Executive Summary 

Prison Professors provides products and services to assist people that face (or may face) challenges with regulatory agencies, government investigations, the judicial system, or complications with the criminal justice system. 

We offer:

• Self-directed training through digital products
• Ghostwriting services
• One-on-one consulting services, and 
• Compliance training services.

Markets We Serve:

We help customers solve complex, life-changing problems by offering products and services for three separate vertical markets, including:

• Mitigation: People that face challenges from government agencies. These clients seek mitigation services to better position themselves for best outcomes. They are eager to recalibrate and resume lives as law-abiding, contributing citizens. Some want to work toward lower sentences after a finding of guilt; some want to prepare for best outcomes through the prison journey; some want to prepare for more productive lives and higher earning capacities after release.

• Reputation Building: We collaborate with people and businesses that want to influence people’s perceptions. We work together in an effort to understand what they’re trying to accomplish. Then we outline a strategy that typically results in a book that explains how those people recalibrated while overcoming challenging times. When appropriate, we take on the responsibility of ghostwriting, editing, formatting, and publishing.

• Government Investigations: We offer services to help small- and medium-sized businesses develop corporate training programs. Through these efforts, we strive to help organizations comply with regulatory agencies. Clients learn how decisions made through the course of business can lead to government investigations and potentially criminal prosecutions.

Government Investigations:

We began working—in 1987—to create products and services. We strive to help people understand the costs of government investigations, and how to get the best outcomes.

Over multiple decades, we’ve developed an unmatched depth and breadth of experience. We have helped more than 10,000 people that have had to work their way toward better outcomes through challenging, life-altering complications.

The self-directed, digital products we offer guide people that want to work toward mitigation and reputation building; through direct services, we sometimes produce the assets that help our clients achieve their goals.

Through those efforts, we’ve interacted with more than a thousand people that consider themselves law-abiding, contributing citizens. They served their communities as doctors, lawyers, financial-services professionals, government or corporate officials. Some were small business owners, entrepreneurs, or rank and file employees. Despite best intentions, those people found themselves mixed up in costly government investigations and criminal prosecutions.

Whether a person goes into a government investigation as a witness, a subject, or a target, the experience can disruptive a person’s life. The costs of participating in a government investigation run high, starting with attorney fees. Attorney fees for a government witness can easily exceed $10,000; subjects and targets of government investigations may pay more than $1,000,000 in legal fees.

Costs of Government Investigations:

Why are costs so high to comply with government investigations?

Staff attorneys that work for different agencies in the federal government begin to investigate companies for a number of reasons. A newspaper article, an anonymous tip, market surveillance, or any number of factors can trigger an investigation. 

Those investigations may begin with a demand for documents. They will follow with interviews. Then the staff attorneys may take depositions. Through those investigative tactics, the government attorneys will accumulate thousands of pages and spend thousands of hours. They will become vested in taking a company and the individuals behind it down; that is how government attorneys define success.

The defense attorneys that represent people in government investigations will want to review everything that the government attorneys have. Those attorneys will bill for hundreds, if not thousands of hours. Civil attorneys with expertise in government investigations will bill in excess of $500 per hour. A client in a civil investigation can easily burn through $10,000 per day in legal fees.

Sadly, many civil investigations have bad outcomes for the people involved. Those investigations may lead to injunctions, fines, and in many cases, criminal prosecutions for white-collar crimes. The costs of defending against a government investigation can decimate businesses and destroy families.

In totality, government investigations can lead:

• To millions of dollars in expenses,
• To decimated businesses,
• To incomprehensible levels of personal stress,
• To the potential loss of liberty. 

A response to a government investigation could be one of the most important decision of a business owner’s life. Experience of working with more than 1,000 business professionals that ended up going to prison convinces us that it’s prudent to learn before government agencies begin investigations that could bring life-altering changes. 

• Do you know that you can become the target of a government investigation, even though you designed and operated your business in good faith, with the best intentions?

• Do you know the steps you should take to minimize your prospects of being targeted in a government investigation?

• Do you have a budget in place in the event that you become involved in a government investigation?

• Do you have an action plan with regard to what you should do within the first 24 hours of being notified that you’re in a government investigation?

• Do you know how your response to a government investigation could expose you to criminal prosecution?

Our team can help!

Ten Points to Consider:

1. No one is immune from a government investigation or a criminal prosecution.
2. All business professionals should contemplate the risks of doing business.
3. If business professionals don’t know the risks, they should find reliable sources to identify potential risks.
4. Business professionals strengthen their teams by learning from human stories.
5. Human stories can help team members appreciate the costs and collateral consequences that accompany any type of government investigation.
6. We can learn lessons from people that have gone through government investigations and criminal prosecutions.
7. Lessons from such people can help business professionals develop a risk-crisis response strategy. 
8. Business professionals should seek outside help to audit operations and assist with risk-mitigation strategies.
9. Business professionals should include risk-mitigation strategies as a component of their compliance training.
10. By documenting their efforts to avoid regulatory violations or white-collar crime, business professionals may qualify for leniency, no-prosecution, or deferred-prosecution agreements.

Big Government:

Business professionals that value safety and peace of mind use our products and services. By training their teams, the business owners get peace of mind, knowing that they’re doing everything possible to minimize the disruption of a government investigation.

To avoid the enormous costs of a government investigation, business professionals need to put training programs in place. They should know that Big Brother is watching. With staff attorneys in the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and numerous other government agencies, every business is vulnerable to an expensive civil investigation. 

With the ever-increasing size of our government, federal and state agencies are broadening their reach. Those agencies have jurisdiction over any transaction with a consumer, regardless of whether the consumer is an individual or a business. If a business offers a product or a service that requires a financial transaction, that organization is vulnerable.

Government agencies define their jurisdiction broadly, giving them the power to investigate all businesses that:

• extend credit and service loans (including “acquiring, purchasing, selling, brokering, or other extensions of credit”); 
• extend or broker leases; 
• use the internet for any purpose;
• advertise products or services to consumers,
• use the telephone to sell or interact with customers,
• use the mail to send invoices or contracts,
• use email for any purpose,
• provide real estate settlement services; 
• act as a custodian of funds; 
• sell, provide or issue stored value or payment instruments; 
• provide check cashing, check collection or check guaranty services; 
• provide payments or other financial data processing products or services to a consumer;
• provide financial advisory services;
• negotiate debt on behalf of consumers;
• collect, analyze, maintain or provide consumer report information; and 
• collect debt related to any consumer financial product or service.

Our Products and Services:

We develop industry- and business-specific services that will help business owners save money and make money. By investing in team training, business owners will minimize exposure to costly government investigations. Further, the CRM and process maps we create will help you communicate the value your company provides to customers, opening more opportunities to convert prospects into paying customers.

Count on our team to help you with:

• Digital training for onboarding staff
• Digital compliance training
• In-person training
• Process Maps
• CRM engineering
• Ghostwriting
• Train-the-trainer courses

Business Differentiator:

Although we collaborate with law firms that specialize in civil investigations, we are not a law firm and we do not dispense legal advice. Rather, our services help business owners understand the costs of a government investigation; we help them understand how to implement policies and procedures to avoid costly government investigations. When appropriate, we can also connect business owners with well-qualified law firms to audit the training procedures we work together to build.

Our team members represent our unique business differentiator. Rather than being staffed with people who speak theoretically about government investigations, we’ve built a team that has the unique experience of having gone through a government investigation, and frequently, a prosecution. 

Former lawyers, physicians, investment bankers, corporate executives, government officials, entrepreneurs, and employees comprise our team. We can help you because we know the costs of getting swept into government investigations; we also know strategies that will help you avoid such costs.

We will provide your team members with the resources necessary to avoid costly government investigations.

Our Process:

1. Schedule a complimentary call with our team to go through a basic consultation.
2. Our team will review your business model based on the information you’ve provided and create a scope of work.
3. We will come to an agreement on how we will define success.
4. We will collaborate in ways to document your company’s story and processes.
5. We will collaborate to develop tools, tactics, and resources to minimize your company’s exposure to a government investigation.
6. We will create systems to measure your progress on a regular basis.
7. We will teach your team steps you can take to qualify for leniency, deferred-prosecution agreements, and no-prosecution agreements.

Fee Information:

A small business would benefit from our minimum viable products that start in the $500 range. Those are digital training programs to help your team. More complex businesses may sign up for our full suite of training products. Those services may require ongoing, in-person training. They may require long-term agreements, with monthly fees that exceed $1,000. 

The complexity of your business, together with the number of locations and employees, will influence the investment you make for training to avoid or respond to government investigations. 

We establish fee arrangements that provide clients predictability and reward us for efficiency and results. As a team of highly experienced professionals who achieve great results for our clients, we are able to focus and be more efficient and effective than others. 

We favor collaborations with our clients. We want to understand their goals. Then, we structure our fee arrangements in a fair way that recognizes the value in achieving those goals. 

There are many ways in which such we can structure fee arrangements, including flat fees, milestone payments, and monthly payments. 

If you value your business and your liberty, you can afford to make Prison Professors a part of your team.