Randall Oliver has joined Red Lion Hotels Inc in Vancouver, Washington. (For those that always thought Vancouver was in BC, Canada, in this case it turns out to be effectively a suburb of Portland, Oregon. That clear?)
For Oliver, 37, joining Red Lion has involved a significant move north and west – as well as down, in terms of scale – since he was previously supervisor of investor relations at Houston Industries Inc. Before that he was at American General Corporation but his experience is not confined to the corporate perspective. He has also worked both as an investor relations counsellor – at Georgeson & Co’s Los Angeles office; and in portfolio management, as investment officer at River Oaks Trust Corporation.
So why does someone like Oliver leave a massive Fortune 500 corporation like Houston Industries (revenues: c. $3 bn a year; assets: around $12 bn) to join a company a tenth of that size which only completed its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange in July of last year?
Oliver has a number of answers to this question. One has to do with the nature of the position itself, ‘Up to this point in my career, I have always been the secondary investor relations officer,’ he explains. ‘While I have always had a high degree of autonomy, it’s very exciting and rewarding to be building my own program.’
But the company itself was a large part of the incentive to make the move, too. ‘It’s a young company with strong growth prospects which has also historically been a strong performer. But since the IPO that hasn’t been reflected in the stock price,’ he explains. Indeed, despite its strong performance, Red Lion’s stock sells at a discount to the rest of the sector. No doubt that’s at least in part the result of the IR responsibility having been split between the company’s treasurer and its general counsel. They have both had far too much else on their plates to be able to build a proactive IR program.
In Oliver’s book, that all adds up to ‘a great opportunity to establish an IR function and try to get the value recognised’.
