Thrill seekers: finding the excitement in IR [AUDIO]

You might think a C-suite position is the endgame for IROs, but in fact most see IR as a career in its own right rather than simply a stepping stone to further opportunities, according to IR Magazine research. While that’s a clear indication of how far the profession has come, it doesn’t necessarily mean the 68 percent who view IR as a career in its own right would turn down an offer to be CFO – or that they don’t already have that coveted seat at the table.

What it does mean is that often, when IROs want to move to a new role, they look for another IR position – and often that new role will be one that offers exciting new possibilities. We spoke to three IROs to find out how they found their new positions, what pushed them to switch – and how those new challenges are panning out.

Downsizing

‘Many of us are either at a one-person or two-person shop doing IR,’ says Peter Schuman, senior director of IR at microcontroller manufacturer Atmel, who left a small-cap company to move to mega-cap Intel before downsizing again six years ago. ‘[Intel] was a chance to learn what I didn’t know,’ he adds.

During Schuman’s time at the tech behemoth, Intel had an IR team of between six and eight IROs. ‘I was able to learn a tremendous amount in terms of best practices from a huge company,’ he notes. ‘You get really in-depth and there’s both good and bad about that; you are a mile deep and an inch wide.’ One example of this is the annual report, he explains, where at Intel a team of 10 worked on producing it.

But Schuman warns that you can get siloed in such a role. ‘When I was at Intel I didn’t have any sell-side account responsibility,’ he explains. ‘I had some buy side, I had retail, web and the annual report, but I wanted to run my own department. The most exciting thing is building something from nothing. That could be in the form of an IPO or a company where something’s broken and needs to be fixed.’

Of course, Schuman recognizes that it can’t be all go all the time. ‘There are points in anyone’s career where you have the status quo, things are running well and you just want to keep the machine working and moving forward – but sometimes the craziest situations are the most fun from an IR point of view,’ he says.

So after three years with Intel, Schuman took on the head of IR position at mid-cap Atmel, which he says certainly provided the challenge he was looking for. ‘I was at Intel on a Thursday and I started at Atmel on the Friday,’ he recalls. ‘There was just so much to do: I revamped the website at least a couple of times, built relationships with the sell side – we went from about 10 analysts to a total of 20 – and repaired relationships with the buy side.’

Six years later and the fun still isn’t over. When IR Magazine last spoke to Schuman in March, Atmel was in the process of being acquired – via a hostile takeover – by Arizona-headquartered Microchip Technology, offering yet another new IR experience. ‘I’ve acquired companies before but never been on the acquired side so it’s very different,’ Schuman says. ‘You have a completely different set of investors with much shorter horizons – and a very different set of challenges.’

If he were to move on following the acquisition, Schuman says he might try a new sector following a spate of M&As in the past year – from Avago Technologies’ agreement to acquire Broadcom in May 2015 to ON Semiconductor’s $2.4 bn November agreement to buy Fairchild Semiconductor, ‘which was one of the oldest semiconductor companies,’ he notes. ‘Huge companies are being acquired. These are billion-dollar deals that are being struck, which leaves fewer opportunities in the industry.’

When asked how he found his position at Atmel, Schuman explains that LinkedIn has played its part over the years – ‘and this was back in the early days of LinkedIn’ – so when a recruiter contacted him at the right time, he was open to talking.

Regulation IR

Schuman works in Silicon Valley, where ‘there are all sorts of industries and all sorts of opportunities.’ But sometimes location is a limiter instead, explains regular IR Magazine Award winner Janet Craig, who left Loblaw Companies in June 2015 and joined Fortis in October the same year.

‘The blessing and the curse of a senior IR role – at least in Canada and I would assume in a lot of geographies – is that there just aren’t that many jobs,’ she says. This means if a job does come up, many of the same people are called, as there aren’t that many senior IR people, either. ‘Even after I left Loblaw, based on the breadth, depth and scope of the type of role I was looking for, there were probably only 20-25 jobs in Canada that could offer that,’ explains Craig. ‘This really tightens your focus.’

While Craig is now at a regulated utilities firm, she has a reputation for heading up IR in companies looking for change. ‘In the past I have enjoyed a challenge in terms of companies that are going through a transformation or things that they really need to deal with,’ she says. ‘So it’s true that [change] is something I have looked for and been able to implement. But also, based on my background, the things I’ve done and the experiences I’ve had, the type of company typically looking to hire me is looking for change.’

And she isn’t exaggerating when she says she has enjoyed a challenge. From telephone maker Nortel filing for bankruptcy in 2009 to the $15.1 bn takeover of oil and gas company Nexen by the Chinese state-owned CNOOC in 2013, Craig certainly has a few stories to tell. ‘When you have the prime minister going on national television to tell the country whether or not he’s approving a transaction you’re involved in, that’s always going to be a big deal,’ she says, adding: ‘Some of the most challenging situations are the ones I can’t talk about!’

Craig points to a period of about two years – between her roles at Nortel and Nexen – when she worked as a consultant, ‘so didn’t have a top IR job’. From a career perspective that was one of the most challenging times, she explains. ‘You’re keeping busy, you’re making money but you don’t know what the next step will be, when it’s going to come or what it’s going to look like,’ she says (see Finding your challenge, below).

So does Fortis represent a calming in Craig’s IR career? ‘Regulated utilities are by definition steady: steady earnings, steady dividend growth and very defensive stocks,’ she says. ‘But Fortis is a company with an incredible track record: it’s one of the biggest companies in Canada with C$29 bn ($23 bn) in assets and a really smart management team that knows what it’s driving at.

‘What attracted me was that the company itself was strong and had a great plan but also that it was really looking to increase its IR outreach.’

Ready to Rolls

Interestingly, John Dawson, head of investor relations at Rolls-Royce, did the opposite to Craig and moved from regulated, steady National grid to a much faster-paced company. But Dawson explains that when he initially joined National grid the company represented its own challenge: its reputation needed rebuilding after a rights issue in 2010, a major update had to be made to communications related to new regulatory price controls, and National grid needed ‘a complete change to the way it reported the business.’

Having largely made the material changes necessary – with impacts that would last for some time – Dawson decided it was time to move on. And then he was asked to consider the move to Rolls-Royce. ‘When I looked into it in more detail I recognized the opportunity and the challenges the business was having at the time in terms of reputation in the market, the opacity of performance, the change that was going on both with management members and in terms of the development of the business, and I thought it would be a really good challenge,’ he says.

Dawson admits that it turned out to be a bigger task than he had anticipated. ‘On the first day I joined Rolls-Royce I was given a blank sheet of paper and told to write a press statement that would deal with a profit warning for 2016,’ he says.

Despite the difficulties of having so much to tackle so quickly, Dawson says the most important thing to do when you join any new company is to build internal relationships. ‘The first 100 days and the impact you have in the business are very important,’ he notes. ‘The relationships you build with key management, particularly the CFO and CEO but also the divisional heads and their finance teams, is absolutely key. Even when you’re plunged in at the deep end, making sure you give time and effort to developing those relationships is critical.’

The pace of change might be different at Rolls-Royce but, like Craig, Dawson says the fundamentals of good IR remain the same. ‘Whether you’re doing IR in a steady situation, where everything is nice and simple, or in a challenging situation where people have lost their confidence, the core ingredients are the same: you have to communicate effectively and spend a bit of time understanding what it is that’s causing problems in people’s understanding and work out what you can do to fix that,’ he says.

And what advice does Dawson offer other IR professionals looking for a bit more excitement in the workplace? ‘In reality I think good IROs like a challenge,’ he says. ‘But if I was being flippant I’d say, Be careful what you wish for!’
 

This article appeared in the Summer 2016 issue of IR Magazine