how many long-term investors there are and how their views and concerns differ considerably from the Wall Street community. In my view, you should always manage a public company with the micro-level thought that real people have placed their hard-earned money with you.
Second, inviting investors to participate will improve the overall discussion and robustness of your call. While I have a lot of respect and admiration for my analyst friends, one thing I am certain of is that they do not have a monopoly on good questions or ideas. Not only are there a lot of smart individual investors around too, but I am also a big believer in a phrase that is batted around a lot lately: that there is wisdom in crowds. Why not use that notion to your advantage? If you do so, I think you might see many questions and ideas arise that you had not even thought of. This will only work to your benefit and should allow you to catch any misunderstandings or confusion there might be in the market about your company.
Lastly, doing this will earn you some valuable confidence and goodwill capital from investors. That is very important because it will improve your reputation and help your company out in the future. For example, I cannot express enough how my opinion of Roche was solidified last week and there is no doubt I’ll be telling people for a while what a great company it is in my opinion, partially because they took thirty seconds out of their time to personally answer a quick question of mine. In this business, small things go a long way. In fact, I have been investing long enough to know that I can somewhat disregard the minutia of the rest of that call because I’m confident investor money is in good hands there over the long-term, in part because they had the regard and respect to do a small thing like that. Trust me, it sends a strong message.
Why including investors will directly benefit them and the system
The benefit to investors and the overall system is relatively straightforward. Simply put, this will make investors feel like they matter, which will increase their confidence in the overall system. This helps everyone. As I am sure you know, confidence in the markets could not be worse lately. Trading volumes are at multi-year lows (imagine how bleak that picture must really be when you consider how much high frequency trading goes on these days) and investors have been taking money out of equities in record numbers and putting it into bonds. Certainly part of the reason for this is the nature of our overall economy right now, but I assure you another big reason is because investors don’t feel like their money is safe, valued, or even welcomed in parts of Wall Street and Corporate America these days.
Frankly, I have heard a few corporate managers say if it were up to them, they would prefer not to even have much of an individual investor following at their company. While I understand how legitimate downside comes along with it at times, I can assure you that our country’s capital markets will not be in for a very bright future if this becomes the prevailing attitude at companies. Our markets are only as strong as their smallest participants, and the picture there is not good. Allowing investors to participate on calls will be just one small way of making the environment more welcoming. Furthermore, due to the boom and bust nature of biotech and pharma in particular, I also believe that it is up to those industries to go the extra mile to make the general investor comfortable. If you have a healthier system at the company level, this will lift all boats and improve the difficulties currently being experienced in the IPO market.
Conclusions
I’d like to conclude by pointing out that the best part of this idea is that it is very simple to implement and, in my opinion, has little downside for you. There are many ways you can do it: by using a private webcast button like Roche does, through a Twitter application, or any other communication method of your choice. Obviously it is not practical for the masses to be on the actual voice-end of the call, but a tool like this should be painless, and in this day and age any size company should be able to do it. We recognize that you will not have time to answer all questions, but at the very least you will be able to show investors that you value them by choosing a few good questions or perhaps one or two that are coming up a lot.
If one of the biggest companies like Roche thinks that allowing investors to participate on their calls is important, then I hope many others out there will also see wisdom in the idea too. It will help you the company, we the investors, and therefore the system as a whole. This is a small thing, but one that will go a long way. I would love to hear your thoughts.
