An effective annual meeting is about more than just sharing information with stakeholders. It’s about creating investor confidence. And an event that is planned carefully, executed smoothly, and provides the information attendees need goes a long way toward increasing investor confidence.
Unfortunately, many firms find it challenging to plan and host a good annual meeting. A recent survey about these events produced some interesting results. Specifically:
- 59% of respondents struggle with distributing and tracking meeting invitations
- 41% find it hard to create good annual meeting presentations
- 35% find ensuring accuracy in reporting to be difficult
3 Tips for Executing Annual Meetings That Build Investor Confidence
The good news about the challenges above is that with the right tools and processes, you can turn them into opportunities. Below are three tips to help you strengthen investor confidence and better position your firm to raise capital in the future.
- Use fund management software to help you manage relationships. Creating a list of potential attendees and coordinating the timing of your outreach so that you connect effectively with the right people can be difficult. That’s why so many survey respondents (nearly 60%) indicated this was a pain point. The solution? Implement advanced fund management software. It can simplify the planning and execution of annual meetings in many ways, starting with serving as a centralized repository for attendee information. Imagine the time you can save by having all the information you need in one place rather than scattered throughout the firm in various spreadsheets, databases, etc.
- Leverage an advanced fund management solution to create accurate presentations efficiently. In simplest terms, analysts want an answer to this question: “What have you been up to for the past year?” Trying to piece together a clear and comprehensive answer to that all-important question using spreadsheets, your calendar, and other random tools and data sources can be a nightmare. Not only does this approach make the task more difficult, it greatly increases the risk of errors in your presentation. With the right system in place, you can get clear, concise, accurate information in seconds rather than the hours it used to take you to gather and organize this data. That way, you don’t have to be among the 41% of survey respondents who struggle with creating annual meeting presentations.
- Gather detailed performance data with ease. To prepare for an annual meeting, you’ve got to pull together lots of information about your portfolio companies—who they are, what their operational metrics are, and much more. You must show investors that you’re “on top of your game,” and that requires being able to generate detailed reports that provide this information. Using the right system for this purpose helps keep you out of the 35% of survey respondents who indicate that accurate reporting is a major headache.
Don’t Leave Investor Confidence to Chance
Too often, firms go into annual meetings hoping that attendees get what they need from the session and that the session will have a positive impact on investor confidence. A much better approach is to have the right tools in place to ensure that your meeting goals are achieved.
You worked hard all year to get the kind of results your stakeholders expect. It would be a shame to have them leave your annual meeting feeling like your efforts fell short, when, in fact, your only failing was being unable to clearly demonstrate your successes.
Learn how Altvia solutions help firms enhance investor confidence.
