The breadth and diversity of our client base, including large- to micro-cap companies, long-established to pre-IPO and newly public, gives Financial Relations Board extensive exposure to the vast array of challenging and crucial events that shape the life of a public company. Among our most valuable services is our consultative approach to investor relations and corporate communications strategy – senior-level and experienced counsel that provides clarity and recommends action based on comprehensive knowledge of the bottom-line issues.

Our advisory services cover the areas of investor perceptions and expectations, financial reporting, valuation, disclosure and regulatory issues. We provide counsel on corporate governance and proxy solicitation, capital financings, exchange listings, stock splits and repurchases, mergers and acquisitions and crisis communications. We structure aggressive programs around recommendations for addressing equity marketability and enhancing shareholder loyalty.

Financial Relations Board assists clients with the common to the most complex situations, leveraging decades of experience to deliver clear, incisive and timely counsel.

 

Corporate Positioning and Communication
Paramount to every client program is development of the company’s key investment appeals. These value driven messages form the backbone of every form of communications delivered by our clients and Financial Relations Board, whether internal, external, written, verbal, face-to-face, electronic or interactive. Our client positioning reflects the most current views on valuation, forward-looking guidance and messaging strategy to bridge the communications gap between company management and the Street.

Clients’ investment considerations address top-of-mind buy-side issues such as the trade-off between growth and returns, operating and risk profiles, the cost of capital and methods of reinvestment. They also offer forthright analyses of the company’s business model and strategy, competitive factors, growth and expansion prospects and past and future financial performance.

Financial Relations Board produces the full spectrum of investor communications tools and financial materials including news releases, speeches and scripts, management presentations, investment profiles, company fact sheets, shareholder letters, web site content and investor information kits. Our account executives also have broad experience in developing award-winning annual reports wherein they manage the entire process from collaboration and writing, to printing and delivery. Our teams arrange targeted distribution services for client communications including direct mail, broadcast fax and email delivery.

Investment Community Targeting (Market Intelligence)
Distinguishing Financial Relations Board from other investor relations firms is our nationwide team of professionals dedicated exclusively to core audience identification and prospecting for new investor sponsorship. These marketers maintain ongoing, direct personal contact with investment professionals in financial centers throughout North America. Through the Weber Shandwick family, we have access to similar resources in major investment centers throughout the world.

Financial Relations Board’s proprietary Market Intelligence database contains records for more than 55,000 contacts in the professional investment community. Our firm has invested over $25 million throughout our history in building this powerful source for detailed, conclusive market research. Data is updated continuously by our teams in conjunction with their outreach to maintain the most sophisticated, robust tool for investment community relations available in the field.

In addition to continual Wall Street contact, our staff coordinate a host of programs including perception and best practice studies, retail marketing and institutional targeting. Perception and best practice studies determine current investor sentiment about specific issues and recommend actions for building on the favorable htmlects of a given program. Retail marketing programs focus on outreach to pre-qualified brokers, independent money managers and newsletter writers with large private investor subscribers.

Financial Relations Board’s institutional targeting program employs a quantitative approach to investment peer analysis. Our methodology involves a statistical analysis to identify those stocks that are most likely to be held in a portfolio along with our client’s securities. By identifying the institutions that own those peers, we develop an equity target market. Our communications strategists then tailor your investment messages into subsets of messages targeted to specific investment styles (such as value, earnings, dividend, theme and economic) that will attract the interest of the targeted institutions. Institutional targeting is a powerful means of further diversifying investor audience beyond simple industry groups with sector or market capitalization characteristics.

At Financial Relations Board, we arrange thousands of investor meetings annually including one-to-one meetings with management, group meetings, virtual investor meetings over the Internet, conference calls, analyst days and industry and financial conference presentations. Our clients enjoy Financial Relations Board’s strong track record of generating research coverage, improving ownership statistics and producing investment correlations through our aggressive Wall Street marketing programs.

Financial Media Relations
The power of the media to influence institutional and individual investors alike is well documented. For example, about one out of every two retail brokers surveyed by Financial Relations Board said that the information they read in the media influenced them and their clients when making investment decisions. By raising public awareness of a company as an investment idea, a strong, positive story in the financial press can have a favorable and immediate impact on a company’s stock price and trading volume. Attracting media attention and generating broad coverage of our clients in the financial, business, trade and public media, both print and electronic press, is a fundamental component of a successful investor relations program. Our goal is to achieve credible third-party support for our clients’ investor and public relations outreach.

Financial Relations Board staffs a team of experts focused exclusively on media placement intended to maximize exposure for our client’s company business, executives, corporate news and performance results. Our media relations specialists leverage well-established relationships with national, regional and local editors and reporters around the country for feature profile article development. Our media programs target the major financial wire services, national financial newspapers and magazines, investment publications and Internet portals, major broadcast media, metropolitan and regional news sources and controlled distribution news sources. For groundbreaking stories, we can arrange a satellite media tour, a series of one-on-one interviews with television reporters and anchors throughout major U.S. cities, covering up to five major markets in the course of just a few hours. Clients new to media interaction can benefit from Financial Relations Board’s comprehensive media interview training for company executives and spokespersons.

Shareholder Management Services
Financial Relations Board’s specialty Shareholder Management Services provide all the tools required for effective management of the important issues related to public ownership. We offer a customizable menu of resources that addresses the key areas of stock activity surveillance, current shareholder identification, corporate governance consulting and proxy solicitation, solutions that link a company’s ownership and trading data to the realities of their Investor Relations messages, activities and strategic plans.

Stock activity surveillance is a dynamic shareholder base management tool. With knowledge of share ownership on a real time basis, Financial Relations Board can learn which institutions are responsible for major trading activity, monitor investors’ buying and selling trends, track the impact of specific news or events, and identify and react to vulnerable positions subject to sell-off. As an alternative to continuous stock surveillance, we can identify institutional ownership at any point in time, bypassing the three-month 13f filing information delay.

Shareholder Management Services help clients apply sound corporate governance principles for maximum benefit by offering recommendations for dealings with activist investors and solutions for shareholder-friendly yet effective anti-takeover protection. We also can bring our extensive experience in the preparation and conduct of proxy solicitations to the planning process for annual meetings or special meetings of shareholders. By combining our knowledge of our client’s ownership base with a review of the proxy agenda, Financial Relations Board is well equipped to determine support or opposition for the vote, recommend appropriate communications strategies and implement the requisite level of proactive proxy solicitation.

Financial Relations Board’s Shareholder Management Services maintains strategic relationships with the industry’s leading organizations including Ilios Partners, Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), The Investor Responsibility Research Center (IRRC) and ADP Investor Communication Services – alliances that add maximum support to your investor relations initiatives.

Strategy Consulting Group
Financial Relations Board’s Strategy Consulting Group is made up of seasoned experts in various fields of financial practice such as equity research, portfolio management, corporate valuation and management strategy. Their sole mission is to assist management teams communicate the means by which their companies will create value, turning cash resources into income producing assets.

Our Strategy Consulting Group is fluent in the language of cash flow, economic margin, value, EVA™, return on invested capital, Cash Flow Return on Investment™, and more. By understanding how corporations create – and sometimes erode – value, we are able to guide clients through this often difficult messaging and reporting process.

Working with the Financial Relations Board account team and the client’s management team, Strategy Consulting Group advisory maximizes your chances to become the investment choice of the world’s leading active portfolio managers. With your improved visibility comes the opportunity to receive the maximum market price for your company’s value-creation capabilities and potential.

Valuation Analysis

The ultimate test of corporate strategy, the only time-tested measure, is whether it creates economic value for shareholders. In determining equity valuation the shortcomings of GAAP accounting are well documented. Today’s professional investors have access to analytical tools that fully expose company’s history in creating value. This is done by converting income statements into true cash flows; and transforming balance sheets into the total invested capital base. Portfolio managers can then quickly judge management’s ability to generate returns above the cost of capital over a period of time.

Using the latest analytical tools we measure the correlation between a client's corporate performance and their share price. Specifically, our analysis can help determine whether or not a company is fairly valued; how a company is measured according to buy-side standards; and the economic margin and sales growth expectations that explain a company’s current stock price. If a stock is undervalued, we develop investment messages that address the drivers of shareholder value. If the stock appears overvalued, we help companies understand the future expectations that investors have set for key metrics of revenue growth, margins and asset turns.

As part of an integrated investor relations offering Financial Relations Board is uniquely equipped to help your company achieve a full, fair and sustainable valuation using state-of-the-practice financial valuation framework.