Our Blog: The Podium

By David Calusdian of Sharon Merrill, and David Fine of Fine Communications

Two investor day experts combine experience to deliver best practices on leveraging digital platforms to deliver a compelling virtual investor day.

The investor day is one of the most effective platforms for presenting your company’s strategy, outlining your long-term targets and showcasing the depth and strength of your management team. With the world moving to virtual formats for the foreseeable future, IROs are faced with a new task – mastering virtual investor day planning. This pivot presents new challenges as well as exciting new opportunities to engage and communicate critical messages with the investment community. 

The following are top tips for IROs to master to execute a successful virtual investor day:

By David Calusdian, President

Five Tips to Effectively Present to Investors on a Video Platform

Management teams of publicly held companies throughout the world are readying for a new phase of the corporate “new normal” in the COVID-19 world – the virtual non-deal roadshow. After the calendar Q1 reporting season ends, management and investors will be meeting via video platforms such as Zoom, Google Hangouts or Teams to discuss their companies’ prospects going forward.

In addition to figuring out the technological logistics that will allow management to tell their companies’ stories to investors in an online format, they will need to prepare to deliver corporate messages using a different medium than what they’ve been accustomed. There is an inherent difference between communicating face to face and through a video platform. In this blog, we provide five tips to help deliver a compelling story to investors during a virtual non-deal roadshow. 

By David Calusdian, President

The option to hold a solely virtual annual meeting has been with us for several years now, but we certainly will see a dramatic increase in the number of companies using these purely online events this coming proxy season.  Broadridge’s virtualshareholdermeeting.com platform lists 140 virtual or “hybrid” (offering a virtual option to supplement the in-person meeting) events on its platform alone from now through the end of May. And we’ll be sure to see more of these events in the coming weeks as a result of the SEC’s new annual meeting guidance due to COVID-19 travel and gathering restrictions. 

Below we have shared the SEC’s guidance around three major areas relating to annual meetings, including 1) changing the date, time and location of meetings; 2) holding virtual or hybrid annual meetings; and 3) providing flexibility regarding shareholder proposals.  We have also included links to helpful resources, and proxy and news release examples relating to virtual or hybrid annual meetings. Of course, since state law governs the conduct of annual meetings, please refer to those corporate codes as well as any limitations provided by your stock exchange. 

Investor Days can be one of the most effective and cost-efficient  activities in your IR program – but only if you’re prepared.  Anyone who has worked “behind the scenes” of an investor day knows that it can be a logistical headache. You not only need to anticipate all the possible hiccups of hosting a live event, but handle the more substantive issues associated with telling your company’s story to a roomful of investors and analysts.

New disclosure rule presents an “apples and oranges” problem

As any communication veteran knows, every corporate “happening” creates a messaging opportunity. That is certainly the case with the impending round of pay-ratio disclosures. Starting this year, under an SEC amendment to Regulation S-K, which stemmed from a provision in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, most U.S. public companies will need to disclose the total annual compensation of their “median” employees, along with the ratio of that figure to the total compensation of their chief executive officers. Based on preliminary estimates, the highest ratios could exceed 350 to 1.

When faced with a crisis, even senior IR executives can benefit from an outside perspective, particularly when that perspective is based on years of experience. In the following conversation, David Calusdian, president at Sharon Merrill Associates, discusses crisis management issues and the most effective strategies to protect corporate reputation and credibility.

Q: Can you share some recent examples of your crisis communications work, to give readers a sense of the many issues that can ensnare a public company, and discuss how you solve them?

A: Today the potential for a crisis lurks in any piece of market-moving information that originates from somewhere other than the company. It could be a social media post about an impending management shakeup, an FDA product recall or a data breach. The potential scenarios are endless, but an effective response shares a few common themes:

When many management teams contemplate the quarterly earnings cycle, they think primarily about compliance – dotting the “i”s and crossing the “t”s. But while compliance is a major driver of financial disclosure, it should not be the only one – if it were, companies would file the 10-Q or 10-K and leave it at that. Take a more strategic approach to your next earnings cycle with these five tips.

We recently spoke with Baruch Lev, the Philip Bardes Professor of Accounting and Finance at New York University Stern School of Business. In “The End of Accounting and the Path Forward for Investors and Managers,” Prof. Lev and Feng Gu, associate professor at the University of Buffalo, propose a new system to improve transparency of corporate accounting.  This system aims to make public accounting disclosures more useful to investors. They encourage investor relations professionals to begin discussions with management to increase the usefulness and relevance of company disclosures for investors.

Timing is everything. On Tuesday, one of the “Original Six” hockey teams fired its long-time coach Claude Julien, who in 2011 led the team to a Stanley Cup victory. The Bruins had underperformed in recent years, especially this one, and Julien, who had been the NHL’s longest-tenured coach, was shown the door. The announcement of the firing caused immediate backlash among the media and fans in New England.

What caused the uproar, however, wasn’t the actual firing of Julien, although he certainly had his defenders among Bruins fans. The problem was timing. The Bruins fired Julien two days after the New England Patriots had won Super Bowl LI in historically dramatic fashion. And in what is undoubtedly no coincidence, the announcement took place on the day of Boston’s celebratory parade and rally for the Patriots -- a day when hundreds of thousands of fans clogged the city streets to get a glimpse of their gridiron heroes. The city’s sports focus was most certainly on the Patriots. And that’s what the Bruins were counting on.

If you’re the CFO of a pre-IPO company, the months leading up to
 your S-1 filing can be exhausting. You’ve read your registration statement so many times you have it memorized. And you cannot even begin to imagine a time when you won’t be spending every waking moment with your bankers.