About

---

30 years of reporting to the CEO or CFO, running Investor Relations, usually concurrently with one or more of the other communications departments, including Corporate Communications, Public Relations, Employee Communications and Lobbying, gave me a lot of experience, such as writing more than 120 quarterly earnings releases and call scripts, facing dozens of IR crisis events, and experimenting with investor targeting and outreach methods and tools.

The vast majority of my career has been at companies where investors didn’t automatically come to us, but we had to work hard to gain attention and build conviction.

The biggest lesson I learned early on is that the way most companies run their IR warrants a C-minus grade.  Most companies do it the same way, and most get mediocre results, resulting in less than full valuations.  Only the bellwethers in each industry group can get away with that, and only because they’re the bellwethers.  

If you don’t believe me, just ask your sell-side analysts what they think about how most companies (and yours) practice IR.  For example, while company management is droning on during their quarterly call about how revenue increased X% year-over-year and Y% sequentially (essentially reading the press release), the sell-side analysts have turned down the volume and started writing their report on the company while waiting for the Q&A to begin. 

I was lucky early in my IR career to learn that doing the same mediocre job as everyone else is not what I am here for.

My philosophy on IR, and company communications overall, is driven by three principles, learned through experience, and which you see reflected in the content of this web site.

1. BE DIFFERENT.  If you want to attract investors, you have to be different and stand out from your industry 

        peer group.  

2. IT’S SALES AND MARKETING.  IR is a sales and marketing job that requires creativity (good marketing) and

         intense proactivity, just like you expect from your own company’s sales force.

3. LOOK BEYOND THE ORTHODOXY.  Questioning the standard practices of IR, PR and Marketing, and 

        thinking outside the box, always yields better results.

My Particulars

• Undergraduate degree in Finance and an MBA from the University of Denver

• Before finding my way to IR, worked in Sales, Marketing and big agency PR

• Ran IR, often concurrently with other communications functions at 6 different public companies from 

        small to large cap, including Zepp Health, Fitbit, Vocera and Trizetto

• Raised and restored billions in market caps for companies, fixed a key part of the Affordable Care Act 

        before passage, and was part of a successful two-year hostile takeover defense that became the definitive

        Delaware case law for “Just Say No” hostile takeover defenses