Organize to maximize your message at the right time
While Tractor Supply Company shifted its investor day calendar away from its routine and its traditional clash with other company announcements, piggybacking on other events can help ensure your target audience is in town.
Christopher Agnew, senior vice president of financial planning and analysis and investor relations at Travel + Leisure Co (T+L), says that was his plan when organizing the company's 2021 investor day – though ultimately the Covid-19 pandemic threw a spanner in the works.
‘I had scheduled the investor day for a Friday morning because there’s a really popular conference on the Thursday and I felt there would be a lot of people in New York,’ he explains.
‘Unfortunately, there was a Covid-19 wave at the time so that conference pivoted to virtual.’ Agnew adds that while the T+L investor day did lose some heads, there was still ‘surprisingly good attendance’.
Your investor day shouldn’t be longer than half a day
Perhaps the reason people still came out is the fact that as a ‘steady, stable business with little change’, T+L might host an investor day once every three or four years. So when it does send out an invitation, the investment community knows the company has something to say. Like Tractor Supply’s Mary Winn Pilkington, Agnew describes himself as ‘a big believer that you’ve got to have a key message.’ For T+L’s investor day, there were multiple messages.
‘We had never introduced our management team and the broader management bench to the investor base,’ Agnew explains. ‘We had also made a couple of acquisitions and a disposal and we really needed to help people understand the strategy around those transactions. At the same time, we were pivoting to accelerate our growth so we wanted to give long-term goals and explain how these deals helped facilitate that plan.’
Agnew’s other key ingredient for success is to be succinct. ‘Your investor day shouldn’t be longer than half a day,’ he suggests. ‘The exception to that would be maybe where you’re bringing people on a site visit.’
The idea of being succinct and not wasting investor time – and of holding an investor day when you have something to say – resonates with David de la Roz Fernandez, director of investor relations at Spanish travel firm eDreams ODIGEO. He explains that while the company averages an investor day once every two years, ‘it is really more about when you have something new to talk about so the market can include it in its projections.’
He adds that, having held an investor day the last couple of Novembers, he does get asked whether there’s another on the cards this year. Is the market disappointed when he says no? Not at all, he says – people don’t want to attend an event they don’t need to. What investors and analysts do want, he says, is to come when there’s something substantial to add to the information they already have.
It’s more about when you have something new to talk about so the market can include it in its projections
