You check your watch. The CEO is coming down the corridor to your office. The CFO is on the phone. A sell-side analyst has e-mailed you asking – yet again – for answers to ten burning questions.
You mop beads of sweat from your forehead and think: ‘What am I doing wrong? If only I could prioritize my time. If only I could manage it more efficiently.’
Don’t worry. You won’t have far to look for guidance. There are numerous training courses, copious manuals and enough gurus to take you round the clock several times over on the subject of time management. But do you really need to apply some quasi-scientific formula to get the best out of your time? Or is it just a question of common sense?
Leave it out
At Skandinavska Enskilda Banken (SEB)- a Swedish financial group which focuses on asset management and corporate business – the IR effort concentrates on institutional investors, sell-side analysts and rating agencies, leaving the retail side to its information department.
IR manager Laurence Westerlund says the 15 largest institutional shareholders hold approximately 50 per cent of the capital in SEB, so it’s natural that most time is spent dealing with them. A large proportion is also spent dealing with sell-side analysts.
But do some institutional investors enjoy preferential treatment? ‘You must have focus, so you therefore end up spending more time with a certain number of institutions,’ concedes Westerlund. ‘But with sell-side analysts the situation is different. Many of them require almost daily contact.’
SEB’s IR-activity is at its most intense following its quarterly and full-year reports when time is set aside for a roadshow which visits key financial centers like London, New York and Boston.
Whether to spend time traveling to see investors or use new technology is a critical time management issue, Westerlund says. But investors still like meeting ‘eye-to-eye’ with management so arranging these meetings is a valuable use of time. Notwithstanding that fact, SEB also uses teleconferences and video-streaming on the internet to enable as many people as possible to participate in its analyst briefings.
For Pia Berndt, IR manager at Denmark-based food and packaging company Danisco, forward planning and careful audience prioritization are key ingredients of her approach to time management. ‘When we make major announcements we prioritize the time we devote to the investment community by having a conference call that will involve mainly analysts. Afterwards we will meet face-to-face with analysts and then major investors. We do not spend any time speaking to the press – that’s the job of our communication group.’
Berndt is constantly in communication with her CFO, mostly via e-mail. They do meet face-to-face when necessary, but quality time is available when they travel together to meet the investment community around Europe.
E-mail is a particularly useful tool for ensuring Berndt’s time is used efficiently. Often she corresponds with analysts in this way because it gives her time to research their questions properly and to forward queries to her colleagues.
‘Time management is a very natural skill for me although I did receive training in the past,’ claims Berndt. ‘I am very time-efficient and always finding ways of compressing time. I feel it’s part of my personality. I know what I can do and what time it will take for me to do it. Of course, problems arise but then I just work more hours.’
Catherine James, group investor relations director at food and drinks multinational Diageo, says time management in IR is helped by the fact that there are accepted dates to work to each year, such as results and invitations to major conferences. Planned around these events – to make most efficient use of time – are meetings with important investment houses and institutions. Choosing who to meet and when is where the IR manager’s time management skills come to the fore.
‘Sometimes prioritization of which investors we see won’t necessarily be a result of their size,’ James explains. ‘In the US, for example, there may be investors who are not the biggest but don’t spread their investments over a huge number of companies. They may therefore end up being a big investor in Diageo. It’s really a case of making a personal judgement call.’
Not in the diary
It’s the less structured events which need to be fitted in around the accepted diary dates that present the greatest test of an IRO’s time management capabilities.
‘I certainly don’t think the most stretching times are during the accepted annual events such as results,’ says Wolfgang Schnorr, deputy head of IR at Deutsche Bank. ‘Everybody knows what they are supposed to be doing. You have a finite date and you know two years in advance what the dates will be.’
Schnorr thinks there may be a certain tension between the needs of investor relations and time management, however, as he explains. ‘We try to be prepared and we try to plan what we can do, but very often things come up we cannot plan for. The objective is to provide equal treatment to everyone at the same time. That’s the theory – the reality may be slightly different.’
When there’s a close call as to which audience to devote most time to, those sell-side analysts who are regarded as opinion formers are the ones who need to be spoken to quickly and in a very detailed way, says Schnorr.
New communication methods have helped his time management. For example, the internet can make important documents like the annual report instantly available to people in the US and elsewhere. But this also has a downside because more analysts expect answers to questions at the same time.
‘But face-to-face contact remains important,’ Schnorr adds. ‘People tell us they want to see the body language of the CEO, to see if he believes what he is saying or not.’
Around 50 per cent of Schnorr’s time is spent arranging such meetings. However, with events changing at a rapid pace in the banking sector, a significant amount of what he does is by its very nature reactive. Time management is therefore about having the skill and foresight to make preparations and about being able to react professionally to unforeseen events.
Basic common sense
Peter Downs is corporate treasurer at BroadVision, a company that produces application software for big personalized web sites. He says time management in investor relations is down to a lot of common sense and to dealing efficiently with the general flow of events.
‘If there’s a major news event to get out around an earnings announcement we focus on the sell-side analysts and the major institutional shareholders. In fact when lots of news is going out you need to focus almost entirely on these audiences. They are going to be asking questions and, for better or worse, they come first,’ he adds. ‘We like to be democratic but a retail shareholder with a couple of hundred shares is simply not as important as an institutional shareholder with thousands.’ Downs may well find that the current regulatory mood is not in tune with his approach.
Phone calls are his ‘first line of attack’ but, after every quarterly results announcement, he and the senior team ‘hit the road pretty hard’ with roadshows and with attendance at various sell-side conferences. ‘I wouldn’t say that we have a long term strategic plan, but I wouldn’t say we act totally tactically either. We actively go out and seek analyst coverage – particularly from top tier banks.’
Penny Berger, investor relations manager at Cable & Wireless in the UK, says there is nothing tactical about the way she works. ‘The main thing about time management is having a prioritization process,’ she maintains. ‘Everyone wants to see the top people in a company and we are very fortunate in having a very supportive senior management. But they don’t have time to see everybody. You don’t always have the opportunity to be as proactive as you might like because the deadlines are dependent on external factors often beyond your control – especially if you have been doing transactions with other companies. It’s a negotiation process – seeing exactly what’s good for your organization as well as for others.’
As to some people’s preference for e-mail as a time-saver, Berger prefers the ‘quality contact’ a voice at the end of the phone can offer. ‘It’s important that people pick up the phone rather than use e-mail. Occasionally people e-mail, but not so much. If people know us, they feel quite comfortable picking up the phone, knowing they are often going to get an instant answer to a question.’
Berger has ‘definitely improved’ her time management but feels that no matter how many extra hours you work it’s impossible to ever get all of your work finished by the end of the day. That’s just the nature of the IR job. It’s an all too familiar comment. And maybe any faint-hearted newcomers should be warned that in investor relations there really are 24 hours in every day.
