Top tips on managing expanding workloads discussed at recent IR Impact and Notified webinar
It’s no secret that the IR workload has been expanding – even as resources fail to match pace. At the same time, market uncertainty has made the day-to-day less predictable. The result is that the modern IRO is busier than ever.
This was something Erik Carlson, chief operating officer at Notified pointed to early in a recent webinar titled: Strategic time management for today’s IRO. ’If look at the challenges in the market, the rise in distrust of the media, the proliferation of content – it’s becoming harder and harder to cut through the noise, to synthesize information and do the jobs that you’re expected to do on a 24/7 basis’. Add macro issues into the mix and Carlson described what has become ‘a tall order just to complete normal responsibilities as an IR team.’
You can watch the webinar replay here.
Carlson and IR Impact moderator Steven Wade were joined by Lisa Caperelli, former vice president of IR at Arbutus biopharma, who explained that across her expansive career, she had always been a team of one. Rounding out the panel was Katie Keita, IR lead at Kneat.com, who shared her experiences across both larger firms like Dell and Shopify and leaner departments too.
As well as watching the webinar on demand, you can also download the IR Playbook: Maximizing your return on time, written in association with Notified and featuring exclusive research as well as insights into how even more leading IR professionals manage their most precious resource.
Here are some top tips taken from the webinar:
Differentiate between the immediate and the strategic impact
‘Time management is sort of this holy grail that we will always be seeking throughout our professional life,’ commented Keita. It’s about ‘spending our time as strategically as possible.’
Having been through the ‘arc’ of IR – from a small and mid-cap focused boutique, to large teams, Keita explained that she was now ‘back at the administrative level,’ but also in a very strategic role as ‘part of a leadership team and being that information highway that IR is meant to be, that brings in all the feelers from what we’re seeing out there [as well as] what we are putting out into the world.’
Talking about her excitement around the advancement of AI tools, Keita warned that the challenge for IRO ‘is going to be not confusing the immediate impact with the strategic impact.’
Package up your priorities
Caperelli talked about the logistics of time management, explaining that she thinks about her priorities as fitting into three buckets.
‘My three buckets are data collection – which is really competitive intelligence – marketing collateral and then my C-suite’s time.’
She added that for her, the data collection bucket is about ‘understanding everything that I possibly can about my peers in the space, my competitors in the space [and] everything I can about my own company,’ admitting it can be a challenge and explaining that tech is already providing support for her in this area.
‘There are AI tools that can help with this, that can help eliminate a lot of the time and effort that is put into tracking down that competitive intelligence,’ said Caperelli.
On the marketing side, she explained that she puts everything from the earnings release materials to PowerPoint presentations, fireside chats, webcasts and everything needed for those into that bucket. ‘There really is no reason to reinvent the wheel for some of these things when we have the tools at our fingertips…to pull from AI, gather the data and repurpose it.’
For her third bucket – where Caperelli’s C-suite time is stored – she talked of the need for IR to manage initial interactions with analysts and investors. ‘No deal is going to close and no investor is going to invest until they look into the eyes of the CEO and the CFO, but not every conversation needs to happen with the CEO and the CFO, and that’s the workload that we really have to show our value for. We have to take ownership of that, so the C-suite can focus on executing.’
Lean on the organization – and your tech
If IR shines in a crisis, then it’s also true that small teams become experts in efficiency. And this is something Carlson pointed to during the webinar, where he talked about how small IR departments need to pull in resources from elsewhere within their firms.
‘When teams are relatively lean, the art of being efficient and really managing your time is in leveraging the broader organization and the team,’ said Carlson. Like Keita, he talked about the need to get your process in place. ‘Have inputs, calls for content from a commercial performance perspective or a financial performance perspective, or [for] Q&A prep, establishing those expectations early [and] often. Holding people accountable to that every quarter does a tremendous amount in terms of saving you time, because you’re not chasing inputs and you’re getting inputs early and often.’
Then, when it comes to really making the most of others within your company, Carlson advised ‘starting with a core messaging document’.
‘Really understand the three to five points that you want to get across in your quarterly earnings and deputize other people within the organization to help you amplify that,’ he said.
You can consider certain tech solutions as an extension of your team too: ‘One thing I’ve seen increasingly over the last two to three years, particularly in our base of clients, is the leveraging of media monitoring tools,’ Carlson added. ‘It’s one thing to see financial disclosures that are listed, whether that’s through an earnings transcript or an SEC filing or an Edgar filing. It’s another to understand what people are saying about it out in the marketplace.
‘We’ve started to see IROs add media monitoring capabilities to their tool belt as a means of staying on top of the broader news cycle and broader information cycle on the market.’
Keita added that it’s important to remember that ‘your team is all of your vendors, as well as all of your internal people who do the analysis work.’
Pick the low-hanging fruit
In the age of AI, it’s easy to think you must push further and harder into what tech can do for you. But if your goal is better time management and increased efficiencies, it’s all about those easy-to-adapt tasks.
‘Go for that low hanging fruit,’ commented Caperelli. ‘Simplify wherever possible and work with your team, establish some standard procedures [and] templates for routine matters. I like to rinse and repeat that.’ She said it’s also important to ensure others have the right degree of access to make your life easier. ‘Make sure everyone on the team has access to [necessary] files and the know-how to be able to update them.’ That could be things like templates for your analyst update, for example, so whenever there’s a change to their model, it’s a case of ‘plug and play’. It could be about projections, key messages, board slides, meeting summaries. ‘You just want to make it as simple as you can so it can be modified as quickly as needed, when needed.’
Added to that, Caperelli said it was important to ‘delegate, delegate, delegate. Know your team and know what makes them work effectively and efficiently. Do your team members want autonomy for a certain task, or are they all willing to swim in other lanes? I would encourage cross training so that you can rely on everyone for anything, rather than have individuals siloed into one area.’
Apply Keita’s version of the Jamie Dimon method
Thinking back to a IR Impact event held in New York, Keita recalled some advice ‘from someone who worked with Jamie Dimon’.
What the JPMorgan Chase CEO reportedly does is this: ‘Every day he looks out at the week ahead; every week he’ll look at what he’s got going on for the month ahead; every month he does the year ahead.’
‘I probably got that wrong, but it doesn’t matter, because I took it away and that’s how I’ve applied it,’ she said. ‘It’s helped me stay strategic, because when you’ve got stuff going on in any given day that you’re going to want to leverage, remembering we’ve got x, y, z happening in three weeks is pretty helpful.’
Click here to watch the webinar replay now.
