Reintroducing a Company to the Street
Client was not widely known in the investment community due to a few years of intentionally limited investor interaction in order to focus on repositioning the sales and marketing effort to capture higher growth. The company’s small-cap status also served to narrow investor awareness in the absence of regular investor interaction.
ICR Westwicke’s Role
With the company beginning to realize sustainable higher growth rates and improving profitability, the client wanted to re-engage more actively with the investment community and generate heightened investor interest in the company’s story.
In order to stimulate greater investor awareness, ICR Westwicke’s opportunity was to design and implement a comprehensive IR strategy centered around three core areas: communication, enhanced sell-side coverage, and proactive investor outreach.
- While the client had maintained its regular quarterly earnings releases, ICR Westwicke subsequently raised the quality of the earnings communications through more rigorous analysis of the financial results, addition of more useful content in the earnings releases, organization and scripting of prepared remarks, and thorough question and answer preparation with management.
- ICR Westwicke fully redesigned the investor presentation, which had remained unchanged for several years, to reflect new messaging themes as well as a more contemporary look and organization to better resonate with investors. Of note, the presentation articulated to investors for the first time the company’s roadmap to achieving sustainably higher growth rates and improving profitability.
- Additional sell-side coverage facilitates the transmission of the company’s story to a wider investment audience so ICR Westwicke implemented a plan to introduce the company to a selective list of small-cap, sector-focused analysts and bring each analyst up to speed on the story. Within the first six months, the client has added one new analyst to coverage and several more are in the queue. This new analyst has already introduced the company to numerous new buy-side accounts, with more introductions expected.
- ICR Westwicke created an annual marketing calendar for the client that included participation in key investor conferences as well as a schedule for non-deal road shows to selected cities. In many cases, ICR Westwicke’s relationships with the sell-side enabled us to secure invitations to new conferences for our client companies where the client is also able to participate in one-on-one meetings with prospective investors. We also facilitated non-deal road shows with investment banks and conducted essential investor targeting so that our client met with the most suitable accounts in each geography.
Result
The company’s institutional investor ownership broadened and deepened. Not only do more high quality “name” investors now own the stock, but the top 20 names are more concentrated than they were previously, indicating a higher degree of conviction due to a clearer understanding of the company’s growth prospects and value.