b'Chapter 17Is Your Offering Viable?How can you tell if your offering is viable? There are two hurdles you have to overcome to have a viable offering.Is it legal?Will anyone invest in it? Is Your Offering Legal? The first hurdle, Is it legal, is easily answered: If you are raising money from passive investors by selling interests in your company and they arerelyingonyoutogenerateprofits,youaresellingInvestment Contracts,whicharesecurities,soyourofferingmustcomplywith securities laws. The alternative is to do a joint venture, where all members are actively involved in generating their own profits.Theeasiestwaytomakesureyourofferingislegalistohirean experienced corporate securities attorney to help you correctly structure your offering, choose a securities exemption, form your companies, draft your investor agreements and securities compliance documents, and do the appropriate securities notice filings within the prescribed deadlines. Your securities counsel should be frank (and experienced) enough to tell you if what you want to offer investors is outside the norm such that it will be undesirable to investors, and thus, doomed to fail or only marginally successful.153'