Strategy & Planning

Like other management disciplines, investor relations takes place on many levels – from strategic planning to tactical execution. At the highest of these levels, SMA believes that every action a company takes, from establishing its IPO identity to managing an earnings shortfall, should be based on a well-conceived, research-based strategy. That’s why we work side-by-side with our clients’ senior management teams as a sounding board for strategic decision-making.

In counseling clients, SMA draws upon the collective experience of its team to develop creative solutions to sometimes difficult problems.

We routinely advise management teams, boards of directors and board committees on matters relating to:

• Anticipating market reaction to corporate initiatives
• Managing Wall Street’s expectations
• Adhering to IR best practices and changing regulations
• Disclosure issues
• IR program planning
• Corporate governance policy and communications
• Managing investor relations crises
• Handling event-driven communications:
  • Mergers and acquisitions 
  • Corporate restructurings 
  • Executive departures and arrivals 
  • Strategic realignments 
  • Earnings surprises 
  • Financial restatements 
  • Equity or debt offerings

SMA starts every engagement with due diligence concerning the client and its peers. The first step in building visibility and credibility is to understand how the client is perceived by its own management team. We take our new clients’ key executives through carefully structured interviews to gain a better understanding of their collective picture of the client organization and its business environment.

It is equally critical to understand how the client’s peers and competitors are approaching their IR challenges. To this end, SMA uses its extensive online research resources and proprietary market intelligence tools to identify an appropriate set of business and financial peers for each client. We then work to understand the operational and financial metrics these comparable companies are using to tell their stories to Wall Street. We use these same research tools to uncover the metrics that are important to the client’s existing institutional shareholders.

We are believers in program evaluation. SMA insists on including feedback mechanisms to measure program performance. During the course of our work on behalf of a client, we gauge actual results against a series of achievement benchmarks established with the client in advance. This ensures that the many components of the program fit together cohesively to accomplish objectives, while at the same time presenting the client's story accurately and consistently.

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