Hello to Alex Jorgensen.
He is partner and head of investor relations at Prosec Partners, a comms and marketing firm that largely specializes in the financial industry.
I got that right.
You did.
Yes, that's right, JD.
Yes, so talk to me first and foremost.
Give our viewers an introduction to your work at Prosec, your key priorities for anyone unfamiliar.
Sure, so at Prosec.
We say that we help companies go public and we help companies stay public and we work a lot, as you said, JD, with the financial services space.
We also work across aerospace and defense, healthcare services, digital assets, fintech, and a whole bunch of others including AI.
And so our work lately has been really widespread.
We've been helping companies navigate a really dynamic macro environment and helping them think about how to reach the most investors to achieve fair valuation.
Those are a lot of dynamic sectors to focus on.
How have investor relations changed even over the course of just the last few years, because a lot of those cool techs and things you just talked about, they've rapidly evolved even in just the last few years.
Absolutely.
I think the way companies, the way IR has evolved is really how the investor base has evolved, right?
So maybe 1015 years ago, most companies were really thinking about the institutional channel and almost solely thinking about the institutional channel.
Today, the investor bases have been democratized.
You're seeing retail investors.
You're seeing companies focus on RIAs, multi-family offices.
All of these investors require.
Consistency.
They want to see the same narrative, the same strategy that companies talk about in their earnings calls, but they might look at it from different altitudes.
So we help companies think about that.
How do you reach a retail investor and how does that look different than maybe reaching an institutional audience?
How has the investor base itself gone global and what are a lot of those big Sort of points of desire that they're coming to with.
What are the things that they really want out of the process?
Investors really want three things.
They want clarity.
They want consistency, and they want accessibility.
And so companies share their strategy.
They need to do so in a clear way.
They need to know what they're going after.
They need to do so consistently.
If companies are just sharing that clear strategy on.
They're missing opportunity.
They need to be out in the market talking to investors, talking in different geographies.
And then I think this is really key.
It's accessibility, right?
Investors, if they can't understand that clear strategy or if everyone in the company is talking about the same thing, but it's not accessible to these various investor audiences, then they're not going to understand why they should buy and why they should buy now.
What do the best IR programs have in common, those common threads that make them separate from the rest of the bunch?
That's a great question.
You know, we were here at the exchange yesterday.
We had an event and I interviewed.
A key sell side analyst who talked about just that, what he said is that the best IR programs, the best management teams do not avoid challenges.
They don't shy away from the headwinds in the market.
Instead they talk about how they're taking them on, how they're going to overcome headwinds, how they're going to overcome challenges, and so it's not about.
Always being the most optimistic.
It's not about always painting the rosiest picture.
It's really talking about the reality of the market today and how you're going to achieve the best results for your customers, your stakeholders, and ultimately your shareholders.
Alex Jorgensen, partner, head of investor relations at Prosec Partners, my manny Crusher, come back onto the show.
