Among several bits of wisdom shared by Jane McCahon last night at a NIRI Kansas City meeting is the idea that investor relations, at its core, still has the mission of building a base of long-term investors who believe in your company and its future.
McCahon is VP of corporate relations for Chicago-based Telephone and Data Systems and its publicly traded subsidiary U.S. Cellular. She is a longtime IRO with experience in several industries and is a former chair of the NIRI national board.
Measuring the success of IR isn’t about this quarter, McCahon says. Success develops over several years as you develop a group of long-term investors who understand and support the company’s story.
You can do perception studies to evaluate how the relationships are going. But the ultimate measure will come in a moment, sometime in the future, when you need your shareholders – when management needs a critical proxy vote, support in an M&A situation or buy-in for a follow-on offering.
In that moment, if you’ve been doing your job well, you’ll approach those investors and the answer will come: “We’re with you.”
As for the near term, McCahon says, make an annual IR plan and put it into practice. Focus on what you can control or influence, not what you can’t change.
One IRO asked how you deal with high-frequency trading and the daily gyrations of stocks in today’s hyper-short-term market. McCahon’s advice:
You can’t. What’s your title? Investor relations – not trader relations. Yes, you have to be aware of what it is and be explaining these events to people. But there’s nothing you can do about it – move on.
McCahon says one of the best things an IR professional can do is spend 50% to 70% of your time focusing internally: educating management about investors’ feelings, preparing execs to meet with analysts and shareholders, coming up with Q&As and drilling managers, sharing the IR plan and managing internal expectations.
“What’s changed in IR?” someone asked. Well, this led to a big discussion about fax machines. Too many of us in the room remember when fax machines were the coolest new technology for rapid communication with the market. We punched in fax numbers and waited for it to send. Today, who still owns a fax machine?
McCahon suggests, though, that the heart of IR hasn’t changed: It’s finding and cultivating long-term investors for that moment in the future when you need them.
Tags: Institutional investors, Investor relations, Long-term investors, Short-termism, Trading
May 13, 2011 at 1:37 pm
Well said. Developing a bench of potential investors that understand your company and are ready to buy “at the right price,” even if today isn’t the right price for them, is extremely important.
May 13, 2011 at 5:17 pm
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May 18, 2011 at 2:37 pm
Good blog, Dick. You nailed it. It’s indeed all about finding those longer term buy-siders who care about who a company is and what it does. Despite all the quants and flash traders there are still a lot of institutions that invest for growth and/or value.
May 31, 2011 at 4:20 pm
Agree with Neal that a deep palette of investors is essential, though it must be one with varying purposes and time horizons today.
Here we divide in a yellow wood and I think IR pros must learn to take the path less trod. About 10% of daily volume is driven by rational investment. IR can’t rest on its laurels, doing the same thing its always done, without developing expertise and a way to quantify activity in the markets too. Otherwise it loses its place of value at the management table.
The human initiative is to adapt to change. Markets are utterly, completely different than they were just ten years ago. There are no specialists. Brokers hardly see any volume. The NYSE traded client we added last week shows only 20% of its traded volume on the listing exchange. Markets are fragmented and the quotes most protected by rules today are automated ones, by design, not rational, thoughtful buying and selling.
What’s more, dollars are depreciating assets. Trading is global, 24-hour, cross-asset-class. Stocks correlate inversely with the dollar and behave most like commodities today, not distinct entities. This is reality.
So IR must adapt to change or become irrelevant. There is a whole, exciting, vibrant world of opportunity for IR practitioners to be the most informed participant in the capital markets — and that’s exceedingly valuable to management and investors alike, today.
Or it can keep on doing the same old things.
September 27, 2011 at 11:48 am
[...] paying off, the quality and experience of management, and the expertise of your board. The long-term investors will be with [...]