Success Story:

About JLL (Jones Lang LaSalle, Inc)

A member of the Fortune 500®, JLL (Jones Lang LaSalle Incorporated) is a leading global commercial real estate and investment management company that helps clients buy, build, occupy, manage, and invest in a variety of commercial, industrial, hotel, residential, and retail properties. JLL brings the power of a global platform combined with local expertise. Driven by their purpose to shape the future of real estate for a better world, JLL delivers innovative technology and impactful sustainability solutions that help their clients, people, and communities. JLL is characterized by their growth orientation, operational excellence, financial strength, premium brand, collaborative culture, and high ethical standards.

Meet JLL’s Investor Relations Team

Scott Einberger is the Head of Investor Relations at JLL. Before joining JLL, he spent over 17 years at US Foods, where he held a number of increasingly senior positions across controllership and corporate finance, most recently as the Director of Investor Relations. Scott joined JLL in 2021 and is responsible for communicating JLL’s strategic priorities and interacting with shareholders and the broader financial community. 

Jennifer Kozob is the Senior Manager of Investor Relations at JLL and manages many of the company’s day-to-day IR activities and workflows. She joined the company in 2017 and held numerous financial analyst roles at companies like CNA Insurance and Northrop Grumman Corporation before her role at JLL.

Why JLL made the switch to Irwin

When it came time to evaluate investor relations solutions, the team at JLL was looking for a tool that was intuitive while providing them with the insights and functionality they needed to run their IR program. Scott explains:

“The biggest challenge I had with our previous solution was the antiquated functionality and design, I struggled navigating within the tool, and there were basic fundamental things that I had a hard time doing.” 

During their discovery process, Irwin’s interface stood out to the team at JLL. Scott was impressed with the simplicity of navigation, which allowed him to get what he needed faster: 

“When I first opened up Irwin, I could navigate the whole tool without anybody having to spend time to show me where to find things. I could easily find my shareholder list or a firm or individual profile. That was appealing to me. It was simple and easy to use, and it provided me with what we needed.”

An easy experience to transfer historical data to Irwin

Switching providers can be an intimidating process for any IR team, historical context must make its way into the new platform so valuable information is not lost. The Irwin Assistant team made the process simple for the team at JLL, using an export from the previous solution and uploading it into the IRM. Scott and the team at JLL were happy with the smooth transition:

“From my end, it was really easy. We just exported our data from our previous tool into Excel, sent it over to the Irwin team, and they imported everything for us. Data accuracy, which was very important during the transition process, was high, and we had very little cleanup after our data was imported to Irwin.”

Constant innovation

With legacy IR solution providers, IR teams don’t always see the benefit of consistent innovation within their tools and workflows. Scott recalls his experience since bringing on Irwin two years ago:

“Over the last two years since we switched to Irwin, the functionality has grown significantly. The increased functionality and capabilities within the tool make it even better than when we first switched. When we signed on, we were impressed with the investor CRM, tear sheets, and the ability to track changes in our shareholder base. Now it’s grown into so much more than that. We use Irwin for targeting and creating itineraries for events–the growth of the tool since we’ve signed on has been great.”

How the team at JLL uses Irwin to support their IR program

Logging meetings & activity tracking

Jennifer uses Irwin to track all of JLL’s investor activities daily. This allows the team to always have access to the context they need–whether for earnings calls or board reports, Jennifer explains:

“We use Irwin daily to log our IR activities–every time we have a meeting with an investor. I’m able to take notes, and then during earnings follow-ups, we’re able to pull out themes based on all the interaction notes we’ve logged.”

Planning events 

Jennifer also uses the itineraries and tear sheets functionality within Irwin to manage logistics and keep the management team prepared and up to date for investor interactions while they’re on the road:

“We often use itineraries for events when we’re going to a conference or an NDR. We pull in all of the meetings and then use that to create tear sheets so management knows who they’re meeting with, if they’ve met them before, and they can see our previous notes and an overview of the firm and the individuals they’re meeting with.”

Tracking changes to their shareholder base

Understanding movements in the shareholder base is vital insight for investor relations teams to keep management and the board informed on the company’s ownership. Jennifer explains:

“We review our ownership within Irwin every quarter, which helps with our board reporting and to see changes in our ownership profile.”

Consistent data between FactSet and Irwin provides clarity and helps to avoid having to troubleshoot their ownership data:

“It’s really helpful that when we compare ownership data within the integrated Irwin + FactSet solution, they’re exactly the same.”

Investor targeting

The team at JLL also leverages Irwin in their investor targeting process to find prospective investors and potentially leverage insights from their shareholder base to get investors to take a larger position. Jennifer explains:

“Irwin’s targeting functionality is easy to use, I like that I can search by different attributes–what kind of style the firm has, the size of the firm, if they hold our peers currently but don’t hold us. Knowing an investor's typical position size, and if we’re above or below that lets us know if they have room to expand their position, which would allow us to target within our shareholder base.”

Irwin + FactSet: An integrated solution 

The team at JLL leverages the Irwin + FactSet integrated solution to provide data for modeling and to keep up with consensus estimates. Jennifer shares her experience with using Irwin + FactSet:

“The Excel plug-in is really useful, once we set up a template for consensus or stock price movements, you can just hit refresh, and everything in our report is up to date.”

With FactSet’s depth of data and functionality, Scott shares his most useful IR workflows that FactSet can help to support:

“I’ve used FactSet in previous roles as well and really like the charting functionality, tracking share prices for the company and all of the peer groups. Consensus estimates is a tab within FactSet I’ve used to track and look at how estimates are changing.”

With the upcoming expansion for the integrated solution, Scott shares the benefits of the combined solution and what he’s looking forward to:

“I’m looking forward to publishing events in FactSet. Right now, we occasionally issue press releases for events that we’re going to or webcasts we’re holding, but there are many events we go to that we don’t necessarily issue a press release for. It will be great to be able to push events into the FactSet Event Calendar without having to go through the press release process.”

Time savings

With a less cumbersome user experience, the JLL team saves valuable time using the Irwin solution. Scott elaborates:

“The ease of using Irwin is pretty significant for me compared to the old tool. There’s time savings because the navigation and the ability to find data and information is much smoother.”

High-quality support experience

For the team at Irwin, partnership and service quality is one of the core pillars of the relationship. Ensuring data is up-to-date and accurate is one element that the support team ensures is smooth for IR teams. Jennifer explains her support experience with the team at Irwin:

“The support is excellent. If I have a meeting in the morning and put the request into Irwin, by the time the meeting is over, the person has already been added to our IRM.”

Scott adds that his experience with his previous provider was difficult:

“With my previous provider, if I had someone not in the database, it was very difficult to get them added.”

Having a team of experts is helpful for the team at JLL, and Jennifer recounts her experience leveraging the Irwin team to help put together board reports from their CRM data:

“The team helps us to put together board reports based on the meetings we input into Irwin and the shareholder ownership, which has been nice.”

On the overall experience with Irwin’s support, Scott adds:

“The support is a thousand times better. It’s like night and day from what I’ve had in the past.”

A message to IROs considering Irwin:

“Look at the functionality and the ease of use of the different platforms, and also look at what sort of support you’re going to get and how responsive the team is. Think about what you’re going to use the tool for. I’ve used all the major IR platforms in the past. While the reporting and charting might be helpful–it’s more beneficial to evaluate if you will use the tool for those things, as well as understand if there are additional benefits the solution provides. 

Innovation in your IR tool is also important–Irwin’s added a fair amount of reporting capability. With the added FactSet integration, it’s a cleaner way to think about what you’re using different systems for to ensure you’re getting the most value out of those systems.”