Resurge

It's becoming more and more popular to have supplemental materials on the IR section of your website that help further investors' understanding of your story. These can be explainer videos, slides, or just text.

With the quarter winding down and you're starting to think about when you'll report next quarter, have a look at when your peers plan to report and choose a day/time that doesn't overlap directly with this.

Today's 30-second IR insight is to show a little love to your neutral and sell-rated analysts. These underperform ratings can be political and when they're not it's usually because the analyst doesn't fully understand your story (presuming you disagree with them).

Do you sometimes feel like you're wasting time meeting with investors who never buy your stock? One solution is to use an investor targeting tool. I've found that when used properly, my clients spend more time meeting with targeted funds who have a higher propensity to buy.

Today's 30-second IR insight is that before you get all bent out of shape about your valuation multiple when comparing yourself to your peers, growth-adjust everyone's multiples for a more accurate comparison since investors still want to pay more for growth than for cash flow!

It's so frustrating when a company's IR website has broken links to SEC forms or particular presentations. It's such an easy thing to avoid! Take 10 mins to audit the IR section of your website to ensure everything is working.

Today's 30-second IR insight is to think about planning UNIQUE, company-sponsored corporate access activities during the quarter. Don't be one of those BORING companies that only does sell-side conference appearances.

IR best practice alert: Look out AT LEAST two quarters into the future to plan your IR calendar! Don't get caught flat-footed with big gaps in your corporate access initiatives and try to be creative, proactive, and forward-looking.

Investors love stories and analogies - it helps them understand what you're talking about. So where possible, use analogies to help tell your company's story. Your investors will thank you for it!

To maximize the virality of your story and to make it easy to be told and retold (that's how stocks get bought), see if you can boil your company down to 3-4 bullets that you want investors to know as the "key takeaways." Then hammer those home over and over again.

You should be looking through ALL of the sell-side models from top-to-bottom to ensure their logic is consistent with how your business works AND that their numbers are in line with your guidance.

As we approach "quiet period," have you reached out to the investors you met during the quarter to remind them that if they want a follow-up call with you (IR or CFO), they need to be aware of the quiet period deadline? If you haven't, you should.

Don't get bothered by low attendance at your next fireside chat since most of the consumption of what you have to say will be done by transcript anyway! Live attendance can be more a function of conference traffic than anything else.

IR best-practice alert: send a list of questions that you'd like the analyst to ask you at your upcoming fireside chat. Save the analyst a little time and also, this helps you control the dialogue to focus on what you want the Street to know.

99% of what you say won't be consumed live, but rather via transcripts later in time. Make investors' lives easier by avoiding "a wall of words" in these transcripts. Short, pithy dialogue is so much more entertaining, informative, and easy to read.

Make sure you NAIL the answer to the first fireside chat question everyone always asks which is "for new investors in the audience, can you tell us a little bit about what you do." You'd be shocked at how many companies take this "softball question" and absolutely whiff.

Make sure ALL of the executives that you bring to conferences will answer key questions the same way. The worst thing you can have happen is mixed messaging. Do rehearsals and practice sessions to ensure this doesn't happen.

Realize that the people listening to you don't know your company one-one-millionth as well as you do. So speak to the audience as if they're new to your story. Treat them with respect, but speak at a level that anyone - no matter how distracted they are...

99% of what you say won't be consumed live, but rather via transcripts later in time. Make investors' lives easier by avoiding "a wall of words" in these transcripts. Short, pithy dialogue is so much more entertaining, informative, and easy to read.

Just because you tell investors something doesn't mean they're going to believe you. Expect that good investors will go out into the field to verify any of your claims…so you better err on the side of being truthful!