The Road Show Blues

Last week’s post about the essential life skills of the investor relations professional put me in mind of roadshows, another of the great travails of anyone who has to speak with investors on a regular basis, be it sell side analysts or investor relations officers. (Believe it or not, the sell side is actually going to get some sympathy here, so read on.) The public in general, and my children in particular, tend to think of a career on Wall Street as being glamorous and exciting, but when it comes to the process of transferring information to investors, the reality is far grittier. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, I’ve often felt as if “I’m stuck in New York with the road show blues again”.

Consider the following as it relates to investor roadshows:

1. A schedule only a marathon runner could love. Your typical roadshow day may involve a breakfast meeting, 3 – 4 morning meetings, a luncheon meeting and 3 meetings in the afternoon. This is followed either by dinner (possibly a meeting) or a sprint for the airport to get to the next city. Drag yourself into your hotel room by 10:00PM. Get up the next morning and do it again. Repeat as necessary.

2. Mind numbing repetition. All road shows revolve around either a powerpoint presentation, a pitch book or a set of talking points. This means that after the first two, or at most, three meetings you’ve got your routine down and there’s not a lot going on to hold your interest as you speak. Presentations go into autopilot mode after that. I’ve done presentations where I get to the end and I honestly don’t remember much about the middle part of the presentation. Fortunately, no one was giving me a funny look at the end, so I must have stuck to the prepared remarks.

3. Answering the same questions multiple times. I talked about this in the last post, but it bears repeating: 95% – 98% of all questions asked by investors are the same, whether you are at Fidelity or a small specialty research shop. During road shows, I have, on more than one occasion, found myself beginning to answer a question only to stop and ask the investor, “Have I said this before?” That’s because, less than an hour earlier, I actually was giving exactly the same answer, only to a different investor.

4. Incredible boredom. Take all of the above and add to it the fact that you’re escorting senior management around to visit investors. That means that you don’t get to talk, because investors are there to hear the big kahuna, not some investor relations officer. So you sit there and you listen to the same presentation and the same questions over and over. If you’re lucky, you might get to answer one or two questions on topics that senior management doesn’t like to handle, such as pension accounting. They don’t make coffee strong enough for this process.

So, is there a better way? Unfortunately, probably not. In spite of the advances of technology, investors still want to have the personal touch; they want to look you in the eye and judge the integrity and veracity of what you are saying. Teleconferencing and conference calls just don’t accomplish the same thing. Institutional investors are committing millions of dollars with each investment decision and their duty to their clients demands that they meet personally with management. They just shouldn’t expect the meeting to be particularly original.