Talking to Investors Before They Vote Their Proxy

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed for a podcast by Broc Romanek who writes the blog The Corporate Counsel (www.thecorporatecounsel.net/blog). Broc’s blog is one of the best around for digging into the technical requirements surrounding dealing with the SEC. Sometimes the stuff is way too technical for me (and I used to practice securities law), but other times the information is really useful. Just to take and example, with Washington buried under two successive snowstorms that have shut down federal government offices, you might wonder how that affects your SEC filings that may be due or that you might wish to file. Broc knows and you can find out on his blog.

Broc’s interview was on one of my favorite topics, trying to place a value on investor relations. For those of you who want a quick overview (the whole podcast is only 8 ½ minutes long) on what the research says about the value of IR, you can find it here: http://www.thecorporatecounsel.net/nonMember/InsideTrack/2010/02_10_Palizza.htm

If you want fuller treatments about the research, see my blog post of July 7, 2008. Broc was even kind enough to put in a plug for my upcoming seminar, “Fundamentals of Investor Relations”, February 24^th at The Houstonian Hotel, Club and Spa in Houston.

For more information go to http://www.palizzapartners.com/Palizza_Partners/Seminars.html

During the interview, something that Broc said struck me as interesting and I thought it was worthy of commentary. Specifically, Broc mentioned that with all of the changes to proxy rules, disclosures and the way issues are voted, there needs to be more communication between IR and the legal team. I think that Broc is right. Too often, specific, mandated disclosures such as proxy compensation discussions get compartmentalized. Lawyers read the rules, write disclosures to conform to the rules and present them in draft form to IR and management. Anybody that’s not a lawyer hates to read this stuff – it’s technical, dry and reads like a lawyer wrote it. So there are usually minimal revisions and the dense, dusty verbiage gets plunked down into the proxy statement. It’s the great irony of this type of disclosure – the more you have of it, the less likely it is to get read.

Now if you think about this process, there is a crucial link missing. Nobody talks to the investors who actually vote the shares. This is somewhat akin to politicians running for office without doing any polling. So when corporate proxy votes come in and there are large withholds on certain issues, companies have only themselves to blame. Actually, that’s not quite true, because portfolio managers in general hate spending time on corporate governance issues. It distracts from what they see as their main mission – making money on stocks.

Here’s a couple of suggestions to bridge this gap: First, well in advance of proxy season, investor relations officers, together with their securities law counsel, should schedule a number of calls to key investors to discuss current disclosure issues in areas such as compensation and governance. The calls should be designed as a dialogue to discover how investors view the topics and not as advocacy. Remember, you can’t solicit votes without a proxy statement. What investors want to hear can then be incorporated into your disclosures. Similarly, when you’re out on non-deal road shows, ask to spend five minutes at the end of a visit discussing the firm’s views on disclosure issues, whether they be compensation, governance or social responsibility. In the larger firms this will mean that they will have to bring in someone at the end of the meeting, as there is usually a separate person that deals with proxy voting, but it is well worth the effort as it gives upper management an opportunity to hear investors’ concerns and thinking.

This is not a cure-all, as sometimes investors want to hear things that management doesn’t want to disclose or they want governance structures that management is unwilling to implement, but at least you’ll know prior to the vote being cast.

The SEC and Climate Change – What Are These Guys Thinking?

First, a brief reminder that my seminar “Fundamentals of Investor Relations” will be held February 24^th in Houston. The seminar blends real world experience with some of the tools we teach in business school such as valuation, decision tree analysis and efficient markets as they interact with the finance, capital markets, legal and communications issues of investor relations. If you’re interested, go to my website, www.palizzapartners.com and click on the seminars tab.

The Securities and Exchange Commission faces a daunting array of issues that need attention - we’re just recovering from the most severe financial crisis our country has faced since the Great Depression which severely tested the structure of our capital markets, credit rating agencies face a crisis of confidence based upon their performance in rating complex mortgage backed bonds and the inherent conflict of interest they face in being paid by the issuers of the bonds they rate, the proper regulation of derivative instruments needs to be addressed, and their enforcement division wasn’t able to identify the billions of dollars being stolen by Bernie Madoff in spite of receiving complaints against him on at least two occasions. So what pressing issue does the SEC choose to tackle first? CLIMATE CHANGE! In the words of Commissioner Kathleen Casey (a Republican who voted against adoption of the release) “our consideration of this release today sends a curious signal to the investment community about what we view as the most pressing issues facing the Commission”.

The interpretive release, which the SEC commissioners adopted in a 3 – 2 party line vote (guess which party voted in favor of the climate change release) and which as of this writing still hasn’t seen the light of day (how’s that for timely disclosure of a material event?) purports not to change disclosure requirements. The last time I checked the definition of materiality as set out by the Supreme Court in Basic v. Levinson, it was “Information is material if there is a substantial likelihood that a reasonable investor would consider it important in making an investment decision”. In over thirty years of working in the field of investor relations I have never had an investor who owns, or is interested in owning shares, ask a climate change question. Could I have been dealing with unreasonable investors all these years? I have had questions from advocacy groups, but they are not investors, which is a crucial difference as far as disclosure requirements go.

Previous SEC interpretive releases have focused on areas such as analysis of long and short-term liquidity and capital resources, segment analysis, the effects of federal financial assistance on the operations of financial institutions, and the disclosure of preliminary merger negotiations. It seems to me that these are proper areas for the Commission to be concerned with; they are concrete, defined in scope and fairly immediate. Now we have a release, which according to the speeches of the SEC commissioners, requires companies to consider the reputational damage and its effect on their financial condition caused by their greenhouse gas emissions and requires them to disclose if their operations may be at material risk from the physical effects of climate change. So here are a couple of questions: How do you measure reputational risk in a meaningful and defined way? How do you know if your operations are at risk from climate change as opposed to normal weather shifts? Last time I checked hurricanes didn’t come with tags that say, “climate change related”. This is just bad regulation, requiring companies to engage in speculation about future events. In most other instances the SEC discourages speculation and requires you to make disclaimers about how the events may not come to pass, but this is an issue that is on the political agenda for the party with the majority of Commissioners on the SEC and so speculation is okay.

And just to remind you, the SEC also put out an interpretive release requiring companies to discuss Y2K issues, and we all know how material they turned out to be.

Efficient Markets and Investor Relations

There is still time to sign up for my seminar "Fundamentals of Investor Relations" on February 24th in Houston. Just go to my website, www.palizzapartners.com and click on the seminars tab for more details.

One of the things you learn about in finance class during the first year of business school is the efficient market hypothesis. In its simplest form, the efficient market hypothesis states that security prices fully reflect all available information. The implications of this seemingly simple statement are profound, because if current stock prices reflect all relevant information, then prices will change only when new information arrives. New information, by its definition, cannot be predicted ahead of time, and therefore stock prices cannot be predicted ahead of time and will be random.

The efficient market hypothesis gave rise to an entirely new investment vehicle, the index fund, as numerous studies were done showing that active investing could not beat the market over the long term, after taking into account transaction costs and overhead.

There are actually three versions of the hypothesis: The strong form, which posits that ALL information, both public and private, is embedded in a security’s price; the Semi-strong form, which holds that all publicly available information is reflected in the stock price; and finally the Weak form, which says that a stock’s price reflects all information that is contained in the past prices of the stock. Of the three forms, financial economists are pretty much in agreement that the Strong form, that security prices embed all information about a stock, both public and private, overstates the case. If it were true, insider trading would not reap abnormal profits, which it clearly does. Most settle on the Semi-strong form of market efficiency as their preferred thesis. Since Eugene Fama initially wrote about efficient markets in 1969 literally hundreds of event studies have been done showing that markets rapidly react to widely available information.

So, you may ask, what has all of this got to do with investor relations? The key here is that investor relations has a fair amount of discretion over what information becomes widely available. Forget for a moment what you have to disclose because of regulations and quarterly filings and think instead about other things that make up your company.

Just to take one example, say you have a terrific management team. If you don’t get them in front of investors so that they can judge how great they are, that information is not widely available and the market will never know about it. If investors don’t know how good the entire management team is, they can’t build that into their expectations of future profits and therefore it will not be reflected it in your stock price.

Another example is corporate culture. Nothing in the regulations or disclosure requirements will ever force you to talk about your company’s corporate culture. Yet that very same culture may be a big reason behind your company’s performance and its future prospects. Wal-Mart comes to mind as a company that puts its culture in front of investors by letting them attend Saturday meetings in Bentonville and welcoming them to the extravaganza they have each year at their annual shareholders’ meeting.

What you choose to disclose is entirely up to you and (here’s the rub) your management. Every company is good at something – brand management, technical expertise, distribution or operations, to name a few. Disclosing data of this nature with investors can help them more efficiently value your stock. The key is that the information has to be widely available. That doesn’t mean that you have to disclose it in your filings or put out a press release. Not all information rises to the level of materiality. But it does mean that you have to have a consistent effort to disclose those pieces of information, both in good times and in bad, to all your investors.

Do that and you will have done your part in making the markets more efficient.

Learning from European IR Websites

First, a brief announcement: registration is now open for my seminar, “Fundamentals of Investor Relations” to be held February 24^th at The Houstonian Hotel. If you are interested in attending, simply go to my web site www.palizzapartners.com, click on the Seminars tab and follow the instructions at the bottom of the page to register. We are offering a high quality educational experience at a compelling price.

And now for something completely different (apologies to Monty Python): Like most modern day office workers, I spend a lot of time in front of my computer getting information off the web. When I do research on companies, I usually start at a general financial information site (my personal favorite is Google Finance, but there are plenty of others out there) to get a quick overview before moving to the company’s investor relations site. What I find when I get there is that many of the investor sites for U.S. companies tend to be very cookie cutter in their approach. In short, the sites are not very interesting or innovative. My impression is that the sites have been assembled from a menu of standard options, sort of the way you can order off a Chinese menu.

I find this somewhat depressing, given the decline in print media as a means of delivering a company’s story and the inherent flexibility that the web provides. As I thought further about it, my conclusions were that there are probably two factors at work here. First, most companies choose to outsource the process of building and maintaining the investor web site portion of their company’s site. I can’t say I blame them for this, as A. doing this well is beyond the capabilities of most smaller companies and B. if you’ve ever worked in a large corporation that maintains the web site internally, you know that investor relations is well down the priority list of most programmers.

Second, the market for providing outsourcing of investor relations sites is essentially a duopoly in the U.S., with all the implications that has on pricing and innovation. Least you think I’m just talking through my hat, over the past couple of years I have spent a fair amount of time looking at European investor relations web sites, and in a number of respects, they do it better. For example, as you can see in the screenshot below, the Italian energy company ENI has a killer main IR page that allows you to customize how you want the information to look through the use of movable widgets.

Or how about a graphics generator for your key data? The screenshot below comparing net income to free cash flow is a graph I generated on the website of EADS, the European defense contractor. The entire process took me six clicks of my computer mouse – no cutting and pasting, and no downloading financials and parsing through the entries and fussing with excel charting functions.

Finally, we live in an increasingly mobile society, but U.S. investor sites seem to think that everyone is sitting at their desk. Below is a screenshot of the Stay in Touch page for Aviva, the U.K. insurance company that gives investors a number of ways to receive their information.

The point of all of this is that here in the U.S. we tend to get a bit insular. We have the largest and most robust capital markets in the world, so naturally we think everything we do connected to those markets is the best as well. However, there seems to be some very innovative things being done for investors in Europe. We could improve our web sites by broadening our horizons a bit.

A Pricing Guide to Executive Education in Investor Relations

Competition is a wonderful thing. Competing offerings generally result in better offerings, more choices and lower prices for the customer. Conversely, when an organization has a monopoly or near monopoly on a product, prices go up and there is no way to know if you are getting the best the market has to offer. If you don’t believe me, just think about what American cars were like before they started to get serious competition from Japanese and German cars.

Until recently, people who wanted to go to educational offerings about investor relations have had very limited choices at very high price points. That’s why I’ve developed my seminar, “Fundamentals of Investor Relations”.

Talk is cheap (unless, evidently, you want to hear it about investor relations), so I thought I would set out how my new seminar compares to what’s currently being offered and let the readers decide.

Fundamentals of Investor Relations

Cost: $475

Duration: one day

Location: Houston, Texas

Instructor: John Palizza (me), lecturer at Rice University Jones Graduate School of Business, developer and teacher of the only MBA level investor relations course taught anywhere.

NIRI Introduction to Investor Relations

Cost: $1,195 for members, $1,495 for non-members

Duration: two and one-half days

Location: Boston, Massachusetts and Santa Monica, California

Instructors: Volunteer consultants, IR practitioners and NIRI staff

University of Michigan — Theory and Practice of Investor Relations

Cost: $7,200 for members, $8,100 for non-members

Duration: five and one-half days

Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan

Instructors: University of Michigan finance professors and Jeffrey Morgan, NIRI president.

Online Certification Program in Investor Relations, offered with the University of California, Irvine

Cost: Six required courses and one elective course at $660 per course for members, $860 for non-members, plus one elective course at $575, textbook cost of $100 per course and $125 candidacy fee. Total cost: $5,360 for members

Instructors: various volunteer practitioners

Certificate Program in Investor Relations at NYU School of Continuing and Professional Studies

Cost: five courses at $775 each, total cost $3,875

Instructors: various volunteer practitioners

If you’re wondering why I can offer this seminar at a price point much lower than anyone else, the answer is that I am much more interested in elevating the educational level available for the discipline of investor relations than I am in making a lot of money. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as driven by the profit motive as any good capitalist, but frankly, I think current offerings are overpriced, inconvenient and take way too much of people’s time. I know what the costs are to put on a seminar and I don’t see it justifying the pricing I see. I think the seminars are being priced for what the traffic will bear, not to the marginal cost of the product.

So here’s my promise: Attend “Fundamentals of Investor Relations” and you will be given the basic knowledge about investor relations you need to have a solid grounding in the legal, marketing, finance and stock valuation aspect of the discipline. I also promise you that we will not waste your time. And we won’t force you into a vendor’s showcase for “networking time”. All we’ll do is have a dialog about the essential knowledge you need to know to do your job well. When all is said and done, I believe you will get a better product – one that is used in a MBA curriculum - at a lower price than anyone else is offering.

This is my first time offering the seminar and it’s being offered in Houston. If we have success, we’ll bring it to other cities, so that it’s convenient to the customers.

If you’re interested, or know someone who might be interested, you can find more information about our upcoming seminar on February 24, 2010 under the Seminars tab on my website http://www.palizzapartners.com or you can email me at john@palizzapartners.com or call me at 281-727-6775. I love to talk about this subject.

More Essential Life Skills for the Investor Relations Professional

First, a brief commercial: I am happy to announce my seminar, "Fundamentals of Investor Relations" will be given in Houston on February 24, 2010. The workshop was developed from my MBA course at Rice University and is designed to be a comprehensive one day overview of the essentials of investor relations. At a cost of $475.00, it represents a great value. For more information, visit the Seminars tab at my website at www.palizzapartners.com.

In the early days of this blog (September, 2007), I wrote a humorous piece entitled “Essential Life Skills for the Investor Relations Professional”. Much to my surprise, the essay has proven to be one of the more popular posts I’ve written. I suspect that people do a web search looking for relevant advice about how to actually practice investor relations and wind up getting my advice about learning to talk with their mouths full, sound enthusiastic when they’re answering the same question for the thirtieth time and other odd bits of advice, but nevertheless, from the data, it appears that people actually read the post when they get there. Therefore, in an attempt to inject a little more humor into what tends to be a humorless profession, I introduce part 2 to my essential life skills series.

Today’s piece of advice is to learn to think of the analysts that cover your company as your children. This may sound like an odd analogy, but in my experience, their behavior often mirrors that of my children when they were growing up. Consider the following behavior traits:

They all want to be first in line. Think about the fight to ask the first question on your conference calls. Think about how quickly they want to get notes out on First Call.

They all want your attention immediately. When an analyst calls, they are interested in getting the answers to the questions they have NOW, not according to your schedule. This certainly sounds like my children.

They all want you to love them best. The job of an analyst is to assemble pieces of information into an investment thesis, and they all want better information flow (their version of love) than anyone else.

Because they’ve been to school, they think they have all the answers. In the case of my children, it was grammar school, while in the case of analysts, it’s business school, but other than that, it’s pretty much the same. Actual practical experience doesn’t seem to count for much.

When it comes to finding out information, they prefer to be told rather than dig the facts out of a book. My children would always opt to try and have me give them the answers instead of looking it up in a textbook. All you have to do here is substitute Report on Form 10-K for textbook and you can see my point.

I could go on, but by now I think you understand the analogy. The question then becomes what parenting skills come into play as essential life skills for investor relations professionals?

First, just as you must love all your children equally, you must also love all the analysts that cover your company equally. There is no room for playing favorites. Many people will find this piece of advice difficult to follow, because, just as with your children, every analyst has a different personality, some of which are nicer than others. Nevertheless, you must act like an adult here and be fair and consistent, even if the analyst has a sell rating on your company.

A corollary to this is that, just as you teach your children to respect others, you must also respect all analysts. Company investor relations officers often lose sight of the fact that analysts are pulled in many different directions by portfolio managers, hedge funds, research directors and the need to continually generate investment ideas. Compounding this you have a divergence of viewpoints – to most IR officers there is little difference between the company and its stock, whereas to an analyst this is a crucial difference. Because of this, a lack of respect for the work being done by the analyst can arise. An essential skill of an IR professional is to respect the work an analyst does regardless of their conclusions.

Finally, actions speak louder than words. It doesn’t matter how much philosophy you may preach to your children, if you don’t walk the talk, they will see right through you. The same is true of analysts. You have to be honest and straightforward in how you respond to their questions. If in discussing a topic, you fail to cover some essential points simply because the question asked wasn’t specific enough, your credibility will eventually suffer.

Although I could continue in this vein for an extended period, I have to stop now. My children are home for the holidays and I have to go break up a fight about who gets to use the car tonight…

IR and Activist Investors

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the National Investor Relations Institute (NIRI) Southwest Regional Conference in San Antonio. I’m on record as having said this before, but I think it bears repeating: I believe that the Southwest Regional Conference is a better learning experience for investor relations professionals than the National Conference. I say this because the Southwest Regional Conference is shorter – a day and one-half as opposed to two and one-half days and thus more focused and, with a smaller number of people in attendance, you actually feel as if you have a chance to get around and talk to everybody.

This year, under the leadership of Lee Ahlstrom, President of the Houston NIRI chapter, the Conference took an interesting departure from the usual lineup of speakers. The first morning saw everyone engaged in a case study examining the actions of an activist investor confronting a company with operational and governance issues. The case required everyone to participate, assuming the role of members of the Board of Directors, while members of management, the activist investor, and an institutional investor presented their side of the situation. The case drove home the incredibly fast pace of events in these types of situations, as members of the Board found themselves with large amounts of data, conflicting agendas and not much time to make a decision.

As someone who uses case studies to teach investor relations, I was very interested to see how things would turn out. After all, the audience was mostly corporate IR practitioners, who would normally be expected to side with management. I had worked on the case with Lee and a number of other professionals in the field and thought that the case was even-handed, presenting issues on both sides of the situation, but with case studies you never know quite how the participants will react. To my surprise, the overwhelming number of participants voted in favor of negotiating with the activist shareholder, recognizing the difficult realities of activist investor situations.

I would be the first to admit that a single case study result does not a trend make. But Directors face enormous pressure to do something in these situations beyond the Nancy Reagan defense (“Just say no”). Add to that the additional pressure Board members face when you consider Director’s liability and potential lawsuits, and you start to understand the leverage activist investors have.

As investor relations professionals we are often the early warning system for these troubles. If you are consistently getting questions about underperforming units or assets, you should let your management know. Hedge funds often talk to one another about investment ideas and when the same question keeps popping up it can serve as a warning sign. Similarly, if your corporate governance scores are low or your compensation practices out of line with your peers, you should be tactfully suggesting that the Board address these issues. Better that the Board act on its own than be forced to by an activist investor.

Finally, set up a program to talk to your major institutional investors to discuss items other than the latest quarterly results. Solicit input on governance issues, compensation and equity plans, with senior management present. You can do this either as a separate call or ask that you spend 5 – 10 minutes on the topics during your next non-deal roadshow. Those are the institutional votes you will need next time there is a potential proxy fight and you would be well served to have a history of listening to your investors on these issues rather than waiting until you are under the gun.

What Makes for Great Investor Relations?

There was an interesting profile in this Sunday’s New York Times about Jim Collins, the author of a number of well known business books such as “Built to Last” and “Good to Great”.  One of the things that became apparent from the article was that Collins likes to ponder and write about big questions that interest him.  Naturally, after reading the article, I got to thinking about one of the big question that interests me, namely “What makes for great investor relations at companies?”

Over the years, I’ve read my fair share of business books, many of them with multi-step procedures for achieving greatness.  Frankly, I can’t remember most of them, so when I sat down to think about how to convey the essence of great investor relations, I decided to try to keep things simple.  When I was growing up, I used to listen to radio broadcasts of the New York Yankees baseball games.  They were sponsored by Ballantine Ale, and to this day I can still remember Mel Allen advising us that the three rings on the Ballantine label stood for “Purity, Body and Flavor”.  So I decided to try and boil down the attributes of great IR to three key items.  (This might also have something to do with my Catholic schooling – the trinity and all that - but I really don’t want to go there, and besides, I remember the beer commercials much more clearly.)

When I sat down to write out my list, three things immediately popped up: Honesty, Consistency and Knowledge.  

Honesty to me is the most important aspect of what good investor relations is all about.  Investors deserve nothing less.  The Securities laws try to mandate honesty, but what I’m talking about is HONESTY.  If you always deal honestly and forthrightly with investors, it might be painful at times, but you will always be able to look yourself in the mirror.  Further, investors will come to believe you, which will pay rich dividends when things get rough, and the valuation of your firm will more accurately reflect its intrinsic value.

Some people like to think of investor relations as an advocacy position, similar to the way our trial system works.  The thinking is that IROs present the party line and then it is up to analysts and investors to challenge the story, with the truth coming out as a result of the process.  Unfortunately, this also means that you are training investors to believe that there is a significant other side to the story, which the investor relations department is concealing from them.  In my opinion, it is better to acknowledge the other side of the story, the potential issues that your company may face and admit to some of the things your company might be able to do better.  In the long run, investors will give much more credence to your story.

Consistency is next on my list because investors keep notes.  If you are talking to someone about the latest quarter’s results, chances are very good that they have in front of them their notes from the same quarter last year.  Nothing drives investors crazy faster than changing your story or the way you present data or, heaven forbid, the way you calculate your data.  It doesn’t matter if you do it for the purest of reasons – investors will always assume the worst, because they’ve seen many examples of data being manipulated to favor management.  Having a comprehensive set of metrics about your business that you report consistently, quarter in and quarter out, will gain you a lot of traction with investors.

The same principle also applies to the way a company deals on the human side with analysts – consistency in the way you work with analysts day in and day out will earn respect over the long haul.  This means no favorites, no disparaging of analysts with a sell recommendation and equal opportunities for access to management.

Finally, knowledge.  Analysts don’t call up investor relations officers to learn something they already know.  At least, they hope they don’t.  They call because they are attempting to understand what goes beyond the contents of the press release or 10K filing.  This means that the good investor relations officer will be an expert, not only on his company, its accounting systems, its culture and its markets, but also on his industry.  The ability to put developments in context, both for your company and for the bigger picture, will assure that investors will call you before they call the trading desk to place a sell order.

So, with a nod to Ballantine Ale and Mel Allen, the greatest voice in baseball broadcasting, there you have it:  Honesty, Consistency and Knowledge.  Now I think I’ll slip off and have a cold one…

Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road

Over the past two months I’ve been in the active phase of teaching my course on investor relations at the Jones Graduate School of Management at Rice University.  It’s something I really enjoy - combining academic pursuits with the realities of Wall Street and how companies interact with investors.  With the term over for the year, I’ve had a chance to step back and reflect upon the state of education for practitioners of investor relations in the real world. The conclusion I come to is that the profession has a scattershot approach to teaching the fundamentals of IR.  The seminars, conferences and courses that I have seen on the subject are, in my opinion, too expensive, both in cost and participants’ time.  Further, they are usually taught either by volunteer practitioners on an ad hoc basis, or in rare cases, by business school academics with very little experience in the real world.  The result is a very uneven learning experience.

One of the great things about capitalism is that if there is a market that is underserved, a product or service will arise to fill the need.  In this case, I propose to fill the gap in the investor relations education market by offering seminars for the profession.  Over the course of a thirty-year career, I have been involved in investor relations as a lawyer, a corporate practitioner, an officer of a buy side firm and an educator.   As a result I believe that I bring a unique blend of practical experience, knowledge and teaching experience to the field.  The seminars I plan to offer will build upon the lectures and textbook I developed for my investor relations class but will be very practical rather than academic in their content. 

The first seminar I have developed is “The Fundamentals of Investor Relations” and is aimed at the person who is relatively new to IR or who has been in the job for a short period of time and wants to make sure they have covered all the bases.  I believe that the basics of investor relations can be taught in an intensive one-day seminar at a modest cost ($300 - $400 per person, depending on location) and further, in order to be respectful of people’s time by eliminating travel, I think that the seminar ought to come to the students’ home market.  In short, I propose to offer a first rate educational experience in an efficient manner at a reasonable cost.  A second seminar, currently in the planning stages, would be for more seasoned practitioners and would feature “Best Practices in Investor Relations”.

So much for the sales pitch.  What I really need now is some input from my readers concerning your interest levels and where you might be.  Additionally, if you are a service provider and think this is something your clients might have an interest in, I’d love to hear from you.  This could be an opportunity for you to reach out and offer them something unique and a little out of the ordinary.  Please email me at john@palizzapartners.com.  I look forward to hearing from you.