Mark Fasken: This is Winning IR, a podcast exploring the diverse insights within the IR community. Join me, Mark Fasken, as I sit down with IROs and other IR stakeholders to discuss the winning strategies, tactics, and shifts in thinking that are redefining the profession. For investor relations professionals, cutting through the noise is no easy task.
Investors have to navigate through full inboxes and busy schedules, and the typical earnings calls or press releases don't always provide a unique angle to stand out. I'm really excited for today's guest. Zane Keller is the head of investor relations at Affirm. Before transitioning into investor relations, he spent a decade on the buy side, investing in global financial services companies across all verticals, including banking, consumer finance, and payment sectors.
With that in mind, Zane is perfectly positioned to understand what gets investors interested and engaged from an IR perspective. His focus on bringing unique insights and engagement to investors in the financial community is a masterclass for IR teams looking to stand out. And I'm excited to share his insight on today's episode.
Mark Fasken: So Zane, I wanted to start with a little bit of your background and how that shapes your view on investor relations. Before your career in investor relations, you worked on the buy side for over a decade, investing in and doing research on global financial services companies, including banking through finance and the payment sector.
Understanding The Decision Making Process on the Buy Side
Mark Fasken: From your perspective, can you walk us through the typical decision-making process on the buy side? And from your perspective, where can investor relations really play the most important role?
Zane Keller: Great to be on. And thank you for hosting this. I've been a subscriber to the Winning IR podcast since day one, I've listened to literally every episode. I'm a big fan, and an even bigger fan of the Irwin product suite.
Some brief background on myself: As you mentioned, before moving to IR, I was a long-only investor for a decade, investing in global financial service and information services companies. I can really only speak to my process as a long-only investor, and that may differ from investors with shorter time horizons, such as a hedge fund. In simple terms, my process as a long-only analyst was first, I would create a list of companies that I wanted to own, and this was based upon a few factors such as the attractiveness of the industry that the company operates in, the company's position within that industry, long-term strategy, and management quality, by which I mean their track record of capital allocation decisions and ability to execute on their stated strategy. The second step in the process was to create and maintain price targets on these companies that I wanted to own.
It's like a one-two combo of first identifying whether you even want to own a company or not. And there were a lot of companies I frankly did not want to own at any price for different reasons. And then reacting to market opportunities. In other words, share prices move all the time.
So the market will eventually bring you an opportunity to buy a company that is on your buy list. I think, again, investors with a shorter time horizon might operate a little bit differently. They might start by identifying a market opportunity. So let's say a certain stock sells off, or a certain country sells off, or interest rates move, or commodity prices, what have you. And then they react to that and say, okay, now I want to find a company within this pocket of volatility to buy. But again, as a long-only investor, you have the luxury, I would say, of generally being able to identify the companies you want to own over time, and then letting the market come to you.
Ultimately, what we're doing as an analyst is separating the wheat from the chaff. As I'm sure every head of IR knows, and many analysts know, investors are surrounded by noise and distractions, and this is where IR can help the most. We can present a crisp, easily digestible story, which investors can build their investment thesis on, give them the basic industry and company data they need to make a decision, and provide them with opportunities to engage and understand management's thinking.
How Proactive Targeting and Outreach Can Create Meaningful Engagements
Mark Fasken: So, Zane, I have a follow-up question on the target list of companies. In terms of developing that list, were you really just doing that based off of sort of fundamental metrics of these companies? Like, were you just going into a FactSet and doing a screen for companies that match certain criteria? Or, you know, where you also maybe focused in your case, you were focused on a sector, going to conferences and meeting companies that weren't on that list, and then adding them after that engagement? How much of that list was developed based on interactions with companies versus just the numbers?
Zane Keller: Of course, it's both, but I do think there's a cumulative nature to this, right? In other words, the longer you've been an analyst and investor, the more companies you've met with, and more conferences you've gone to, the more you build that knowledge base of here's what an attractive sector looks like, and here's what a winning company within an attractive sector looks like, right?
So, within financial services, one of the subsectors that's very attractive is the exchange industry. It's capital light, there are a lot of structural trends that have led to consolidation of the industry. The return on invested capital is extremely high, and the competitive moats are miles wide because of network effects.
So that was an example of one sector. After meeting with enough companies in that sector, I realized that globally, almost all exchanges are very attractive businesses, and it's just a matter, again, of finding a market opportunity, like the market, letting the market bring you that opportunity to buy it.
Not reacting to, okay, the stock sold off and now I need to learn about what this company does.
Mark Fasken: And, you know, we also talked a lot about investor targeting, right? It's like the flip side, right? You know, as an investor, you were looking at who are the companies that I want to have. Investor relations professionals are saying, who are the investors that I want to have.
How often were you getting, whether it was emails or introductory messages from companies who wanted to meet with you? Did you take many of those meetings, or did you ignore a lot of that because you already had your predefined list and that company perhaps wasn't on it?
Zane Keller: I think it's a big missed opportunity, frankly. The answer is no, I did not receive any direct outreach attempts from companies. And I would say, frankly, the ones I did were often not companies you'd probably want to invest in. In other words, they're a micro-cap or they just couldn't get any type of investor attention, but I do think it's a big missed opportunity.
I mean, there is such powerful targeting software out there now, of course, that's one of the many features that Irwin offers. It's really a missed opportunity. If you, as IR, are doing a non-deal roadshow to a certain pair of cities, or you're going to a conference, or you're going to be in a city for another type of event, you should be reaching out to investors in those cities and targeting them proactively to try to meet them.
I mean, I could think about in our example at Affirm, we do a non-deal roadshow at least once a year, and it usually takes one to two years for an initial meeting to translate into that investor buying into the stock. So I think it's incumbent upon IR to use the targeting software they have or other targeting services they have access to, and reach out to investors proactively to try to get them into the boat, so to speak.
How Strong IR Can Get You On The "Buy List"
Mark Fasken: Probably a good segue into another question and your transition into the investor relations role. How has your understanding of investor priorities shaped your approach to your process and priorities as an IR professional? What were some of the first processes you established, and what steps did you take to really get up to speed in the IR role?
Zane Keller: I'm going to start with what my time on the buy side, what type of insights those gave me into how IR should be run. And there are a few implications in my experience for how IR should be managed. The first is that you need to make sure you're making investors' buy list. I'm stating the obvious here, but if your company is not making that buy list, you need to dig into why and address that to the extent possible. And there are many different reasons you may not make the buy list, but it's generally a combination of either the company's market position, and it might be just a perception, right? It could be a misperception, which could be something you need to address as IR.
It could be due to governance problems. It could be due to a poor articulation of long-term strategy or financial objectives. Again, something IR should definitely be able to address. You need to ask your investors and analysts, especially those that are not shareholders, or if it's a sell-side analyst, perhaps they have a neutral or even sell on your stock, you need to ask them to be able to understand here's what the reasons are, and then formulate a plan to address those.
The second implication is that every interaction with investors and analysts is an opportunity, and you need to help investors separate the wheat from the chaff. Fair or not, investors are arriving at a judgment call on your company and management team. And the soft factors matter as much, probably even more, than just the financial models or your valuation multiple.
You only get a few shots on goal with an investor. You need to really make those count. I'm constantly amazed by how many companies spend their earnings calls reading the press release or just repeating the financial results, or they only do the bare minimum in terms of conference attendance or other investor engagement opportunities.
Investors should come away from each interaction they have with you with a new insight. If not, what was the purpose of that meeting? In other words, it wasn't a good use of your time or their time. If you're just repeating the last quarter's results, give them an insight into your business, an impression of management or an industry takeaway.
It could be an insight into one of your vendors, a customer, or something happening in the industry writ large, but every single opportunity should be viewed again as a means by which you can provide investors unique insights so that they feel their time was well spent.
The third implication is that the price target is a function of many factors. And in my view, IR's role is to be an educator. We need to provide accurate information, enabling the investor to assess fair value. Our goal is not to be a cheerleader; we should not be trying to drive the stock price higher or lower.
Our goal is to educate and let the investor make the decision what that fair price is.
Implementing Effective IR Processes
Zane Keller: In terms of processes that we implemented once I started as Head of IR at Affirm, there are actually a few different things we did and I think we're starting to see other companies within the industry adopt these as well.
The first is introducing a shareholder letter. Our opening script, if you listen to our earnings call, you'll see that we do less than five minutes of opening script. If you remove the part where I'm reading the mandatory legal disclosures, it's probably less than two minutes. Anything longer than that is a waste of time.
In other words, if you're doing a 20-minute opening script where your CFO or CEO is repeating financial results, that is not a good use of anybody's time. A letter or a presentation is a superior method to convey financial information. It also grants you creative license and freedom to help shape the narrative for that quarter. And every quarter, coming back to something I mentioned previously, we are trying to provide a unique insight within the shareholder letter.
So if you looked at our topics, one quarter, we might be talking about a certain product, or a certain partnership, or a new geography for us. The topics vary quarter to quarter, and not every quarter is necessarily a meaningful topic or material, but at least investors come away with some type of unique insight, and they feel like it was worth their time to read the letter beyond just the financial results.
The second thing we did was host a financial model information session. Why do we do this? Whether investors admit it or not, they often struggle to model your business. And this is a one-to-many problem as every head of IR knows. Do you want to be answering the same question about how to model your business a hundred times in a hundred different calls, or do you want to find a more scalable solution?
So we address this by holding a virtual financial model session where we had 15 or 20 of our sell-side analysts join. We walked them through a presentation, where we went line item by line item and showed them how they could think about modeling our business. And then we posted the replay on our investor relations website, so that any new analysts coming to a firm, any new investor that's just starting to become familiar with our company can go look at that.
And then after they review that, they can then have a chat with us, and it's a much more efficient use of both their time and ours. The third item we introduced was a series of casual investor engagements over the course of the year. We hosted dinners or lunches with investors often co-hosted by a sell-side analyst.
Both our investors and management have raved about the small group dinners that we've hosted. It provides an opportunity for investors to gain a unique insight in a more casual format. They also get a glimpse into how your management team works together, which is really important.
Finally, it allows us to showcase the rest of our C-Suite and demonstrate the talent bench. Most companies only put their CFO or maybe their CEO out on the road. They don't really let investors engage with the rest of the C-Suite.
I think that's a missed opportunity. You've got a whole talent bench. Why not show the rest of them off? And your investors will definitely come away with a unique insight if they're meeting with your head of sales, head of product, head of capital, whatever title applies to your company.
You definitely have other people within your company and your management team that are interesting to speak with, and that you should be getting in front of investors.
Gathering and Utilizing Investor Feedback
Zane Keller: The fourth and final thing I wanted to mention was gathering investor feedback systematically. It's no secret that perception studies are valuable.
In fact, in my view, they're almost a must if you're moving into a new head of IR role, but feedback really needs to be more regular than that. You can't just do a perception study once every few years and believe that's adequate. So one idea we recently implemented – and I have to give credit to you, Mark, we gained this insight, or this idea from one of your other clients when we attended the dinner that you hosted a few months ago – was to introduce a quarterly investor survey, gathering feedback from investors and our analysts every single quarter. We disseminate that feedback in a weekly email that goes directly to our leadership team.
So every single week, obviously we're having calls with investors. We take quotes from those meetings, as well as other statistics and give that directly to our management team. And what I've found is leadership often wants unique insights into what investors are thinking. So in other words, it's actually a two-way street, right?
They don't just want to hear from IR: "Here's what consensus is," or "Here's what the average price target is." That's a commodity. There's no value added from doing that. They want unique insights, just like investors want unique insights into your business.
Mark Fasken: Awesome. Those are great. And so I just want to ask a couple of follow-up questions for the listeners who are maybe wondering about how do they actually execute on a few of those things?
One on the model recording, how often do you refresh that? Is that a once-a-year activity, or maybe it's like you just do it once and it's good for a few years. What's the shelf life?
Zane Keller: I think it depends upon your company and just how dynamic your financial model is. I think in our case, it's been a little bit over a year since we held that session.
I don't think enough has changed that would warrant redoing the session. If we felt like something really changed in the business, whether it was a totally new line of business, you know, perhaps new segments, something like that, then we could of course consider hosting another session.
But I think for most companies, the answer is it's probably an almost evergreen session, right? And that's the beauty of it, right? You spend a few hours thinking about what the content of this should look like and then recording it. And then it lasts, it should last for many years. If you did it well, it should be usable by dozens, if not hundreds of investors and analysts, and you have ended up saving a lot of time for both you and the investment community.
Mark Fasken: Okay. And on the dinners, how often would you say you're hosting those dinners and how do you decide who you want to invite to those dinners?
Zane Keller: Yeah, we typically host two dinners a year and then we also do a lunch or two over the course of the year. We're usually hosting these with one of the sell-side analysts that covers us.
So we've got a list of almost 20 analysts that cover us and we try to rotate through that list. Some of the analysts have very strong distribution networks through their brokerages. So they're able to get quite a good number of investors in front of us.
But we also always supplement that with targeting to one of your earlier questions. So we use the targeting software within Irwin to make sure that if we're hosting a dinner, let's say in San Francisco, where Affirm is headquartered, we are reaching out to some of the San Francisco-based investors that we don't always talk with, and inviting them to the dinner.
Or if we're going to Boston as another example, we reach out to investors there. So we've often found we don't have trouble getting enough investors. If anything, we have the opposite problem where there's more demand than seats. But I've found that these types of casual engagements, it's again, a two-way street where both our management and investors find them really useful.
And I want to reiterate, it's very important that management hears directly from your investors. I think there's a trap that many IR teams fall into where management's only hearing feedback filtered through IR, which means it can have a very positive lens on it. And they're not necessarily hearing from investors when they're unhappy about something, or they feel like there's something we could be doing better from either an IR or communication standpoint.
So it's important to give your CEO and your CFO time with investors one-on-one where those investors with no filter can let them know exactly what they think you are doing well, and perhaps areas that could use improvement.
Engaging with Investors and Analysts
Mark Fasken: Moving on to our next question, you talked a lot about communication and how your background has impacted the way that you communicate with analysts and investors.
Can you share a little bit about your communication style and some non-traditional interactions that you find valuable in building those relationships, and are there some mistakes or things you would recommend investor relations teams avoid when communicating with the buy side?
Zane Keller: To reiterate something I said earlier, every investor engagement should be viewed as a means to provide a unique insight. I want to give you an example from my time on the buy side to drive home, you know, an example of an event where I found a unique insight that I never would have gotten just by reading the quarterly report.
There was a company I did a tremendous amount of work on when I was on the buy side. It had a favorable cost position within its industry, interesting competitive moat, very compelling financial results. I was ready to pull the trigger on putting a buy on this company. Thankfully, before I did that, I attended a cocktail reception and dinner with their management team.
And I should add from an IR perspective, this was an incredibly well-executed event. Now the company had co-CEOs, and at the reception before the dinner, I asked one of the co-CEOs, "How do you divide up the work?" In other words, there's all sorts of responsibilities of companies: HR, operations, finance, product.
How do you divide that up between you and the other co-CEO? And then I sat at dinner, I was at another table with the other co-CEO and asked him the same exact question. And the insight I came away from that dinner with was that the co-CEO arrangement was a disaster, and the company landed on my "no" list.
In other words, there was no way I was ever going to buy this company without leadership arrangement. And no amount of financial analysis or reading an earnings call transcript would have ever told me that. I came away from that dinner with a unique insight I otherwise never would have gotten. So what have I found that works? At Affirm we do some of the following. So as I mentioned, we do a shareholder letter every single quarter. We are striving to provide investors with a new insight. We host, as we just talked about, twice a year, we do a dinner with investors. We're letting them gain an impression of management. And we're also showing off the management bench across the different investor events we do.
So when you look at the conferences we attend, we're rotating members of the management team that go out. It's not just our CEO or CFO. It's in some cases, our head of product, head of capital, head of revenue, really showing off the entirety of the bench and letting investors get many different views of the company across functions.
And we're willing to experiment with what I would consider non-conventional investor engagement. So one of the things we implemented is an annual governance roadshow where we take, virtually speaking, two of our board members and let them interact directly with investors and hear feedback from them.
Again, I think that's another missed opportunity where at many companies, the board never interacts with investors. They never hear from them unless there's a serious problem, such as an activist situation. I think IR needs to be proactive, right? We need to get our board members out there on the road, let them hear directly from the investors.
And they're going to hear the good things that investors like, and then they might hear areas of concern as well, but you'd rather find that out early and build a relationship, before you get into some type of crisis situation or an activist. Another idea we have is retail-focused investor events.
So we do a quarterly fireside chat with our CFO. Again, it's virtual and we rotate between doing this with either media members, or some of the sell-side analysts that cover us. And the idea again, most companies are not trying to address the retail investor base, but we found that by trying to proactively address them and solicit questions from them, that we get a lot better engagement.
You could also consider doing something like a product-focused event or a webinar. So I've seen some companies do a 45-minute or one-hour session with one of the product leaders, and talking about a certain part of the business, or it could be doing a plant tour is another interesting example.
So if your company has a physical plant of some type, perhaps you're in the mining industry or oil and gas, or a power utility company, doing a plant tour can provide a very interesting insight that an investor otherwise would never get.
Mark Fasken: That's great. I mean, I think it's a great point really just using the depth of the team. To your point, sometimes you talk to IROs who feel like it's all on them and the CFO and CEO. You'll hear IROs say, we struggle because the investors only want to meet the CEO or CFO and maybe they don't always have the time.
So to your point, how do you build out a bench of people that are really interesting to investors and give them those insights that they might not get from the CEO and CFO because they're deep in the operations of the business?
Zane Keller: But I think often when I hear that from investors, and of course you're right, they always say, "I want to talk to the CEO" or "I want to talk to the president."
I actually think what they're usually meaning is they're not getting enough unique insights from existing meetings. In other words, they're just talking to IR. IR is maybe only giving them a repeat of what was in the quarterly documents, or repeating what's otherwise been stated elsewhere. And so the investor feels like they're not getting satisfactory engagement and they're not getting enough unique insights.
So I would actually try to ask or understand the question behind the question there, or what does the ultimate request usually indicate? It's usually indicating some amount of dissatisfaction with your existing disclosures. And again, you're not providing unique insights when you're doing your quarterly earnings call or other investor events.
Mark Fasken: Okay. Great. We'll shift gears a little bit. It's along the same thread of investor engagement and different ways of engaging the buy side. We talked a little bit about investor days and roadshows. You were talking about governance roadshows and whatnot.
Having been an analyst and doing research on companies, you probably attended a fair number of investor days, went to a lot of conferences, met a lot of companies on roadshows. What can IR teams do to stand out? Actually, it's an interesting question.
I was at an IR mag event the other week and somebody in the room was saying, what can IR teams do to really make meetings more engaging? You go to a conference, you do 20 meetings in a day or something, and management can get a little bit bored.
Maybe the investors get bored. Any insights you can share on what IROs can do to make these meetings more engaging, more useful would be awesome.
Hosting Successful Investor Days
Zane Keller: Let's start with the investor days, because I think those are frankly one of the culminating events that any IR team will ever host. You only host, most companies, at least will only host one of these every few years and right or wrong, many investors will make a decision based upon those that can last for many years.
In other words, if you have an investor day that does not go well, that can become a significant overhang on the stock for many years. And you will not have the opportunity to right that for probably quite a number of years. I think an investor day allows you to tell a story in a way that the earnings call or your quarterly earnings report does not.
You can really get investors excited about the mission and vision of the company. In other words, what could the company be in five, 10, even 20 years from now? And if you try to do that on an earnings call, investors would roll their eyes. In other words, if I had my quarterly call and I started to talk about the 10-year vision, I think people would probably tune out because they wouldn't take it seriously.
So it gives you an opportunity not only to lay out that vision, but to provide a tremendous amount of unique insights about your business, across many different facets. I think the second part of what you need to do with an investor day is give investors the framework for how you're going to deliver on that vision.
So I've seen some companies that have done a great job of laying out quite a significant vision that could get investors excited, but then I feel like they fall short laying out the breadcrumbs for how we're going to execute on that and how that's going to translate into financial results.
I think one of the biggest takeaways I had from our investor day that we held last year was that you really don't want to get lost in the weeds. You want investors to come away with three to four main takeaways, and then they need to have a direct understanding in terms of how that will translate to financial results.
Investor days are also an opportunity to introduce investors to management team members, partners, and other, you know, counterparties that they'll otherwise never get to meet. So one of the things we did during our investor day was we had the COO from one of our largest partners up on stage to do a fireside chat with our CEO.
We also had a round table where we had various capital partners, that help us fund our business, participate and speak to why they like to be capital partners of our company. And what gets them excited about that? I think opportunities like that, again, you're only going to be able to do it once every few years.
You're never going to have the COO of another company on your earnings call normally. So, it gives you a huge blank slate with which to work. And the sky is really the limit in terms of what you could do. So I think any investor day you need to have many members of the management participate, but also consider bringing in third parties.
You need to think about doing a product demo, if your company has a physical plant, consider doing a facility tour, perhaps some type of breakout session. I'm aware of a software company where they actually break out into two or three different sessions. So if an investor has an interest in one suite of products and go to breakout room A, if they want to talk to, let's say just the CFO, they go to breakout room B. I think that's fascinating. Obviously you need to be a fairly large company to be able to pull that off. But there are so many ways you can make an investor day interesting. If it's just going up there and talking about the financial outlook, I think that's a missed opportunity. You need to make it unique and something they will remember, even if they don't come away as buyers of your stock.
Mark Fasken: That's great. And I think that idea of, reiterating the point of, making sure that the message and key points get driven home.
That's something we've heard a lot on this podcast, whether that's in an investor day or an investor meeting, like making sure there is one or two key messages that you're getting across. Somebody mentioned in another session we did at the same IR mag event, they were asking about, how do you keep things engaging?
And to your point, it's like everybody has a product, right? Everybody has something that they can show to investors, and investors can see or touch at the end of the day, that's a big part of the investment decision. I want to go back to investor feedback for a second because you've talked about it a fair bit.
Right now you're collecting investor feedback on an ad hoc basis through your meetings. You're also doing these quarterly investor surveys. I've heard mixed feedback from IR teams over the years on the ability to gather investor feedback. From your experience, having been on the buy side, was there a hesitancy on your end around providing feedback to companies?
Or do you think that was more a hesitancy of providing it to the sell side? Maybe if you can share a little bit of insight on how can IR teams get more feedback, and higher quality feedback from their investor base?
Zane Keller: The only hesitancy was that usually IR teams actually never asked for feedback, which I kind of find amazing now being in the IR seat, but there were very few companies that I met with during my time on the buy side that ever bothered to reach out and say, "Hey, what feedback do you have for our management, for our company or for our board?"
They might do a perception study now and then, but even that was not as common as you might think. And I think there's an insight to be had here, and that's that most people inside a company are focused on just what's in front of them and they're not focused on the outside world. And that's great, but that can create a huge blind spot if we, as IR, don't do our job.
So if we're not systematically collecting feedback and making sure it gets in the hands of top leadership, it could create a problem down the road, right? You could have investors that are unhappy, or they feel like they don't have a good understanding of some part of the business or they don't understand part of your strategy and that discontent can be fermenting.
And yet, your management may not be aware of it until an activist comes knocking on the door. So I think you need to gather feedback systematically. What does that look like? First, you absolutely need to track investor engagement, and tie that to buying and selling activity. I'm still amazed, Mark, by the number of IR teams that don't even use a CRM system.
I mean, you probably talk to them every day, but there are so many IR teams that either don't bother tracking it at all, or they're using Word or Excel or some other antiquated solution. You need to be using a modern IR CRM, like an Irwin, and if you're not doing that, I think it indicates you as an IR team are way behind the curve.
One of the things that Irwin does, that we love, is it allows us to track topics. So we can within any given meeting, we can track which topics were discussed. And that way, when we give feedback to management, we can show them hard numbers and say, okay, this topic, topic X was brought up in half of the meetings, or this topic was only brought up in 5 percent of meetings, and it just wasn't something that was particularly important to investors.
And you need to be conveying that regularly to them, so that they understand what's on investors' minds and what we should be addressing, whether it's at conferences, on the earnings call, at the investor day. You also need to be looking at who is visiting your IR website. This is another feature we love about Irwin, as we can see not only among our existing investors, who's looking at our website, but also investors that are not currently shareholders.
And this is great because you can see what they're looking at. In other words, are they looking at certain presentations? You know, maybe that financial model information session we talked about earlier, maybe the investor day. You could also tell, importantly, are there activists or other shareholders you don't want in the stock that are starting to kick the tires in your company?
And it gives you a heads up or insight into what's coming around the curve, right? And I'm amazed, not only how many companies don't use a CRM, but don't even bother looking at who's going to their IR website. Again, I view that as a missed opportunity. That's one of the things we love about Irwin is it allows us to do that a whole lot more.
And that's why we're happy customers.
Mark Fasken: That's awesome. Thanks Zane. I appreciate the support on the Irwin side. Just going back to the feedback, I've heard both on this podcast and in conversations with IR teams, right? There's this discussion around like, how do I really get the management team to pay attention. We've heard about perception studies where we spend all this money and I give it to the management team. And they don't take it seriously. As an IRO, I'm providing feedback or advice based on my interactions with investors, but the management team isn't taking it seriously. Are there any recommendations that you have or things that you are doing to ensure that feedback is structured in a way that is impactful to the management team? You mentioned a weekly email, but are you doing quarterly meetings to review it and discuss it?
What does that look like?
Zane Keller: Yeah. There are several good points here. The first is I find that it's a virtuous cycle. In other words, if your management team regularly engages with investors, that actually gets them fired up to do more engagement. And likewise, your investors get more and more interested in engaging with management team members because they start to develop a personal relationship with them.
So I think it's very important again, to have a broad swath of your management team out there in front of investors. What I find is actually most management team members like doing this. They like hearing from investors. Almost everybody I know at a company likes talking about what they're working on, whether it's product, or capital, or the CFO.
They are very proud of their work, of their team, and they actually want to convey that to investors in the outside world. They just don't know how to do it. And so that's why you need to be proactive about approaching them and saying, "Hey, we've got a conference coming up. Would you mind attending, or thinking about doing a dinner in this city, can you please come with us?" And I think, again, you'll find most management team members. It's not a matter of like, do they want to do it? It's just, they don't, they haven't been asked and they haven't even thought about asking to participate in these meetings. Another point you made that I thought was a good one is look, not every management team member is extroverted.
We get that, right? Some management team members just prefer not to do a presentation, or get on an earnings call for the whole world to hear from them. And I think that's where you need to be creative as an IR person, right? Yeah. Maybe a small group dinner is a better format for them. Maybe it's a coffee chat or meeting with investors in a certain city.
Maybe it's only one-on-one meetings where it's just a very small group and they feel much more comfortable. There are so many different ways you could do this. I think it's really not a good excuse to say, "Well, so-and-so doesn't like to get up for big presentations, so we're just not going to have them engage with investors at all."
There are ways every single executive can get in front of investors and convey what they're doing and working on, and give them unique insights. It's just a matter of you as IR figuring out how to do that.
Mark Fasken: Awesome.
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Mark Fasken: Zane, so many good insights that you shared in this episode. Really appreciate your time and all the tips that you've shared. Thank you.
Zane Keller: Thank you, Mark. I look forward to talking again soon.
Mark Fasken: I hope you enjoyed this episode of Winning IR, the Investor Relations Podcast. Winning IR is brought to you by Irwin, the IR solution designed with engagement in mind. For more information and episodes, visit www.getirwin.com.
