The ICR Westwicke Blog is designed to deliver information and insights into the ever-changing world of healthcare communications.
You spend considerable time creating a professional investor presentation that tells a comprehensive story of your company. Yet aside from the analyst/investor due diligence meeting, few opportunities exist for you to deliver the entire presentation from start-to-finish. How, then, can you tailor your presentation to the time and opportunities at hand?
Investor meetings are essential for managing and expanding your shareholder base. They provide investors with clarity on a company’s story and can allow you to gauge potential investor concerns, but most importantly, they provide management the opportunity to control the story being told to investors.
The buy side often views a meeting with management as a critical component in their due diligence process. Even in the wake of increased scrutiny from SEC regulators regarding Reg FD, these meetings give the buy side more insight into a company story, recent developments, and potential headwinds.
The biotech market has been growing rapidly over the past two decades, and is expected to be worth nearly $2.5 trillion by 2028. Meanwhile, the pace of technological developments and innovation have reduced barriers to entry, leading to an influx of aspiring biotech startups eager to bring their products to market. But despite the increase in available capital, early-stage biotech companies are battling harder for their share of funding. In this article, we explore the challenges, strategies, and best practices in early-stage biotech funding.
Properly handled relationships with Wall Street analysts can play a key role in a company’s investor relations plan and overall success. However, missteps can create unnecessary problems — especially considering that analysts may share anything you say with the public markets — so executives should approach these relationships carefully. Use the checklist below to maintain effective analyst communications.
Medical meetings allow analysts and investors to explore an array of public and private healthcare companies in one place and gain deeper insight into the industry’s competitive dynamics as they meet with management teams and learn about new products and strategies.
These and other industry events play an important role in enhancing Wall Street professionals’ understanding of the quickly changing healthcare landscape – helping them reinforce and update their investment ideas, conduct due diligence, evaluate new prospects, and spot emerging competitive threats.
For public and mature private companies in need of financing, finding the right investment bank is a vital early step. Choose wrong, and your deal could sour, or you could wind up accepting an unfavorable valuation. But the right banker will guide you through your IPO, follow-on investment, or other financing deal while maintaining a long-term relationship with you that could bear fruit for years to come.
So what should you be looking for? For each investment bank you consider, you’ll want to look hard at three things above all: the quality of each firm’s banking team itself, the credibility of its research team, and the relationships that you can forge with its people, as well as their own relationships with the Street.
At some point during your company’s growth, you will need to share sensitive data with investors and financial professionals by using a data room. In the old days, a data room was just that: a room filled with printed files and reams of paper containing patent descriptions, clinical data, and financial projections.
Today, data rooms are usually virtual. And with hackers increasing their efforts (and their ability) to steal sensitive data, it’s vital you consider security as well as service and convenience as you evaluate data room solutions.
With our colleagues at NASDAQ, we recently co-hosted an informational luncheon for private-company CEOs and CFOs on the IPO process. Guest speakers included a life science venture capital investor and a CFO of a company that went public in 2016.
The management teams in the audience for the well-attended event had plenty of questions for our guests, on everything from how to prepare for an IPO to avoiding pitfalls to making the transition to being a public company.
Our speakers had much to say. Below are a few of their most important pieces of advice:
Dining with one of your analysts can be nerve-racking, but it really doesn’t need to be.
Sharing a meal at a restaurant should make for a less formal meeting than one conducted in a boardroom. The mood should prove to be friendlier and less business-like, and conversations rarely venture deep into the numbers.
Over dinner, analysts frequently probe for “color” related to previously disclosed themes to gather the kind of details that can animate their coverage and talking points for investors.
Throughout my 23 years as an institutional salesperson, I had the pleasure to host many interesting and successful investor meetings.
Very few of those meetings went badly, because I always made a point to educate the companies I was traveling with in advance of the meeting. My goal was to make sure the management team had a complete background on the investor they were meeting and a deep understanding of that investor’s investment process and philosophy. I even tried to ensure that the management team knew about any investor’s personality quirks so they would not get thrown off their game during the meeting. Investors can sometimes try to intentionally rattle management teams in order to get them to say things they were not planning to say.
