Deep Dives
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The CFO: ‘Don’t wait too long to make changes,’ says Central Garden & Pet finance chief
Visit the executive page of Central Garden & Pet, the Walnut Creek, California-headquartered company, and you get an immediate sense of just how much the C-suite is tied to the company: instead of the typical suit-in-a-boardroom shot, it’s a case of bring-your-pet-to-work day. Brad Smith, who was promoted from his role as finance chief for the firm’s pet segment to group CFO eight months ago, brought in his French bulldog. Elsewhere there are labradors, maybe a couple of poodle mixes and a cat, though Smith points out that dogs are definitely the more cooperative choice. Smith talks to IR Impact…
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‘Earnings are our Super Bowl halftime show’: Tales from 100 quarterly updates with Mary Winn Pilkington
Earlier this year, Tractor Supply Company (TSC)’s Mary Winn Pilkington celebrated her 100th earnings call – with balloons, cake and the typical quarterly stress to match. ‘In IR you touch on everything – that’s probably part of the reason I have stayed in investor relations for 25 years,’ she says. ‘Every day is different and you get to work with the smartest people inside the company. ‘You’re working with people that are on the board or the management team, you’re working with high potential individuals that have been given strategic projects to work on,’ she adds. ‘Then, outside of the…
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‘People aren’t robots’: How can companies support mothers in their IR teams?
How do you keep a mother in investor relations? How do you support her in a way that keeps diversity of knowledge and experience climbing the corporate ladder? This is a very difficult act to balance, with our recent article on the topic hearing from high-functioning, street facing women who hold senior positions while also raising children. And as Debbie Nathan of Debbie Nathan Associates explained, the issue of childcare is not one that men ever raise in the recruitment process: this is predominantly a female issue. So what should companies be doing to make sure that women feel they…
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The sustainability Taliban, the eco right and why we need a new language for ESG: down the rabbit hole with Robert Eccles
When Robert Eccles wrote a piece called Grift capitalism: The GOP’s brilliant strategy for ripping off ordinary Americans, it received the usual dose of online hate mail. It also led to a challenge: if you can find a conservative that thinks sustainability is good for capital markets, will you stop ‘writing nasty stuff’ about Republicans? That led him to the position he speaks from today: a liberal ex-hippy who has found common ground with the so-called ‘eco right’. Eccles, a well-known author and lecturer who has been writing about non-financial metrics since the early 1970s, had already become frustrated with…
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Mothers of IR: From babies at conferences to the metaphorical ‘sticky floors’ beneath the glass ceiling
If you were at an investor event in May 2022 alongside alternative defense firm Axon, you might have spotted a rather unusual attendee: the softest of blonde hair, pacifier in place and no socks on their feet. This was Andrea James’ third child getting a fast-track induction to IR so that James could continue breastfeeding as she worked a high-profile, Street-facing job. Today, James is finance lead at Oncocyte. But she isn’t just a CFO, nor just an IR Impact Award-winning former head of IR either. On her CV she proudly lists the position of ‘co-founder at Family Inc’. Check…
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The CFO: ‘My best advice comes from a former marine – embrace the suck,’ says Andrea James of Oncocyte
Earlier this year, Andrea James – the IR Impact Award-winning former investor relations lead at Axon – talked to us about taking a sabbatical from investor relations as she sought a new role. Having taken time to herself, then taken time think about what her next move might look like, she manifested a CFO position at a small cap. That small cap is Nasdaq-listed precision diagnostics firm Oncocyte. Here James talks to IR Impact about the skills you need to make the move from IR to CFO, what she looks for from her advisers and why stock-picking and finance appealed…
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Talking DEI under Trump 2.0: how anti-woke investors are hijacking pro-ESG proposals
What does DEI mean to you? Here at IR Impact, we’ve stopped spelling out diversity, equity and inclusion, working under the assumption that this most tricky of news items is known to all. But it seems that other interpretations exist – on the White House official X account for example, where a post was recently put out stating ‘the only DEI we support is Deport Every Illegal’. That very much sums up the kind of narrative companies are up against with today’s very public broadly anti-ESG and specifically anti-DEI rhetoric.
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‘We’re experienced in market drawdowns’: Setanta’s Fergal Sarsfield talks value, opportunity and luck
Fergal Sarsfield joined Dublin-headquartered Setanta in 2007 and it today responsible for co-managing the EAFE (European, Australasian and Far East) Equity Fund. Previously, he divided his time with sector responsibility for the technology sector within the Setanta Global Equity Fund, while co-managing EAFE. Setanta was established in 1998 and today manages around $15 bn with $8.9 bn in equities across three strategies: global, EAFE and dividend (with roughly $3-$4 bn in US equities). Setanta is a wholly owned subsidiary of Canada Life, which is in turn owned by Canada’s Great-West Lifeco. There is an investment team of 30 based mainly…
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The CFO: ‘Managing spin-offs is like raising kids. You love them all, despite the challenges,’ says Kyndryl’s finance chief explaining how he leans on IR for corporate transactions
David Wyshner speaks about his involvement in six corporate transactions – and counting – in his career Most IR teams – and most CFOs – might be involved in one or two large corporate transactions in their careers. For David Wyshner, finance chief at NYSE-listed IT services provider, he’s up to six and still counting. […]
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‘We’re thinking about what AI is going to destroy as much as what it’s going to create’: Jonathan Knowles of Compound Equity Group
Compound Equity Group (CEG) was founded in 2024 and seeks high-conviction, long-term ideas in global equities. The founder and portfolio manager in charge, Jonathan Knowles, spent more than 30 years managing money at Capital Group. At his time of retirement in December 2024, he was in charge of some $50 bn in assets and was the chief investment officer of the firm’s $70 bn small-cap fund – the largest such fund in the world. CEG has recently raised $500 mn in capital and is deploying a very long-term, highly concentrated approach: to have 20 to 25 investments with some positions…
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The CFO: ‘You need to have a stomach of iron during times of volatility,’ says Block’s Amrita Ahuja
Many IROs hope that their time in the profession might set them up well for a C-suite position well one day. But for Amrita Ahuja, CFO and COO for payments company Block, the transition happened directly during her time as head of IR for interactive entertainment firm Activision Blizzard, where she was called upon to become finance chief of its video-game publishing wing Blizzard Entertainment in 2018. Fast forward a few years and she now holds the dual posts of CFO and – for the past two years – COO at Block, the financial technology company founded by Jack Dorsey,…
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Taking management on tour: What’s the sweet spot for investor meeting attendance?
‘We’re spending more time with investors without our management team,’ Naji Baydoun, director of IR at Innergex, told IR Impact editor Laurie Havelock in the Global Roadshow Report 2025. ‘Maybe at the beginning of the [2024] we were spending 10 percent of our investor engagements without management and now we’re up to about 25 percent with just the IR team,’ explained Baydoun. ‘That’s because we’ve built relationships and trust with those investors, so I’m happy about that.’ According to IR Impact’s 15th annual research report into the who, where, how and why of corporate roadshow activity, there has been a…
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How to talk tariffs: IR in the new era of uncertainty
The US economy is in ‘a period of transition,’ US President Donald Trump told Fox News on Sunday. By close of trading on Monday, the US S&P 500 had dropped almost 3 percent, with tech stocks taking a particularly heavy hit. Weeks of back and forth as Trump threatened tariffs, paused tariffs, reintroduced tariffs – and saw retaliatory levies by affected markets – finally came to a head.
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‘I under-appreciated the work that went into IR’: What it’s really like to move from the sell side to investor relations
When asked for an example of a time she really leaned into her skills honed on the sell side, Bonita To, director of investor relations at First Quantum Minerals, points to a unique situation: the shutting down of one of the firm’s mines by the Panamanian government in November 2023. ‘The balance sheet became quite distressed and it was very apparent that we would need to take some action in terms of addressing our liquidity constraints – including going to the capital markets,’ she recalls.
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The CFO: The best IROs bring in ideas from all over, says Ciena’s finance chief
Gregg Lampf, head of IR at Ciena, is a familiar face at IR Impact events. He’s also a big advocate for AI for investor relations – a topic he talks about, writes about and puts to work in his day job.
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‘What we don’t need is more masculine energy’: Where ESG fits in the corporate scandal warning system
What links Wells Fargo, the largest retail bank in the US with Boeing or failed blood-analysis startup Theranos? They all offer up examples of corporate scandal that feature in Guido Palazzo’s book The Dark Pattern: The hidden dynamics of corporate scandal, co-authored with Ulrich Hoffrage. In it, Palazzo, a professor of business ethics and TEDx Talk speaker, and Hoffrage, a professor of decision theory, seek to uncover what lands huge multinational firms with multi-million-dollar fines for fraud, their senior executives at best fired or at worst jailed.
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Rather be canoeing the Mekong River than riding the corporate commute? Perhaps it’s time for an IR sabbatical
This time last year Andrea James was spending time with her young family, going to yoga twice a week and generally taking the slow approach to life. Today, she is CFO at Nasdaq-listed Oncocyte, a molecular diagnostics technology company. James explains that when she first decided to take a career break – at the time she was chief communications officer and IR head at alternative defense firm Axon – she didn’t know what she wanted to do next. ‘I needed to get out of the day-to-day of being at a rapid-growth company, in a highly visible role, to find that…
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‘I’ve seen the good and the bad from the sell side – it’s framed how I approach IR’: Inside IR at Alamos Gold
What does it take to become an award-winning IRO? Scott Parsons, a former sell-side analyst who joined the IR team at Alamos Gold in 2013, working his way up to lead the program, knows that a lot of it is hard work. But successful IR is also about honing your organizational skills, your people skills and your ability to package up the company story in a way that makes it work for investors and analysts. Here, we dive into the IR program at Alamos Gold to hear about everything from the sell-side to IR learning curve, the way ESG conversations…
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The CFO: Heads of IR should understand their company better than management, says Alamos Gold finance chief
To mark the first of the year’s CFO interviews, we headed to Toronto to talk IR with Greg Fisher, finance chief at Alamos Gold – a company that has been repeatedly recognized for its efforts in investor relations
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Personality and pandemics: What we learned from a year of talking IR with CFOs
As the year draws to a close, we look back on 12 months of The CFO column. What started with Kurt Barton of Tractor Supply Company expanded to conversations about all things IR with finance chiefs from Brazil’s NuBank to Hong Kong’s Sa Sa International, Canada’s Cineplex to Campbell’s Soup Company in the US – and many more. We discussed the benefits that good IR can deliver, about what they look for in their heads of IR, about what works in corporate access and what they liked most – and least – about their involvement in the IR program.
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The CFO: ‘Our ultimate mission is the protection of lives’, says finance chief of Japan’s Weathernews Inc
Masanori Yoshitake talks weather, climate and society, ramping up IR and taking investors from a financial return to an emotional one
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Why Brian Thompson’s killing has prompted companies to think about executive safety and corporate purpose
‘Executive security used to be something of a hard sell,’ says Iylia Lavatelli, a former close-protection security provider, now working at operational resilience firm Restrata, talking about budget as well as executive willingness playing their parts in what any security manager can achieve. That, of course, changed with the shooting of Brian Thompson, UnitedHealthcare CEO, in New York last week. The news today is of companies scrambling to organize their security and senior profiles being removed from corporate websites – health insurance firms in particular
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The CFO: Ultimate Products’ finance chief on what he’ll look for when it’s time to hire an IRO
What did you use to keen an eye on that lockdown weight gain? In many markets, the chances are it was a trusted pair of Salter bathroom scales. That’s what Chris Dent has in his home – and what sits in the homes of around 70 percent of Brits. They are just one of the 3,000 or so products designed, manufactured and distributed b London-listed Ultimate Products. In the latest installment to The CFO series, Dent talks about how an education in history helps him tell a good company story, the benefits of being able to bring out company experts…
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The CFO: Gord Nelson of Cineplex on how strategy, growth and transparency can get you into the C-suite
Speaking to Gord Nelson, CFO of Cineplex, you get a real feel for why he’s so good at what he does. For him, a successful finance chief needs much more than technical skills – they need those personal qualities that really connect with investors and bring the company story to life. As we chat, Ellis Jacob, the firm’s CEO, pops in to ask Nelson a question. This is indicative of the close-knit relationship enjoyed by the company’s senior management has – perhaps because they’ve been through ups and downs, listings and market growth, near-buyouts and pandemics together
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The CFO: ‘You invariably learn something about your business’ from investors and analysts, says Hostelworld finance chief
Caroline Sherry talks about entering the travel sector just months before Covid-19, the small-team approach and why everyone should visit Dublin
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How to rebuild investor trust after an earnings miss
Four practical steps for IR teams to restore credibility and reinforce the long-term value of the company’s story
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The worst day of my IR life: Dealing with the fallout from stock option backdating
Ciena’s head of IR Gregg Lampf discusses the crisis that helped form his IR career
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Cyber-security exclusive: Inside the IR response to a major hack
Issue increasingly on the radar of boards – and regulators
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‘Being an IRO gave me a deep appreciation of how important it is to be a steward of value’ – Wave CFO on the transition from IR
From building trust externally to developing internal confidence, Michaella Gallina talks transferrable IR skills
