentically.
The TWELVE stores that I physically visited at random from one end of the Metroplex to the other gave me more than a 10% sample set.
I figured that was a pretty good representation of what was happening overall. QuikTrip is not the kind of chain to put cling film advertising for a product in only some stores. When it does in-store advertising, it does that uniformly everywhere.
For the months that DNA was in the coolers, I never saw any in-store advertising for it ever.
Here is the thing. Retail shelf space is finite, and therefore not cheap. One way or another, distributors have to pay for the use of that shelf space.
There are always shiny, brand new products competing for their chance to be on the shelf. Always...
DNA is not a shiny, brand new product. DNA is a product that has already had its chance on many, many shelves, and it failed to stay there.
If you were a distributor that had to choose between gambling your cash to put a shiny, brand new product on the shelf, or gambling your cash to put a product back on the shelf which did not work out the first time, which would you choose?
The question is that simple regarding whether or not DNA will be able to obtain distribution agreements RIGHT NOW.
I think that Adrian is going to have to sell DNA products directly to independent retailers, and he is going to have to advertise it strongly to make sure sales are excellent.
After 6 to 12 months of strong sales RESULTS with independent retailers, he can take those results to distributors to show them that DNA is a successfully selling product, not a tarnished has-been.
A proven track record of sales to demonstrate to distributors what results they be proven to enjoy would completely reverse the competition against shiny, brand new products into DNA's favor.
Adrian can achieve this in a straight forward manner. The products are good enough as-is. He just has to be willing to do the legwork to get the job done.
That means realizing that dreams of acquiring lots of additional streams of income must be put far into the back of his mind for a few years while he focuses on building back the DNA energy drink brand.
So far, I think that Adrian is still fighting that notion, and he must stop.
So, you are saying that DNA had advertising in your local area?
In my local area, a distributor put DNA in the coolers of a retail chain of 114 stores. There was no local advertising... not from the distributor and not from DNA.
The last filing with 0TC, which was for Q3, stated 7.4 billion O/S.
Since then, based on large pulses in trading which COULD represent dilution, the O/S could be as high as about 10 billion. No one here on iHub has any way to be sure.
It would not be embezzlement because he controls enough shares to have the corporation do anything he wants... including increase his personal compensation to nearly equal whatever is in the corporate bank account.
Do remember that any business plans provided by a corporation are only plans, and are not in any manner binding.
What? How did he manage to increase the $50 THOUSAND startup costs from last August's conference call to $5 HUNDRED THOUSAND now?!?!?!?
Adrian needs to write a business plan or at least an itemized budget to present to shareholders and prospective investors. We ought to know how he plans to spend half a million dollars.
I've been saying since at least last April that Adrian wants to ultimately build a conglomerate and is fixated with the notion of how to buy more businesses. He talked about this on the new web site almost before he even added content on the web site about energy drinks. That is simply where his focus is.
That is a terrific long term goal. It could make DNA Brands, Inc. into an huge corporation in a decade.
However, Adrian needs to get focused on what is important and viable for the company now, and that frankly is a small production run to create inventory which he can sell profitably in small quantities to independent retail stores. After 6 months to a year of good sales to the independents, he can go to distributors and easily get distribution agreements.
So far, I am not convinced that Adrian is ready to do the grunt work required to initially develop a reputation in the beverage industry necessary to easily gain distribution agreements.
I expect that he will fight with this for a short while, and then come around to what must be done. Until then, it may be a frustrating time for shareholders.
The reasons why DNA collapsed is they got great distribution agreements and then did not advertise the product so it did not move well enough.
They likely did not advertise the product because they did not have the required funds is because of two reasons.
First, a major funding deal with a financial institution fell apart at the last minute, thus DNA did not get the anticipated funds that could have been used for advertising.
Second, before the Coca-Cola fiasco, Eric Fowler spent almost all of DNA's cash to purchase perishable inventory that DNA would not be able to sell before the inventory started to go bad. This inventory was later liquidated at a loss with Big Lots.
No, no, no... Eric Fowler released a PR where he claimed that DNA had a new distribution agreement with The Trenton Coca-Cola Bottling Company.
The Trenton Coca-Cola Bottling Company is one of many bottlers that put Coca-Col into cans and bottles, and is NOT the same as the Coca-Cola company.
However, all investors saw in the PR were the words "Coca-Cola" and the PPS of DNAX skyrocketed because stupid investors who cannot read thought the PR meant that Coca-Cola was now working with DNA.
In the PR, Fowler named Chuck Jones as the CEO of The Trenton Coca-Cola Bottling Company, and he was not.
Then... the actual CEO of The Trenton Coca-Cola Bottling Company released his own PR debunking DNA's claim of any sort of agreement. They had not even been talking to DNA. Fowler just flat out made up the whole story. He completely flat out publicly lied.
There was talk that there was no way the SEC would not halt DNAX.
Fowler resigned.
DNA issued a correcting PR and tried to file a lawsuit against Fowler.
The PPS of DNAX cratered and lots of stupid people lost huge amounts of money.
Interestingly, this did not kill the company, and they continued to obtain additional distribution agreements.
Read my sticky post, and all of the linked information for many more details, good and bad, about the history of DNA.
I imagine that the primary reason something is not converted to a sticky post is that none of the six moderators feel that the information is more important than whatever they currently have shown as the one sticky post each moderator is allowed.
I did contact the companies directly and in this case, I referred to them as "vendors" because the standard definition of "a person or agency that sells" applies.
Plenty of people here apparently take Adrian seriously enough that shares are willingly being held.
I don't figure that users of this iHub forum are unique that regard. I just don't think that the number of people willing to take a risk on DNAX intersected with the number of people who are going to see Adrian pitch on RedChip will be very numerous. I guess we will find out today and maybe tomorrow.
We are 26 days into the new year and those latest results from the competition are for 2016-2017. So, those latest reports were likely just released within the last couple of weeks.
You incorrectly presume that news about awards are going to propagate to company web sites almost instantly.
We will see what the beverage vendors have to say in response to my requests for information. Stay tuned...
Anyone can make a web site say whatever they want. So, let's test this out...
I have directly contacted the Francis Ford Coppola Winery about their 2017 Platinum "Best of Show" awards for their 2014 Petite Sirah and 2014 Cabernet Sauvignon wines.
I have directly contacted the Barefoot Cellars about their 2017 Platinum "Best of Show" awards for their NV Zinfandel and NV Pinot Grigio wines.
I have directly contacted Bacardi about their 2017 Platinum "Best of Show" awards for their Bacardi Black and Dewar's Signature spirits.
I have directly contacted Samuel Adams about their 2017 Platinum "Best of Show" awards for their Utopias beer.
I have directly contacted the Great Divide Brewing Company about their 2017 Platinum "Best of Show" awards for their Yeti Imperial Stout beer.
Good, bad or indifferent, if I get responses from these various companies, I will let you all know what they said.
One curious thing is that for this latest 2016-2017 competition, there were no awards given for the energy drink or soda categories. Of course, it may simply be that there were not at least four entries this year in those categories. Without at least four entries, it would not be possible to give platinum, gold, silver and bronze awards.
No... Adrian took over control of the company in February of 2016.
The first conference call was in April of 2016.
The second conference call was in August of 2016. By that time, Adrian had SEVEN months to learn about his company and its challenges, so by that time, he understood exactly what those challenges were.