Looking back at my many years of work in IR, I have been lucky to lead three- or four-person IR teams but have also led teams of two. What I have observed is that the work required for IR often doesn't scale down just because the market cap of your company is smaller. In fact, in many cases targeting is more work and investors can be more dispersed for smaller caps. On top of that, a smaller listed company is subject to the same obligations as larger companies, yet possibly has less legal and finance support and fewer staff members to address these responsibilities, likely with a smaller budget. 

This poses interesting questions about where to allocate resources – whether they are financial or people – to maximum benefit.

In thinking about the most impactful items that demand resources and where IR has some control over how these are delivered and the message heard by investors, a few items stand out to me: reports and events.  

In a world where news is 24/7 and mostly consumed via mobile and social media, where quarterly reporting is extensive, where printed reports are no longer the norm and where ESG is more important to investors, there are real questions as to what documents are best suited to purpose for communicating with investors. The reality is that many investors are consuming information in ‘chunks’, gathering data from a number of places. I recently spoke to an investor whose ESG research on the company involved a lot of ‘Ctrl-F’ to simply jump through our documents to relevant paragraphs.

Publishing a comprehensive annual report or annual ESG report is often one of the line items that consume a substantial amount of the budget. Producing these reports is a time-consuming project management exercise that has likely reduced many IROs to tears over the years and diverted time and attention from the ‘messaging’ in favour of project management.  

Certainly lining up teams from around the business and getting everyone to agree on strategy and messaging can be invaluable both from an internal as well as external point of view. Still, IROs with more limited teams should definitely consider whether this is the right vehicle to best communicate with investors or whether a well-thought-out and executed factsheet or investor presentation and a section on strategy on the website, complemented by the AIF and financial reporting, may serve the purpose just as well. 

If you have done an Investor Day, you will likely know already this item will lead to significant year-on-year variances in the IR budget. Few companies hold an Investor Day event every year because of the effort required. The skills involved in project managing this kind of event and producing two to three hours of content, with multimedia elements and slides to be presented by multiple executives, mean that it is rarely an effort that IR can undertake solo.

If these items are indeed priorities for the company, consider where the following approaches might be best:

• Partner for them – enlist internal events/communications/legal resources to help with project management if such resources exist elsewhere in the company;
• Hire for them – if these will continue to be items the company wants to prioritize and you can’t partner, ensure you consider this in staffing your team to add some relevant in-house experience; or    
• Contract for them – a good use of budget can be bringing in contractors to support these big projects, adding critical expertise.

While these types of events and reports can really help shape the company’s positioning with the market, make sure you think carefully about how you resource them. Doing so will allow your team to stay focused on the real value-add, shaping strategy and analysis to support the outcomes and inform your ongoing reporting, rather than getting stuck in project management.  

Karen Keyes is Head of Investor Relations at Canadian Tire Corporation Limited.