There’s never a better time than the present to chart your investor interaction strategy over the coming months. What investors do you still need to meet with this year – including follow-ups to initial meetings you’ve already held, and meetings with new investors with whom you haven’t yet connected?
Do you have plans for which conferences to attend, new KOLs to contact, or for attracting new sell-side research?
Of course, all of this consideration needs to be prioritized within the context of your company’s upcoming catalysts: clinical trial progress, data readouts, product approvals, product launches, potential financings, growth target bogeys, and other various metrics investors will use to gauge your progress.
At Westwicke, we outline an investor interaction strategy that combines attending five to seven investor conferences and conducting four to five non-deal road shows. However, every company is different and subject to its own fundamentals and milestones, and therefore a bespoke approach is warranted. While investor conference dates are set well in advance, you can and should be flexible on your non-deal road show schedule, timing your investor interactions to overlap your specific catalysts in order to maximize positive investor perception. Here are a few other points to consider as you formulate your non-deal road show strategy:
- Don’t be afraid to schedule a multi-region non-deal road show over a condensed period of time. This is especially true if you are out seeing investors on the heels of achieving any of the aforementioned milestones. In these situations, the market feedback loop can be extremely efficient with a continuous flow of information across multiple geographies. Typically, trading volume will increase in unison with your visibility. And investors new to your story, or who have been monitoring your progress and waiting to initiate a position, have the liquidity to do so effectively. It is also a good opportunity to concurrently update long-term shareholders across different regions, conducting constructive dialogues on your next objectives.
- Flexibility is key to finding ideal road show dates. With so many investor and industry conferences taking place today, they can easily conflict with proposed dates for a non-deal road show. Quarterly earnings periods are also difficult as investors find their days consumed by conference calls, replays, and reading earnings transcripts to the point where they hardly have time to consider new investments. Try not to set in concrete what days you will be on the road, but work with your capital markets advisor and IR partner to find the best dates that will garner the widest investor exposure possible. It is unfortunate for you to miss seeing quality investors or have an incomplete schedule because people were unavailable due to conflicts. Also, give yourself room to maneuver around moving timelines on development milestones so that road shows encompass public announcements and/or incremental data.
- Don’t risk overexposure to any one particular region. Your non-deal road show strategy should ultimately expose you to investors in multiple regions of the country in a controlled cadence throughout the year. Many management teams limit themselves needlessly to New York and Boston, but some of the best audiences for your story can be found all over the country, and even the world. Try not to allocate too many days to the same city or to tag on non-investor related meetings in cities that you frequent. With a lack of a new development to your story, this gives the appearance of being overly-promotional as investors with whom you recently met are being solicited multiple times for additional meetings.
- Take advantage of the time you allocate to non-deal road shows to maximize investor exposure. Simply said, start early, stay late, and do as many group events as possible. I know it can be a grind but if logistics permit, do at least six or seven one on one meetings a day. These meetings should be reserved for your existing large shareholders as well as potential new shareholders that will be strong long term partners. Try to do at least one group event, a breakfast or a lunch and also include a dinner with some select shareholders or potential new ones. Maximizing your time in front of investors frees up more time to execute against your business plan which is priority one.
Your non-deal road show schedule should complement your investor conference appearances in a manner that will maximize your visibility amongst investors in parallel with the events that define the growth and development of your company. It is a fluid situation that demands a custom approach.
At Westwicke we work on such solutions every day. Just reach out for a deeper conversation.
