Make It Memorable

One thing I have learned from teaching over the past six years is that if you want your audience to not only learn, but also remember what they learn, you have to make it memorable.  There are many ways to do this – you can speak with passion, you can use humor, you can have catchy phrases and acronyms, you can even (heaven forbid) have a catchy PowerPoint presentation – but what you are saying and doing has to catch and hold the audience’s attention. In a way, it is education as theater, and it is particularly effective in an adult education setting where the distractions of emails and messages from the office are a constant challenge.

Last week I attended the NIRI Southwest regional conference in Ft. Worth and it reinforced my opinion that the Southwest regional conference is a better overall learning experience than the NIRI national conference. I have a variety of reasons for saying this, but for today I want to focus on the educational aspect of the Southwest regional conference. The national conference seems to be locked into a format that is heavily dependent upon panel discussions featuring panelists that are long on narrow technical expertise and short on speaking skills. This was true a year ago when I attended in Seattle and a quick review of the 2013 National conference agenda reveals that the vast majority of the sessions continue to be panel discussions. The result of many panel discussions viewed in quick succession is the verbal equivalent of Chinese water torture – many words delivered in a monotone, leading to eventual brain damage. 

The Southwest regional conference, in the years when it has been organized by the Houston chapter, has broken from this mold. In 2010 and 2012 the conference featured a case study that forced attendees to work together and make decisions. They went beyond that and introduced several new formats to the conference this year. (Full and fair disclosure: I was on the conference planning committee, but due to my move back to Chicago, cannot claim much credit for the work of the planning committee.) In addition to the usual speakers and panel discussions, the conference introduced an interactive case study based on a real life example (featuring yours truly), a point - counterpoint style debate featuring practitioners discussing current hot topics in IR, an IR version of the dating game where IR officers try to convince an analyst to cover their company’s stock, and my favorite, three short (20 minute) TED style talks where people addressed issues near and dear to their hearts with passion and conviction. The result was a mix of information delivered in memorable fashion that consistently engaged the audience.

When you are in investor relations, a key element to what you do is communication. I can only hope that the National Investor Relations Institute takes note of how the Southwest regional conference is expanding the communication boundaries in order to help people remember what they learn at conferences and become better practitioners of investor relations. After all, isn’t what these conferences are all about?

Thoughts on the 2012 NIRI National Conference

It is a well-known axiom among educators that different people learn in different ways. That’s why when you put together a program, you include a variety of different types of learning mechanisms. Alas, this is not a lesson that has been learned by the National Investor Relations Institute.

Last month I journeyed to Seattle to attend the NIRI Annual Conference. I had not attended the annual conference in several years and was hoping to get updated on the latest developments in the profession. What I was treated to was two and one half days of unremitting panel discussions. Not only that, but most of the panel discussions featured speakers that were subject matter experts in fields other than investor relations, so that we were hearing from them about specialized topics as they might relate to IR. The amount of coordination and preparation by and among the panelists appeared to be patchy at best. There may have been good information in there, but after the first couple of panel discussions I had gone numb.

Contrast this with TED Talks (http://www.ted.com/). If you’ve ever seen a speaker at TED, you know a.) They are passionate about their subject, and b.) They are committed to giving the talk of their lives in 18 minutes or less. The result is consistently fascinating information delivered in a riveting fashion. Why can’t NIRI, an organization of professional communicators, come up with a way to be as interesting? For communicators, a conference full of panel discussions is the equivalent of going to a decorators’ convention and seeing everything painted white.

So here’s a modest suggestion for the NIRI national conference: Put out a call to members of the profession for presentations, no more than 15 minutes in length, about something they do that is unique, different or best in class related to IR. The best presentations would then be featured at the NIRI National conference in front of their peers. Talk about a chance to shine and be recognized as one of the best in your profession. At the same time best practices would be shared in an entertaining format.

But it’s not just about sitting passively and listening to people talk. People learn by doing as well. Interactive learning through case studies is a great way for people to work with concepts in real life situations. The Houston NIRI chapter has successfully used case studies at the last two Southwest regional conferences they’ve organized and even received awards from NIRI for them. So when the Houston chapter offered to put on a case study at this year’s national conference, you would have thought that NIRI would feature it as a great change of pace and a different way to impart information. Instead, NIRI put the case study as an optional workshop after the main conference had ended. I was participating in the case study and even I was ready to go home by the time the case study started. As a result of the scheduling, only 30 people out of the 1,300 that attended the conference stayed around for the case study. Talk about the waste of a learning opportunity.

I have been making presentations for more than 30 years and have taught in business school for 5 years, and one thing I’ve learned is that people will remember things if you make it interesting and memorable. I hope that NIRI learns the same lesson before the next annual conference. 

Stop the Earnings Guidance Madness

The subject of issuing earnings guidance is one for constant hand wringing by companies, analysts, commentators and even the National Investor Relations Institute.  Companies hate it, because their stock gets hammered if they miss their guidance by so much as a penny.  Analysts hate it because if they follow a company’s guidance and it turns out to be wrong, they feel duped.  On the other hand, if the analyst goes their own way and publishes an EPS forecast outside the company’s range, there is a good chance the company will either treat him as if he’s crazy, or nag him until he comes in line with the consensus. Reams of studies have been conducted about all of this, generally stating that the process puts too much focus on short-term quarterly results.

With all of this floating around, I thought that I would take a shot at bringing some light to the topic.  First, consider that analysts are not going to stop making estimates for quarterly earnings by companies just because companies stop giving earnings guidance.  Public companies in the United States report on a quarterly basis and, therefore, analysts will make earnings estimates on a quarterly basis, whether companies issue guidance or not. 

Further, whether or not a company issues earnings guidance has little to no effect on the pressure it feels to report good quarterly earnings.  To paraphrase one of my least favorite presidents, “It’s the earnings, stupid”. Companies that do not issue guidance feel pressure to hit the consensus earnings number that is every bit as intense as the pressure felt by companies to hit their guidance number. 

When the economy gets dicey, as it is now, issuing EPS forecasts becomes particularly hazardous.  When companies issue guidance, they almost never want to appear too downbeat, as it will act as an overhang on the company’s stock price for the foreseeable future.  So you usually get “cautiously optimistic” forecasts, which the company winds up revising downward as the year progresses.  Neither situation is good for the company.

So here’s my proposal – I call it “Less and More”.  Companies should give less in the way of specific EPS guidance; in fact, they should eliminate quarterly EPS guidance altogether.  In its place, I would suggest companies issue long term goals: revenue growth, key return criteria such as Return on Equity, Assets or Capital, the planned improvement in earnings growth and the manner in which they see achieving their goals, be it margin improvements, cost containment or simple growth.  These goals would be issued as target averages, with the explanation that any given year could vary from the goal, but over time, the expectation would be to achieve the target. 

On the other hand, companies should issue more short-term information in order to allow the market to work more efficiently.  This would involve companies releasing key performance metrics on a regular monthly basis.  This information would be along the lines of sales, order backlogs, customer mix, product mix and other key information that would allow investors to better assess the current state of business.  This would modestly increase a company’s reporting burden, but it’s not as if companies don’t already have this information – they run the businesses based upon it.  If they don’t have the information on at least a quarterly basis, they should.  Key metrics consistently reported monthly would increase transparency and help eliminate surprises.  By supplying what they consider to be important information on a monthly basis companies can eliminate the “black box” syndrome where investors have no idea what is happening at the company in between quarters.

It’s not a perfect solution for all concerned – some analysts will not be happy unless they have a direct feed from the reporting company’s mainframe computer, while many managements will groan at the thought of telling the street more.  What it will help to achieve is a better balance between allowing a company to focus on its longer-term goals, while supplying the market with timely short-term information that progress is being made towards those goals.

The Trouble With PowerPoint

There was an old Star Trek episode, "The Trouble with Tribbles".  Without going into all of the details of the plot, suffice it to say that tribbles, which are adorable, cuddly creatures, when brought on board Captain Kirk's vessel, reproduce far too often and threaten to consume all of the supplies on the starship Enterprise. So it is with PowerPoint.  It's a (relatively) easy program to use and enables almost anyone to become a designer of graphic presentations. In fact, graphic designs proliferate to the point of threatening to consume all of the useful information in investor relations presentations.

I’ve spent some time lately poking around on the web looking at various companies’ investor relations presentations.  I have not been impressed.  Just about every presentation I looked at had something in it that bothered me. The combination of PowerPoint bullet point formats with bad graphics can be really deadly to good communications.  It’s clear to me that investor relations practitioners are better at verbal communication than visual communication, so I thought that I would share some of my thoughts on the subject. 

Let me start out by saying that I have a bias when it comes to presentations – the presentation should enhance and clarify the data, not distract from it.  To understand how good presentations can work and what constitutes bad display of data, every person that has to make or prepare a presentation should read Edward Tufte’s book, “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”.  It is the seminal work in this area and it sets out with much greater authority and detail than I can the elements of good data presentation.

Having said that, here are some of the chief complaints I have about the presentations I’ve reviewed:

1.  Cheesy backgrounds – just because PowerPoint gives you all sorts of ugly templates to choose from doesn’t mean that you have to use them.  All they do is distract from the message you are trying to deliver.  My advice is to hire a professional design group to help you set a template, which ties into your corporate design or this year’s annual report.

2.  Runaway fonts – it is not unusual to see five or six different fonts and type sizes on the same slide.  This is sloppy and distracting.  This is a particularly egregious sin of PowerPoint, which will automatically resize type on slides unless you take out a whip and chair and tame it.

3.  Use of acronyms and abbreviations – Corporate America loves TLAs (three letter acronyms).  Unfortunately, while they may be a handy shorthand for those in the know, when encountered later, on a slide on the company’s investor relations website without accompanying commentary, they merely serve to obscure things.

The foregoing, while distracting, are design errors, and can be forgiven as simply in bad taste.  In the parlance of my religious upbringing, they are venial sins, as they don’t really bring into question the integrity of the presenting company. However, some of the things I’m going to talk about now are issues where the visual information is manipulated to make data appear more favorable than it really is, which is something no self respecting investor relations practitioner should stand for. 

4.  Using objects that grow in volume to show linear growth.  Unfortunately, we’ve all seen this one far too many times.  Using pictures to show the growth of say, revenue, introduces a distorting factor as the volume of the object depicted grows much faster than the growth of a linear object such as money.   If you have to jazz up your charts with cute pictures or expanding objects, you probably don’t have enough data for a chart.

5.  Conveniently changing scales on charts to make data appear to fit your point.  Not all charts and graphs need be zero based, but you need to be careful about the scale you use.  It is far too easy to manipulate the visual impact of change by zooming in on a scale, which makes a single percentage point change seem huge.  A corollary to this is changing scales on two adjacent charts to make it appear as if everything is moving in the same magnitude and direction simultaneously.

6. Omitting inconvenient data.  I find it hard to believe that companies would do this, but I’ve seen it with my own eyes.  If a particular year doesn’t fit the fact pattern that companies wish to talk about, they simply omit the data from the chart.  I guess they think that no one will notice the year missing from the bar chart.  A different take on this is to put the inconvenient data on the chart but then assert in words that something different and more favorable is going on.  My favorite example of this is a chart that shows a large dip in earnings in a recent year with an arrow going right past it stating “Continuous growth”.  Last time I looked, continuous meant without interruption, which clearly wasn’t the case for the earnings growth shown on the slide. 

There are more examples of bad and misleading graphics out there, but I think I’ve made my point.  Besides, I have to prepare some slides for a speech I’m giving at the NIRI Southwest Regional Conference next month and if I can just get the dancing 3-D graphics to work, it could be a real triumph of form over substance.

Blogging and Investor Relations

Blogging seems to be on the minds of many practitioners of investor relations lately.  In the course of the last month, I’ve been on a Webinar on the topic, quoted in an investor relations newsletter, authored an article that will appear in an upcoming issue of NIRI’s IR Update and attended a breakout session on the topic at the NIRI 2008 annual conference.  In addition, blogging was specifically mentioned by John White, the Director of the Division of Corporate Finance of the SEC during his remarks at the opening session of the NIRI 2008 conference.

As one of the few people that are actually blogging about investor relations, all of this is grist for my mill, and I thought I would share a couple of thoughts about where I think all of this is heading.  I start with two premises: first, corporate IR bloggers are at an inherent disadvantage to individual bloggers such as myself, and two, there can be a useful, but limited role for corporate IR blogging in the future. 

First the disadvantages:  1.) Regulatory.  The aforementioned John White of the SEC in his address to NIRI members was quite specific in stating that anything corporations put on their blogs for viewing by the public is subject to the anti-fraud provisions of the securities laws, namely Rule 10b-5.  While this is not new news (he was just reiterating a previously stated position of the Commission), it certainly will prove to be an overhang to the development of blogs that provide meaningful information.  Most investor relations officers that I know are reluctant to answer analyst questions in email format for fear of creating a paper trail, so putting their thoughts in a blog on a public web site with the overhang of antifraud liability is almost beyond the pale.  Why would you do one more thing to create a public record that can be used against you when things go wrong?  

2.) Corporate.  Most corporations function collectively, with information and corporate positions passing through multiple layers of approvals, from the corporate communications department to the general counsel and numerous people in between.  This process means that every phrase is pondered, considered and revised.  The process also means that almost all of the individual’s voice is smoothed away, opinions are eliminated and certainly all of the humor is drained away.  The result is the bland pabulum served up in most corporate press releases - it’s just not very interesting stuff.  Blogging, on the other hand, is a solitary and somewhat spontaneous pursuit.  It is designed to express the individual’s view of events, unfiltered by the editing process (this can be good or bad, depending on who’s writing).  When I get an idea for a blog post, I sit down, write it and post it within a matter of hours.  Nobody reviews it, and my opinions, of which there are many, (hopefully) make the resulting article more interesting. 

3. Bureaucratic  When I sat in on the session on blogging at the NIRI conference, I was struck by the nature of the questions that attendees had.  The questions were not, “What sort of information do you include in your blog?” or “How do you make your blog interesting?” but rather, “Did you have to modify your disclosure policy to allow you to set up a blog?” and “What sort of approvals do you have to get before you post to your blog?”  This type of thinking is very prevalent in corporate America and especially in investor relations, where regulation and legal liability permeate everything.  Things have to be done by the book, with a system for everything.  It also means that for many companies, establishing and writing on a blog are not worth the hassle, unless and until they are dragged, kicking and screaming, into the blogosphere.  On the other hand, in the age of the internet, everyone with access to the web has his own printing press.  Individuals are much more nimble about what they can say, and how quickly it gets said.  It stands the whole system on its head, and size becomes a disadvantage for corporations, which simply cannot react as quickly as the collective individuals on the web.

With all of these disadvantages, where can corporate IR blogs be useful?  First, as restatements of the obvious.  In spite of what it sounds like, this is a useful function.  Much time in investor relations is taken up with answering obvious questions: industry position, product offering, company values and other important, but common matters.  With the decline in annual reports, the web site will increasingly become the source for this type of information.  Investor relations officers should take a proactive stance in writing about such matters.  Or, you can go brain dead and repeat the answers verbally 300 times per year. 

Secondly, as a reporting function.  Not everyone can make it to your analyst day or has the time to listen to 6 hours of webcasts.  Someone who can succinctly write about what you are presenting to the street can help you reach a larger audience.  This can be particularly helpful in reaching smaller money management shops and individual investors.  With the shrinking of the sell side, investor relation departments need to think of alternative ways to reach more of the buy side and also individual investors, and this is one potential way.

Finally, and probably more controversially, investor relations blogs should track and disclose the types of questions they are receiving from investors.  Almost every company has aspects of its operations that investors do not understand particularly well.  This can arise for a variety of reasons, but usually because the accounting in the area is complex or convoluted (think deferred taxes or pension accounting) or the company is doing something new and unusual.  If investors are constantly asking questions about the area, that in itself is important information.  To the company it’s important because it tells them they are not doing a good job on disclosure.  To investors it’s important because it gives them an idea about what other people on the street are thinking. 

 

I would write more, but my editor says its time for lunch… 

Report on the NIRI Conference

I’ve just returned from the annual National Investor Relations Institute Conference in San Diego and I think the slow down in the economy has affected investor relations.  I base this on three factors:  first, it just looked as if there were fewer people at the conference.  The yearly conference is always very well attended, so trying to gauge attendance by a visual impression can be somewhat difficult, similar to trying to guess Christmas sales by the size of the crowds in stores on Christmas eve, but to me, it felt as if there were fewer people at the event.  Secondly, my conversations with vendors in the exhibit hall seemed to confirm the downturn as the exhibitors uniformly told me that things were slower than in previous years and there were fewer exhibitors in attendance.  What really clinched it for me however, was the fact that there were significantly fewer of the free trinkets being given away by the exhibitors.  (Note: For those of you interested in retail, such items are referred to as tchotchkies, which is Yiddish, meaning a small object that is decorative rather than functional.)  When times are good, not only are there lots and lots of giveaways, but in addition, the exhibitors get really creative about their giveaways.  Last year’s flying screaming monkey stuffed animal comes to mind.  This year it seems as though the emphasis was on free pens and luggage tags with a few tee shirts and baseball hats thrown in.  Don’t get me wrong – I’m not complaining, and I’m as happy as the next person to pick up whatever they send my way.  I regularly supply my office and family with pens for a year from the conference.  But still, my dog really liked the screaming monkey…

 

The conference is too large and the breakout sessions too numerous for me to get to everything, but for me there were three interesting sessions.  First, there was a breakout session on blogging entitled “Is Your Company or IR Department Ready for a Blog?”  Naturally, this was of interest to me, although I sit on the other side of the fence.  I would venture to say that the corporate IR officers in that room, if they know about me at all, hope that I will never blog about them because I usually only write about companies after they have done something compellingly stupid.  Blogging is the topic du jour; in the past month I’ve participated in a Webinar, been to the NIRI session and been quoted in a newsletter on the effect of blogging.  In my next post I plan to write about blogging and corporate investor relations.

 

The highlight of the conference to me was the speech given by Stephen McClellan on Wednesday.  Stephen is the author of a recently published book, “Full of Bull” and a former Wall Street analyst for 32 years.  Judging from his remarks, he’s seen it all on Wall Street from the analyst point of view.  He focused his remarks on management credibility and things investor relations officers need to be aware of when dealing with analysts.  I was so impressed, I bought the book and will be writing more about what he said after I’ve had a chance to read the book.

 

Finally, Charlie Gasparino, from CNBC in a session entitled, “Wall Street: The Inside Scoop” dished out dirt on the goings-on in the heart of capitalism coming out of the Dick Grasso, NYSE, Elliott Spitzer affairs.  It was fascinating and I learned things I never would have dreamed of.  (For those not at the speech, do a Google search on Elliott Spitzer, black socks.)

 

Finally, I was gratified by the many people at the conference who told me they enjoyed this blog.  I will try and live up to your high expectations.  Also, as they say on Car Talk, feel free to express your gratitude on the back of a $20.00 bill …

Road Shows and Hedge Funds

I had the pleasure last week of attending a meeting of The Conference Board’s Global Council of Investor Relations Executives. It is an organization I used to belong to when I was on the corporate side of the equation and I think they do a good job of focusing on areas of concern for large cap corporations. The meetings are a great opportunity to hear what your peers are working on, network and listen to some interesting presentations. It is in this latter role that I was attending, having arranged to have Christopher Middleton, CEO of Atlantic Equities, discuss the merits of European roadshows for U.S. companies. Atlantic Equities is the only European based sell side shop covering U.S. equities exclusively and as a result each year they also wind up arranging a fair number of European roadshows for U.S. companies. Chris did a great job laying out the rationale for going to Europe, and every large and mid cap U. S. company should give thought to visiting with European investors as a way of broadening their shareholder base and getting away from the hedge fund merry go round that so many U.S. roadshows have turned into. (Disclosure note: the author has a relationship with Atlantic Equities and therefore is not an entirely disinterested observer.)

All of this prompted me to start thinking about why it has become such a fight to see long only investors on U. S. roadshows lately. After a moderate amount of thought (you don’t want to overdo these things), my thesis is as follows: 1. The funding for sell side research has changed, 2. You (the company) are not the client of the sell side, and 3. Follow the money.

1. The funding for sell side research has changed. It used to be that investment banking paid for much of the budget of sell side research departments. When that was happening, there was every incentive for the research analyst to maintain a good relationship with the potential investment banking client and to help facilitate meetings with the type of investors the company wants to see – long only, low turnover investors. If it didn’t result in many shares being bought or sold, well, investment banking was picking up the tab, and commission structures were higher then. Of course, Elliot Spitzer has changed all that and eliminated the inherent conflicts of interest. He’s also eliminated a strong incentive for sell side analysts to help you see the kind of investors you want to see.

2. The Company is not the client of the sell side. I think corporate IR officers often lose sight of this one. The sell side has placed more emphasis than ever before on getting management access for the buy side. The major sell side shops have entire departments that can set up road shows for you, soup to nuts, on very short notice, with only a phone call from you. As a result it feels as if you are their client. After all, they’re doing all this nice stuff for you and eliminating a major administrative headache. But you, the company, are not the client, but merely a means to an end. That end is commission flow, coming from the true client, the buy side.

3. Follow the money. Today, sell side research budgets are heavily dependant upon commission flow. And because commission rates keep falling, the most important clients of the sell side are the ones that trade the most – the hedge funds. Think about it this way – if you are visiting a city for one day, you have at most, 6 one hour time slots to see investors. When the analyst and the sales desk start to talk about which investors to see, their interest is in making their 6 biggest commission generating clients happy. You might have a top 20 investor in the city that has held the stock forever, but if they don’t generate a lot of commissions they won’t be getting a call from the sell side unless you insist upon it.

So what’s a poor investor relations officer to do? There are some things that a company can do to that can make things work for both sides. First, know the investors you clearly want to see on any give roadshow, especially if they are existing shareholders, and make your desires known at the outset. Second, recognize that the sell side will have some clients they will want you to see, and reach a happy medium. Remember, the sell side is not going to the trouble to arrange the roadshow for you without the expectation of some form of compensation, which is coming from the buy side. Third, pray that the hedge funds you do agree to see do not include the obnoxious, 30 year old who thinks he can tell your CEO how run the company.

Or, alternatively, you can go to Europe, where there are far fewer hedge funds. (For more on this topic, see my article in the September, 2007 National Investor Relations Institute Update magazine entitled “Things to Consider When Contemplating a European Investor Relations Roadshow”.)

What is Investor Relations Worth?

Last week I attended and was privileged to speak at the National Investor Relations Institute Southwest Regional Conference in Austin, Texas. This was the second time I have attended the Southwest regional conference and I like it a whole lot better than the National conference. The scale of the conference - 150 attendees versus 1,400 at the National conference – is much more manageable. You can get around and talk to most people. In addition, the scope of the conference – 1½ versus 2 ½ days at the National conference – causes it to be much more focused. I found the subject matter and the quality of the speakers uniformly better at the Southwest regional than at the National conference.

It is about one of those speeches that I want to share an interesting statistic. Brian Rivel of Rivel Research Group gave a speech discussing a study his firm completed earlier in the year entitled “Perspectives From the Buy Side”. In the study members of the buy side were asked to give their opinion as to the impact good or bad investor relations has on the valuation of a company. As this is a subject that every investor relations officer struggles with (particularly around annual review time), I perked up when Brian trotted out this statistic.

It turns out that members of the buy side say that good investor relations can add 10% to a firm’s valuation, while bad investor relations can subtract as much as 15% from a firm’s valuation. These are startling numbers. If your firm has a $10 billion market capitalization, by doing investor relations right you can add $1 billion of shareholder value to the owners of the firm. On the other hand, if you consistently get your investor relations efforts wrong, you can destroy $1.5 billion of share value.

At first blush this seems to go against what I was taught in business school: that markets are efficient at valuing future cash streams. After all, the regulatory and disclosure requirements are the same for all firms, so the way that they speak to the markets shouldn’t result in a 25% difference between the best and the worst. Then I got to thinking about it and I think it makes perfect sense. My recollection of the efficient markets hypothesis is that the market rapidly incorporates all available information about a firm into the price of its stock. The key here is all available information. The best firms go beyond the requirements of the regulations to add context, clarity and confidence in management to the reported results. This additional information is then incorporated into the firm’s value. On the other hand, the worst firms in terms of investor relations view the disclosure regulations as the maximum amount of information they will disclose. By using the securities regulations as a shield rather than a guide, companies create uncertainties about future earnings causing investors to discount the value of the company.

What this suggests is that investor relations is an underutilized function. After all, how much more effort would be required to raise a firm’s valuation by 10% through additional sales and earnings compared to presenting the firm’s earnings and prospects with clarity, candor and consistency? Every investor relations officer should take this statistic and show it to their management. It may help you get more time, attention and resources devoted to the function. More importantly, it may help get managements thinking about dealing with their shareholders proactively rather than reactively.

Alternatively, investor relations officers could take a page from the hedge fund managers and ask for a percentage of the valuation increase caused by their management of the function over the average for their industry. That would get some attention.