What does it take to run investor relations for one of the most recognized brands in America — a company that's been public for nearly 150 years, serves tens of millions of customers, and is under constant scrutiny from investors, regulators, and the public alike?
Today's guest, Brett Feldman, has the answer. As Senior Vice President — Investor Relations and Treasurer at AT&T, Brett oversees IR for a company with a market cap north of $175 billion and a retail investor base that makes up roughly a third of its shareholders — many of whom are also AT&T customers.
Brett brings a perspective that's genuinely rare in IR: he started his career in IR, spent 20 years as a sell-side equity analyst, and returned to the corporate side. That full-circle experience shapes how he thinks about everything from analyst relationships to internal communications to the fundamental purpose of an investor relations function.
In this conversation, Brett and Mark Fasken go deep on what it really means to align perception and reality — and why getting that wrong has a measurable cost to your company's shareholders.
Listen to the full episode to learn more about:
Mark Fasken: So Brett, telecom is one of the most closely watched sectors in the market. Massive scale, long investment cycles, a lot of public scrutiny. What makes investor relations unique in this environment?
Brett Feldman: It's a good question and I'll step back and I'll take it at a higher level before I actually drill down in telecom, which is, everyone's sector is unique and everyone's company is unique.
And I think that one of the things that you can get tripped up on is you become so accustomed to marinating in your sector and marinating in your company, you begin to speak a language as kind of unique to this small cohort that you exist in every day, and you forget that your investor audience is very broad.
Meaning, you're not just talking to the analysts that cover your sector who are pretty fluent in that language. Or even to the investors who may have a broader mandate but are pretty familiar with it. Anyone who invests money is someone that should be thinking about making an investment in your company.
You know, at AT&T, we have a lot of acronyms. Our company name is an acronym, and when I got here, they said, you know, Brett, we have a lot of TLAs and FLAs. I was like, what's that? They said, that's three letter acronyms and four letter acronyms. And so you always have to take a step back when you're doing your messaging and you just have to read it with a broader lens and say, is this in English?
If I were to go and just show this to somebody who doesn't live in our world, would they understand that? Am I even just using shorthand, like I'm using full words, but I'm using them in a way that only someone in my category would string those words together and understand what you're referring to?
And it actually forces you when you look at your messaging that way to really stress test the quality of what you're saying. Because if you have a hard time converting it from industry speak or company speak into just plain English, there's a hole somewhere in what you're trying to say. You are using some of your terminology and acronyms as a crutch to try to get past something that maybe doesn't hold muster.
So that's the high level.
Brett Feldman: Now if I go to AT&T you're right. I mean, we're one of the most well-known consumer brands. Our company has been around for nearly 150 years, and we have a very large base of retail investors, many individual human beings who actually own our stock. About a third of our shares we estimate, are held by retail investors.
The large companies on average might only be about 20%. And we spent a lot of time trying to understand these investors, and it turns out many of them are our customers.
Brett Feldman: And so, when we think about how we're speaking to our investors, we have to remind ourselves we're also speaking to our customers, which means that the way we speak to our customers and the way that we speak to our shareholders should sound the same.
And maybe for a company like AT&T that's actually easy. We sell something that everybody buys. Everyone has a cell phone. Everyone has an internet connection. And so these are parts of everyday language in our lives. And so if we find that we are speaking to a constituency in a highly tailored way, that's a red flag that we're not speaking in a common voice because, uh, there should never be a situation where our very large retail investor base that is a meaningful portion of our customer base feels like they hear two different things coming out of AT&T. It's the fact that they understand what we are that made them not only become our customer, but made them become our shareholders.
So that's probably a little unique to us. And then of course, we're in a very regulated industry.
We always have to ask ourselves, are we making sure that the voice we're using to speak to the investment community is aligned with the voice that we're using to speak with our regulators.
We have a massive team who work in Washington dc. We have external affairs people essentially in every state in the country. And it's not a good thing if anyone in the public sector thinks that the way AT&T speaks to one audience is not the way they're speaking to others, including our unionized employees.
So we do have to think about that a lot, and it's not just in our IR messaging. If you were to sit down with our core comms team, you know, they like to say, "Hey, if we're putting out materials for our investor messaging, does it look like the materials that we're using when we communicate externally to other channels?"
And so I do think if you're at a very large corporation, particularly one that has a large footprint, in the community, you wanna make sure that you come across as a single organization.
And going back to my first point. If you find that you have difficulty stitching together all those narratives, there's a hole in your narrative. That's your red flag, and you have to go back and ask, why am I finding that it's difficult to talk to investors in the same voice that I used to speak to another stakeholder that we care a lot about.
Mark Fasken: Right. No, I think that you nailed it. I'm glad that you took that high level view because, we hear from a lot of IROs through the course of this podcast and through the course of just being a part of Irwin, across every different sector. And to your point, everybody thinks they're unique and in some way, I guess they are, right? Every industry is different. We talk to companies and mining companies in healthcare, and I think the point that you made of like, you have to have that technical aspect. Of course you have to have a deep understanding of your industry, but you need to be able to explain that to somebody in plain English is so important and a big part of being a really effective investor relations team.
You also talked about consistency and clarity. You know, there's a lot of announcements and a lot of news coming out of a company the size of AT&T. Um, you know, you've got strategic updates, you've got earnings, you've got, you know, guidance, and all of those things influence sort of the investor's perception of the company. And you talked even about community and all the different stakeholders that are involved.
So how do you think about managing consistency and clarity in that sort of spotlight where you have so many different stakeholders that you're interacting with?
Brett Feldman: I think you always have to remind yourself that you're a storyteller in this job.
I'm gonna go back to a similar point I made with the first question you asked, which is to someone who lives and marinates in this all the time. You're always immersed in the story. You're always aware of when there's something new, or there's a change in the story, but the broader audience that you're speaking to, isn't right?
You know, when you tune into a TV show and they give you the recap. It's like, where are we left off? You always wanna make sure that you're bringing your listeners, which is the investment community in our state, along and reminding them, these are things we've been saying, these are proof points that are aligned with things that we've been saying. Here is something new.
It should never be ambiguous when you are reinforcing a point versus sharing an incremental point, because they may not have listened that last time. You know, they'll say, oh, well, didn't we already say that that one time at that conference? I'll say, great, but half those people were looking at their phone.
A meaningful portion of our audience wasn't in that room. They may not have read the report that the analyst wrote, or the story that the journalist wrote about that one comment that we made that one time. So the next five times we say it, it's gonna be new to somebody. But you also want them to know this isn't actually new. I understand you didn't hear it.
So you're always looking at your story arc and you're asking yourself, am I being clear about what I'm saying that's a repetition and I'm being clear about what I'm saying that's new. And then make sure when you say something new, you explain why.
Why does this matter? Why am I giving you this new insight that I may not have given you before? Because if you are speaking to an investor, you know, you do an earnings call, you set up a bunch of follow up calls with analysts and investors. And if you're in those conversations and you realize that that audience, these are people who generally pay attention to your company, didn't quite catch what was new and what was old, you screwed up.
One of the tests that we use to say, well, how did our messaging land? Is that if the questions that you're getting are all points of clarification, trying to understand what you really said, trying to be clear whether it was new or wasn't new. You didn't do it right.
You never got a chance to have a follow on conversation that really helped people get a deeper sense of what you were conveying in that communication. So for us it's always about understanding what's on the storyboard, and being clear about what's new and what's repetitive.
Mark Fasken: That's great. And I mean, we've had some other podcast guests who talk about that of trying to. Not that you're saying the message needs to be simple. It needs to be clear, it needs to be repeated, but you know, there's a lot of information to digest. And I think that importance of sort of repeating yourself and making sure that people really clearly understand what's new
is, a great point.
Brett Feldman: And I'll give you a quick follow up on that. Here's one of the things,
yeah.
When I was an analyst, I was an analyst for 20 years when I know we're gonna talk about that for a little bit, and you write a lot of short notes to clients after things happen. And if somewhere at the very front end of that note, you start off a sentence by saying, while something happened, blah, blah, blah. I was like, you're assuming by using that word while that someone understands where you are in this narrative. Right. You don't assume that, you know, don't ever jump into the middle of a conversation and say, "well, while this wasn't quite what I expected." Did you ever tell them what you expected?
Remind them what you expected. And so it's the same thing when we're writing our scripts. You know that word while shows up to me as a red flag that says, have you actually caught someone up?
Mark Fasken: I like that analogy that you use of the previous episode summary, right?
If you remember in our previous conversation we said this, this is what I wanna talk to you about this time is, is great. It's an easy way to think about it. So you we're talking about the importance of consistency and clarity, everything.
Mark Fasken: You've also talked about the importance of ensuring that the market's understanding and perception of the company matches the internal reality. I think that alignment is extremely important.
And so what does that look like in practice? How do you help leadership stay connected to how the street sees the business and ensure that you don't get this massive disconnect between perception and reality.
Brett Feldman: I explain this to people all the time. I said that's the only responsibility of an investor relations function. Because there is no requirement that a public company have an investor relations function. You're required to make timely filings with the SEC on certain forms, and if you complete them accurately on time, you've completed your public disclosure requirements, and so you have this discretionary expenditure.
People don't like it when I say that in front of CFOs they're like, you mean I can stop spending money on this?
Mark Fasken: I've never heard anybody, I've never heard anybody say that. I love it.
Brett Feldman: Yeah. Well, because that was like, don't tell people that. Don't tell 'em they don't need to do this.
Mark Fasken: I'm not an IRO, so I love it, but I can see how some people might not.
Brett Feldman: You do it. You do it to maintain that alignment of perception and reality. And the reason, the financial reason when my CFO asked me, hold on a second. Why am I paying you anything? Is that if the market frequently discovers that it misunderstands the reality of what a company is, that is gonna get reflected in volatility.
And for those of us who remember business school and you calculate the weighted average cost of capital, there's this Greek letter called beta, which is relative volatility. And the more volatile your equity is on this framework, the more you're raising the cost of your capital. Well, companies earn an economic return by generating a return on invested capital that's greater on their cost of capital. And the larger that gap is, the more return you're getting.
Well, if you are artificially inflating your cost of capital by being bad at explaining what you are, there's a lot of things that can do it. But that's one of them. And you start to create more volatility in your equity. You are just diminishing the return you can generate for your shareholders.
So an investor relations function says, if I can maintain that for better or for worse, keep those as tight as possible so the market says, when I look at this company, I see what I think I'm seeing and now we can price it and feel confident. And if people don't, not only is your stock gonna be volatile, liquidity's gonna leave your market.
People are gonna say, I don't care about this company. There's 3000 companies in a Russell 3000. I can go look at the other 2,999 of them. I don't have to waste my time on it. Right. So, so that's why you're doing it. So when most people think about investor relations, and I like the way you phrased the question, but when they think about it, they think about what I call external investor relations.
The conference calls, the conferences, talking to the sell side, talking to the buy side, doing all those things, helping to make sure that everyone outside of your company is given an opportunity to understand it. But if the people inside of the company, everyone, particularly at the board level, particularly at the senior leadership level, but really at any level, don't understand how the public investor community processes and understands what you are. If you don't understand that, you're never going to be good at explaining what you are. And, you may be very bad at making decisions that you think are aligned with driving shareholder value.
So I spend as much of my time doing internal investor relations, and that takes a lot of forms. I write memos to the board, about once a quarter, saying, here's sort of a little take on sentiment right now. You know, our stock has been up, it has been down. What's driving that? How does that align with what we're hearing from analysts and investors and what we've seen from our peers. These are not long. But we're giving them a touch point, right?
I actually do a weekly internal email almost every week that goes to the senior leaders of AT&T. And, it goes a little bit deeper and it says, okay, what's going on? What are analysts saying about us? We were at a conference, what kind of questions were we getting? And I have to remember, these are operators who are reading these, these aren't investors.
I always say, what does this mean? Why does it care? Why, why did our stock go down or up after announcing that? How does that relate to what you are doing? How does that tie into a public commitment that we made?
And so, you're always allowing them to assess, whether the way that we are running this company, a public company, is aligned with an understanding of how the public market thinks about an investment in our business.
We even do videos. We're a very large company. We have, you know, over 130,000 employees. I'll do a quarterly video where I'll explain this and it, and it goes back to, am I doing this in English? I don't expect that a majority of AT&T employees know what adjusted EBITDA is, right? But I can say that profitability matters and here's why.
And so we do all that to try to keep people aligned. And the feedback is great because what you find is that people feel like this public company concept is so mysterious and it's not. They've just never really had an opportunity to have someone explain to them how their day job factors into it.
And a lot of employees here own stock, like a lot of public companies. And to be able to help people see an alignment between what they do and how that's reflected in the share price, it ultimately just creates that ability to make sure that perception and reality is aligned across the board.
Mark Fasken: Yeah. And it's kind of crazy when you, I was just looking here at AT&T's market cap, and I think, looking at current numbers today, it's like 176 billion roughly.
And so you talk about the disconnect in external perception versus internal reality. Like even single percentage points or fractions of a percentage point can mean massive numbers from a company value perspective. And I don't know that a lot of, of, I'm sure a lot of IROs think about it in terms of like, I don't want the stock price going up and down.
I don't know that everybody connects it to the disconnect between reality and what investors think is gonna be announced on the next quarterly earnings call. And that
Brett Feldman: Yeah.
Mark Fasken: Sort of leads to the next question, which is, the connection between stock price and iR efforts and like, how do you measure the impact that you're having?
Because we speak to so many IROs, and I think there's always a conversation within sort of NIRI forums and whatnot about like, how do you prove the value of investor relations, right? Is it people, is it number of meetings? Is it people invested from a recent roadshow that I went on?
How do you think about the value of IR at AT&T and measuring the impact of the efforts that you're going through every single day?
Brett Feldman: So the worst measure is stock price. I preach that a lot, because it's everyone's responsibility to create shareholder value. Right.
If that's not the case, then IROs at companies that are seeing share price appreciation are the most underpaid people in corporate America. So we all have to be aligned with that.
Now, the ultimate measure that I like to use, which is a soft measure, I think is the most important, but it relates to what we were just talking about. Which is anytime we provide new insight to the market, an earnings report, a presentation at a conference, announcement of an acquisition, something that is new and material, and you would expect that there's going to be some response to it. If that response to it is meaningfully different than what we had anticipated, I screwed up, right, because I did not help the leadership appropriately understand the way the public investment community would digest this.
So. You know, we talk about these red flags, like the word while at the beginning of a, of a press release. Well, here's another great one. You are on your earnings call and you get into the Q&A and everyone says not to beat a horse here. Right? It means they're going back to something. It means you didn't explain something to me that's important, and you should have done it as part of your prepared materials. You then got a question or two on it, and you still didn't give me the insight I needed. So now I'm sitting here as the third person in the queue asking a question about this. Right?
So a Q&A session after an earnings call or a merger that is everyone trying to make sense of what you theoretically said or should have said. You're not doing it right. You don't need a scorecard for that. The response, uh, in, in the analyst community, what do they write about? Were they writing about the things that you consider to be the most important aspects or better for worse of what you wrote?
You know, we'll go ahead and we'll say before earnings, like, this is what we're gonna report. We think we're gonna see positive responses to this, but there might be a negative response on this. You get a pretty quick report card on that. Were you right or are you wrong? And I mean, ultimately I think you can measure your your job performance in this role is do you find that the CEO and see of your com company have a lot of confidence that when you are prepping them and giving them feedback, that you are a trusted advisor on what's going on? Not whether the stock went up or down, but you're a trusted advisor on all that.
Now, do we look at how many meetings we have with targeted investors? Yes. We track all of that, right? I mean, there, there's a common set of tools that I'm sure every IR department uses to some degree. We absolutely want to show that we have targeted investors, that we are trying to get meetings with them.
That's, I think, a normal practice, but ultimately it's, do you find that there's a consistency of how the market is responding versus what you expected? That's the ultimate test.
Mark Fasken: And you talked about earlier, that you spent some time on the sell side, two decades before you joined AT&T.
And I have to imagine that that had a pretty big impact on sort of your view of what good IR looks like having interacted with a bunch of IROs from, from the other side of the table. And so how, how has that experience shaped your perspective on what IR should look like and how you interact with analysts at AT&T.
Brett Feldman: Yeah, that's a fair question. You know, I actually did IR early in my career as well, very early in my career. My first job was actually at AT&T, never would've imagined that.
Mark Fasken: No way. Really. Oh, wow. That's a good Easter egg for the, for the episode. Right.
Brett Feldman: There was a 24 year gap between the first time and the second time I worked here, but I was in the AT&T investor relations department very early in my career, and I actually was the head of IR for a telecom bubble company for the brief period that that company existed.
I'm sort of an odd duck that I actually went from IR to sell side and then back. But my point is, if you look at the community of people who do investor relations, and I'm gonna oversimplify, most people kind of fall into one of three buckets. They're either the in-house rising star.
You know, someone that really understands the company, maybe is on the short list of people to be a CFO or something like that down the road, and they wanna get them engaged with the investment community. They have a lot of trust as senior leadership.
You then have someone who came out of the investment community, most commonly formerly a sell sider who covered the company, but it could be a buy sider.
And then you tend to have the investor relations, career professionals who have moved from company to company, and they just developed a real strength in doing that. And they bring different perspectives to it. The thing you bring as someone who came from my background from the outside is you can speak with real authority and credibility about how you expect the investment community to process, what a company's gonna say. And to be able to have that confidence to be able to tell your CEO or CFO something that maybe they weren't expecting to hear or don't want to hear, but to be able to kind of stand your ground and say, no, I've seen this movie a lot and, we absolutely should or shouldn't and here's why. I think that that's can be very hard for the homegrown all star.
I'm not saying it doesn't mean that person shouldn't go into the job. They have to understand that that's the, the weakness that they have to work on. Because in the worst case scenario, what I found as a sell side analyst is that those people, instead of being a conduit, ensuring this alignment of perception and reality between the company and the investment community, they actually act as if they're a bodyguard protecting the senior leadership from the street.
And that becomes a real problem. And now you're gonna have a company and a board that are going to not get accurate feedback about how the investment community is responding to them. These are public companies, and if they're not a controlled company, there's no controlling shareholder, which in most cases they're not.
That can introduce activists, that can, you know, the shareholder community can become very aggravated. And that can matter a lot and they're not getting the feedback they want.
And so as you step into that role, you have to sort of know, part of my growth is that I'm gonna really try to understand the feedback loop and to know when I have to stand firm, and probably work a little harder to get that feedback and to build those relationships.
Whereas someone who comes in from the outside, like me, the biggest thing that we have to learn is bedside manner. Which is, you know, you spend, and when you're out in the investor community, particularly as an analyst, you just argue with people for a living. In fact, you make a habit of constantly telling your clients that you think they're wrong.
Right. And so sometimes you lose the filter and you know, when you come into a company like this, you have to understand there's a chain of command. There's corporate politics, and there has to be collaboration and you can't just decide that you're right and, you know, cross your arms and, you know, puff out your chest and just be like, I don't understand why people aren't listening to me.
So the skill you have to develop is asking questions. And I learned that early on where I was making an argument with our CFO about something I thought we should or shouldn't be disclosing. I don't remember what it was. And he wasn't agreeing with me. And I'm thinking to myself, I am making very good points. This is what he hired me for. I don't understand.
And then, I'll give him credit. He said, Brett, let me tell you something that you don't know. Then I said, okay, well based on that, absolutely your recommendation is the right way to go.
And it was a reminder that I'm just not trying to win an argument like I did for the last 20 years. I actually have to be a little, I have to probe a little bit and find out if someone isn't buying into what I'm saying, what is it that they know that I don't? And then that helps you figure out shaping perception and reality.
Mark Fasken: Absolutely. Well, and I think that idea, so, summarizing that, I think that your point on really being that person, being that point of contact who's not only gonna go out and speak to the investment community, really understand them and ask the questions, also ask the questions internally, to get a deep understanding of everybody's perspective.
But it's having really rock solid communication skills and going back to the management team and helping them understand what is the reality, what do people really think? And I think, you know, that's a very important skill. Now we hear from a lot of IROs who say, well, I go and do that, and then my management team doesn't necessarily always listen. And so we try to use perception studies and that's a whole other conversation. But I think that idea of being the truth sayer, or the person who's bringing reality to the conversation is extremely valuable.
Mark Fasken: Continuing on this analyst experience, what do you think most IROs misunderstand about how analysts operate?
You know, what's really driving their behavior and decision making day to day and any advice for IROs on how they can improve their relationships with their analysts.
Brett Feldman: Columbia Business School runs an investor relations executive education seminar a few times a year, and I speak at it and a lot of what I talk about, we've just discussed. It's the role of an investor relations professional, what you're trying to achieve.
But then I have a separate section where I talk about understanding the sell side, right? Because I was a, I was an analyst for 20 years, and as a general rule of thumb, if you're trying to understand a person and why they do what they do, it's always helpful to understand the incentive structure that drives their behavior.
And I think a lot of people, most people who've never been a sell side analyst wouldn't have an ability to truly understand the incentive structure of sell side analysts. And, and there's, I explain this, that there's essentially three pillars of that incentive structure, which are compliance, recognition and corporate relationships. Right, and I think the corporate relationships one, people in the investor relations profession would get, you know, they're always asking for corporate access. I sort of understand that.
Recognition. I can explain a little more about what that means. The compliance piece of it, I think is probably a mystery.
Equity research is a heavily regulated profession. It wasn't always that way. There was a lot of problems that emerged as a result of that with the telecom and tech bubble in the early part of the century. And as a result it became very regulated. There's strict separation between the analyst and the rest of the bank.
If you think that telling that analyst that you're not gonna do a bond deal with them because you didn't like something they wrote, you're screaming at a wall. No one's gonna talk about it. In fact, you can be reported for threatening that analyst and you work at a public issuer. An analyst is always going to be compliant.
Analysts in many cases have ratings distributions that states of the percentage of their ratings that can't be more than this many buys. You have to have this many sells. It influences how they think about where they wanna really emphasize points of view and where they want to take a stand and, and where they don't. They obviously can never share two different points of view with two different audiences or change their view.
And so if you ever wonder, why am I having an awkward conversation? It's because they know that compliance is a landmine that if they step on, that's it. There's no going back. So compliance is always front end of how an analyst is thinking about what they're doing, because there's no wiggle room on compliance.
Recognition. A lot of people were very aware of things like the II or now the Extel survey, but there's a lot of ways that analysts get recognition. They can go on tv, they can have a high profile conference. They could win awards for stock picking. And then the institutional investors at the buy side, they tend to provide fairly formal feedback to all of their brokers. There's these scorecards and typically they're on a quarterly basis. And it reflects how often did I engage with you? Did you help me engage with a corporate? That recognition is highly quantifiable. And so when they're asking for these things, this is what's behind all of that.
And so trying to understand what are the easy ways that I can work with you? That are valuable to you? That for me might have been like, really, I had lunch with you and that was overwhelmingly valuable. I eat lunch every day. Maybe I should be eating lunch with my analyst four days a week.
Because analysts are just out there trying to get people to think that they're important. That's the key to success as a sell side analyst. And so if you can, if you sort of look at this and say, I always need to be respectful that this person has a compliance architecture that is completely rigid, they can't operate outside of that.
I understand how important it's for them to be visible with investors, with corporates. You know, are there easy ways I can let them be visible on that basis? And then, corporate relationships are just so important. Sometimes we think all that matters is you go to the conference, or you do a non-deal roadshow, but there's a lot of ways that you can do things where you participate with analysts and it's great for relationship building. You really understand the questions they're asking, you learn a lot about the types of investors, you care about their franchise. And so, anytime you're talking to an analyst and you wonder what's the disconnect, start asking yourself, is there a compliance issue? You know, am I not helping them?
Am I, am I making them less recognizable than they want to be? That's the kind of stuff you have to have in the back of your mind.
Mark Fasken: That's great. And so I'm going to combine my last two questions because you've made a ton of great points here and this is a good opportunity to summarize them. For IROs outside of telecom, what lessons can they take from you on how your team manages relationships with the buy side? Perception, communication, trust in not only such a high visibility industry, but such a high visibility company.
Brett Feldman: I'm gonna take it back to where I started, which is, in many cases a smaller business is probably smaller because there's something niche about what they're doing. Which means that the universe of people who understand what they are as a, as a company, as a service provider, as a product or something like that, is gonna be small. And once again, in the investment community, it's the same thing. And so if you are trying to cast as wide a net as possible, with the investor community and get them to understand you, try to speak in plain English.
But here's the other thing, and this is something that I really discovered when I was working on IPOs. You know, as a sell side analyst, you have to help vet these deals and ultimately explain through a teach-in to the sales force what a business does.
And you meet these companies and they're very successful private companies, and that's why they're on the precipice of going public. And you ask them and you say, tell me about your business. What do you like? And they say, we're sort of like a hybrid of like Meta and Google and Amazon, right? I'm like, no, that's not gonna work.
I need to know that you are a very specific thing and I need to understand why you're very good at that very specific thing. That's what gets investors excited. That's what gets them to be a premium. Right. Don't tell me you're a hybrid. Hybrid's trade at a discount. Right. You're muddling your story.
I mean, so ultimately companies have to understand what makes us special. And it's not because we are a salad of all these different things, and no one else has that salad. I'm the best cherry tomato you're ever gonna put in a salad. Let me tell you exactly why. And if you really simplify it, it makes it so easy for investors.
You know, people always say, yeah, you gotta go have a pitch. You gotta have three or four things that are great. They're only gonna remember one. Right. And so, ask yourself why, why have we over complicated what we're saying to make ourselves look cool? And let's just try to figure out the single thing that makes us special and then tell that story.
And I'm gonna add one thing you didn't quite ask, which is that if you are a smaller company, and either you just went public or you've just been around for a while. What your, what your CEO and CFO are telling you is, if you aren't already covered by the big banks, go get JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley. I want those top ranked analysts out there telling my story.
Calm down. You want analysts telling your story who are most interested in your company. Right? Go find the mid-tier banks, right? Find their animals. Find someone who's kind of young, who's desperately trying to get recognition and actually thinks you have something special and is gonna knock on everyone's door telling them about your business. Right.
You know, because if you go and you become the 40th company that the tech analyst at Morgan Stanley is covering, you are getting significantly less than one 40th of their attention. So don't get too worked up about the brand. Build relationships with people in the investment community who are as obsessed with your business as you are.
Mark Fasken: It's amazing. I think, the clarity of communication in this episode alone is a testament to your communication skills, Brett, and really appreciate you taking the time to walk everybody through this. I think there's gonna be a lot of people that find this all extremely valuable. So thank you again and appreciate everything that you've done and all the prep you've put into this episode.
Brett Feldman: Thanks for having me on. It was a lot of fun.
Winning IR is a podcast exploring the diverse insights within the investor relations community. Join host Mark Fasken as he discusses the winning strategies, tactics, and shifts in thinking with innovative investor relations professionals who are redefining the profession.
Each episode features a different challenge, innovation, or perspective on the ever-evolving role of IR, giving you real, actionable insight you’ll be able to use to build a better investor relations program.
Jack Riehemann, CFA, is the Head of International Investor Relations at Robinhood Markets. At Robinhood, he leads relationships with global institutional investors and research analysts and serves as a key voice between the management team and external stakeholders. Additionally, he leads the quarterly earnings process and other recurring external disclosures.
Craig Marks joined Sandoz in Basel in January 2025. He has 20 years of experience in the investor relations space, including six years at AstraZeneca and four at Ipsen. Craig has won numerous awards, including being named Best IR Officer by the UK IR Society. Before his career in Investor Relations, he spent 10 years as a qualified Corporate Treasurer. Craig lives in Worcestershire, UK, and commutes to Basel most weeks.
Damian was one of the co-founders of Phoenix-IR in 2005. He has been an advisor to North American companies on their European investor relations programs since 1990, when he joined Kuhn Partners in Brussels. He became one of the partners in the firm, which was acquired by Carson in 1999 and subsequently by Thomson Financial in 2000. Throughout his career, he worked with numerous leading North American companies, and as of January 2026, Damian is retired. Congratulations to him on an incredible career in IR.