The Westwicke Blog is designed to deliver information and insights into the ever-changing world of healthcare communications.
Your earnings calls are more than just numbers – they present an important opportunity to make a favorable impression and add context to your financials while establishing expectations for investors. Prepare your team and set yourself up for a successful earnings call with these eight, simple best practices.
“Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.”
— Thomas Jefferson
Just as honesty fuels wisdom on life’s great matters, candid thoughts from outsiders can prove invaluable for corporate executives seeking to learn how key market participants view their company. A perception study can play a vital role in gathering these opinions.
At Westwicke, an ICR Company, we know what constitutes investor relations (IR) best practices for one important reason: as former investors, bankers, analysts, and salespeople, we have the experience to understand information flow dynamics on Wall Street and the proven strategies. We have discussed specific best practices of a good IR strategy at length – sometimes in broad strokes and other times in greater detail. Every once in a while, however, it is important to pick your head up out of the trees and view the forest to get a sense of the prevailing buy-side perspective on IR and confirm that your intuition is in fact correct. I recently came across a global buy-side survey conducted by Rivel Research Group that underscores our qualitative expertise on IR strategy with quantitative measures. It is important for management teams of publicly traded companies to consider these buy-side perspectives as they approach IR.
To some companies, the annual letter to shareholders is an art. Warren Buffet, for example, may write a 30-page letter that addresses a range of topics — some that have little relevance to the letter’s intended audience. However, as you prepare to release your annual letter to shareholders, the best approach for most companies is to keep it clear and concise. This letter is an important piece of communication with your investors, and it should clearly lay out your vision, goals, and milestones achieved. Here are six tips to make your letter as effective as possible.
Your leadership spends a lot of time developing and writing public messages about your company’s story — whether a press release, the corporate deck, or the script of an earnings call. And while the intended audience is often the investment community, it’s important to consider what other constituencies will read these public documents. Your competitors, the media, and even the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will likely read your news as well.
To execute a successful non-deal road show, you must put in the planning and work. It’s critical to pinpoint the right city and sponsoring analyst to make the most of your trip. However, that work and coordination is well worth it. By getting on the road and telling your story to the Street, you’ll experience many benefits. Here are what we consider the top 10 benefits of non-deal road shows.
As the year comes to a close, it’s time for management teams to start thinking about their 2019 investor relations strategies. How can you learn from your efforts in 2018 — and what needs to change for the year ahead? Should you shift the focus of your activities or hold steady on the path toward the goals you outlined for the past year?
Here, our team of IR experts at Westwicke provide their best advice for creating a top-notch investor relations plan that aligns with your company’s goals and priorities for the upcoming year.
At-the-market (ATM) offerings, a tool early-stage companies have used for years to quickly raise capital, have grown increasingly common among healthcare players, with biotech firms in particular embracing this funding method.
ATM financing provides young, publicly traded companies with a relatively agile, low-key, low-hassle, lower-cost way to sell newly issued shares to finance growth — without the need to stage a road show or even announce the sale. This works well for businesses like biotech firms that need to fund R&D and general operations before their products have received government approval for commercial sale.
The J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference provides an insightful beginning to the year. Beyond offering an opportunity to meet with analysts, investors, and other professionals in the healthcare industry, it illuminates trends that you’re likely to see throughout the upcoming year.
As you look forward to the 2019 event in January, start thinking about the information you can glean from the sessions you’ll attend, meetings you’ll facilitate, and announcements you’ll hear over the course of the conference.
Some management teams assume — incorrectly — that they can play it safe by withholding financial guidance, believing they can’t miss estimates they don’t provide. To the contrary, companies may inadvertently limit their Street credibility by opting out of earnings forecasts and, at the same time, miss an opportunity to manage investor expectations.
Investors judge financial results against analysts’ consensus estimates even if a company doesn’t provide projection, so it makes sense for leadership to set expectations themselves and provide some guardrails. Perhaps more importantly, formal guidance signals management’s confidence in the company’s growth and stability.
