Step 4: Build IR Assets

The more interest and understanding the lower your cost of capital, and the less investors understand the higher the cost of capital and the greater risks to the company. Why would a company go public to be perennially undervalued and trade at a large discount to private market value. 

How would an investor discover your company with 5,000 stocks and 3,000 ETFs? Given this fast-moving world of a $55 trillion public market stocks frequently over and undershoot fair value. Step 4 is to familiarize yourself with what is possible and how and what to build.

Why would a retail investor part with their savings to invest in your company? Why would a buy-side investor risk his career investing in your company? Warren Buffett defines an investment as "Laying out money today for more in the future." This underpins an important point that investing is about trust and confidence in the management and board. The more an investor understands the core business and reinvestments (provided they are sound) the less the price/value gap will become. Stocks can get rapid price/value gap's from surprises to what the market believes are truths. 

Valuation factors, trading patterns, alternative data sets (e.g. real-time credit card, Google Trend web traffic, etc) peer group long/short, transcripts, PR, IR decks, and SEC filings

The bare minimum 

Earnings transcripts are helpful in injecting key messages, the context of results, key areas of focus, strategies to drive value, and interactive Q&A with analysts. For companies with sell-side analysts, earnings calls are must-haves. 

Press releases are important, drawing attention to events that drive equity value. 

Investor decks are INCREDIBLY important. A good IR deck should allow an investor with 15 minutes of effort to thoroughly understand your business with the simple basics to want to take the next steps of diligence. 

A letter to investors can be included to investors for quarterly earnings calls as a direct message from the CEO to investors to best understand what is going on in the business. 

Investor days are great both internally and for investors to get focused specific set of deliverables from management to owners. 

You are selling a financial product, a fractional interest in your business. Warren Buffett famously made an Owners Manual of what to expect from such an investment in his company. See Details: https://oddsmakerir.com/best-ir-decks

Investor Deck + Live Engagement are key to building long-term new and existing investors

Investors typically have a mosaic approach of IR website and IR deck which must be kept up to date. 

 Why FiscalNote? | FiscalNote 

FiscalNote does an excellent job of Why Invest?  

Who We Are…

1. We are a mission-driven company, whose aim is to create innovative products with purpose, urgency, and meaning that have tremendous impact for our customers.

2. We are a bold company that makes strategic and sometimes unconventional decisions not based on what “everyone else is doing” or how things “have always been done”, but rather by what makes the most sense for our mission and enables us to extend our market position.

3. We are a disciplined company that places a heavy emphasis on customer satisfaction, operational excellence, continuous improvement, and core competencies — not as a requirement to appease any short-term external forces — but as a necessary condition toward accomplishing our long-term goals.

4. We are an experimental and high-velocity organization that moves with speed, agility, and conviction to capture and seize the opportunities we see ahead of us.

5. We are a deeply analytical company, constantly weighing our cost of capital against our investments and products that are producing outsized returns versus those that are underperforming. We commit to analytically and decisively invest in the ones that grow and shut down the ones that do not.

6. We are a growth company - constantly optimizing revenue scale against long-term profitability on a per share basis, seeking to balance incremental dilution with growth opportunities. We intricately understand business cycles and maturity and seek to appropriately balance blue ocean growth opportunities with long-term potential for outsized profitability.

7. We are a transparent company that aims to win over public supporters to our way of doing business with action and proven results.

We are an agile company with an experienced, cross-industry leadership team that has ambitions to build an enduring, consequential, category-creating, and global enterprise.

8. We are a People company, constantly retaining and pursuing the best talent while forging a culture firmly rooted in our Values — as well as our abiding commitment to Diversity, Equality, Inclusion, and Belonging — in all that we do.

9. At FiscalNote, we believe there is a massive opportunity in the disruption of our industry. With an innovative vision, solid execution, and seasoned management, we look forward to continuing the important work of building FiscalNote into an enduring enterprise.