Success Story:

About Caterpillar

Caterpillar Inc. (NYSE: CAT) is the world's leading manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, off-highway diesel and natural gas engines, industrial gas turbines and diesel-electric locomotives. Headquartered in Irving, Texas, the company serves customers in construction, resource industries and power and energy markets around the world.

Meet Caterpillar’s Investor Relations Representative

John Bovee is on the Investor Relations team at Caterpillar, where he leads much of the team’s work around evaluating the shareholder base and buy-side engagement. His role focuses on understanding who holds the stock, how ownership is changing, how different investors engage with Caterpillar, and how that context can help the company prepare for more effective investor conversations.

While Caterpillar’s IR program is supported by a broader team, John has been the day-to-day owner of this project, including the work to evaluate the prior process, partner with Irwin, shape the reporting outputs, and develop a more repeatable framework for shareholder analysis and investor targeting.

Across the industry, the Investor Relations function has become increasingly data-driven, raising expectations for how teams connect ownership data, engagement history, and investor targeting into more strategic decision-making.

Investor Relations has evolved significantly over the past decade. Relationships are still at the heart of the function, but it has become much more data-driven. The opportunity is to combine relationship context with better analytics so engagement decisions are more informed and more strategic.

For John, that science starts with a basic responsibility: understanding the shareholder base and the people behind it. That means knowing who owns the stock and how ownership is changing, who the company has met and what was discussed, how different investors prefer to engage, where management’s time can be most effective, and what themes are emerging across the investor base.

The goal isn’t just to log meetings; it’s to connect ownership, engagement history, and investor interest so every interaction is better informed, purposeful, and useful for both Caterpillar and its investors.

What IR workflows looked like before Irwin

When John joined Caterpillar, the IR team relied on separate providers for surveillance, targeting, and CRM.

Before Irwin, we worked with several specialized providers, each of which served an important purpose. The challenge was that ownership, surveillance, CRM, and targeting information lived across separate platforms. I had built processes to reconcile and integrate that information, but too much time was spent maintaining the process instead of analyzing the information and identifying actionable insights.

Event planning showed the strain most clearly.

Preparing for an NDR or investor conference requires a connected view of ownership, relationship history, and investor context. Before Irwin, assembling that view required too many manual steps across multiple systems.

The cost wasn’t only time. The same information supported executive meeting preparation, shareholder reporting, targeting, and leadership-level materials, so the team needed to trust both the underlying data and the analysis built from it.

We were spending too much time and energy reconciling data across multiple vendors and adapting separate sources into recurring IR deliverables. This is fundamental IR work, and we saw an opportunity to make the process more efficient, more consistent, and more easily scalable.

Why Caterpillar chose Irwin

John led the effort to find a better way to work. As the team evaluated providers, one idea kept coming up: core ownership data is widely available, but the real value comes from how effectively that data is organized, contextualized, and translated into decisions.

Core ownership data is widely available across platforms. The real differentiator is how effectively that data is organized, connected to relationship history, and translated into better decisions.

Irwin answered that question differently. Instead of pointing Caterpillar to a standard set of reports, the Irwin team asked to see the deliverables the IR team already relied on.

What stood out about Irwin was their willingness to start with the deliverables and decisions that mattered to us. Rather than asking us to adapt our process to a standard report, Irwin was the first to offer a white-glove service model and a collaborative relationship built around our process.

Caterpillar consolidated its ownership, CRM, and targeting work onto Irwin, and the Irwin Professional Services team rebuilt the reports the IR team already relied on. The difference first appeared in how the team prepares management for investor meetings.

Briefings built around management's questions

For Caterpillar’s executives, more data isn’t necessarily more useful. When the CEO or CFO walks into an investor meeting, they want a short answer to one question.

When we brief management for an investor meeting, the objective is not to provide an overload of information; it is to provide the right context concisely. That means understanding the investor’s ownership position, our relationship history, the topics that have been important to them, and what management needs to know to make the conversation productive.

With Irwin, ownership, contacts, meeting history, and targeting live in one place. Past meetings and ownership stay tied to the right organizations and people, so the team can connect current and potential holders back to their relationship history and quickly develop actionable insights.

The team no longer reconciles multiple systems every quarter. It works from one consistent source for executive materials, shareholder reporting, targeting and event prep, and spends more of its time analyzing trends and investor behavior.

The biggest benefit is not just having the information in one place. It is being able to spend more time on the higher-value work: interpreting what it means and deciding how to act on it.

That shift shows up in the questions the team can now answer quickly:

• Shareholder reporting: What changed in the ownership base, and what drove it?

• Engagement analysis: Are we engaging investors appropriately and using each interaction effectively?

• Investor profiles: What should management know before walking into the room?

• Targeting: Which relationships should we continue to develop, and what context should guide the next interaction?

• Event planning: Which investors are the best fit for a particular event or engagement format?

• Relationship history: Do we follow up now or try a different format? What have they been focused on lately? Where are the gaps in coverage?

• Board and executive reporting: How is management time being used to support effective investor engagement?

A targeting methodology built for Caterpillar

The IR team at Caterpillar wanted targeting to go deeper than share counts. Together, Irwin’s Professional Services team and Caterpillar built a custom targeting methodology that blends quantitative indicators, ownership potential, engagement history, momentum, and the IR team’s qualitative perspective.

Effective targeting cannot just be reduced to buying power. It requires understanding of the broader trends: ownership momentum, activity in peers and adjacent sectors, and how the investor’s perspective has developed through prior conversations with us. That relationship context is critical because Investor Relations is ultimately about understanding investors, listening to their perspectives, and using that insight to make future engagement more productive.

The relationship assessment adds context that data alone cannot provide. It helps the team understand how best to engage with different investors based on prior dialogue, areas of interest, and the nature of the relationship.

One of the most important inputs in our targeting model is Caterpillar's own relationship context. We've met with investors, heard their perspectives, and developed a better understanding of the topics that matter most to them when they engage with Caterpillar.

John credits the Irwin Professional Services team for building something around Caterpillar’s priorities rather than a standard data-driven template.

Irwin was highly collaborative in building a targeting model around Caterpillar’s priorities. They did not force a standard framework on us; they gave us a meaningful role in shaping the methodology, and the result is something we are proud to have built together.

Deeper profiles for key engagement

The methodology produces an annual list of organizations identified for deeper analysis and outreach planning. Irwin’s Professional Services team then built a dedicated profile for each one, covering Caterpillar-specific context, primary relationships, recent interactions, ownership, portfolio characteristics, and relevant fund-level detail. The profiles will be refreshed on an ongoing basis.

When we plan investor outreach, the profiles help us prepare with a more complete view of each organization. They bring together ownership context, relationship history, recent interactions, and investor-specific considerations so we can tailor the engagement appropriately.

Surveillance with Okapi Partners

Caterpillar receives market surveillance through Irwin’s partnership with Okapi Partners. Continuous improvement is part of how Caterpillar operates, and the Okapi team works with the IR team to bring that mindset to each quarter’s reporting.

The Okapi team is very collaborative and willing to problem-solve with us. Nothing is set in stone. Every quarter, we look for opportunities to strengthen the process, because continuous improvement is the Caterpillar mindset, and they're always open to it and willing to work through it with us.

An extension of the team

For John, the platform made the partnership possible, but the partnership is what made it valuable.

We do not view Irwin simply as a software provider or data vendor. We view them as an extension of our team. The platform helps centralize information, but the real value comes from the partnership: their responsiveness, their willingness to customize solutions around Caterpillar’s needs, and their ability to help us turn information into actionable insights and decision-useful materials.