Advocate or Adversary, choice is always yours!

Investor relations, shareholder relations, public relations etc... all are commonly referred to as IR. There might be no greater cesspool of business than this particular industry. Now, I certainly do not want to pass judgement on those professionals who provide meaningful and well structured service to many public companies. My work is predominantly in the small cap, commonly referred to as micro-cap and most prevelantly known as penny stocks. The industry usually preys on companies that have market caps of 100M or less. Many times this consists of newer issuers, often times brand new S1 filings. The non-filing Pink Sheets alone have over 7500 public companies. Many other pubco's start out on the OTCBB and now OTCQB as fully filing companies. For now I just want to provide some simple and very obvious issues that face CEO's, CFO's and others concerned about creating proper IR representation and campaigns.

Typically IR firms are scarcity driven. This means they see all others in the industry as competition. There is no integration or strategic alliances as IR firms beleive they should be the end all and be all for their clients. This leads to an almost immediate conflict of interest. These providers build large bulky, and for the most part inefficient platforms to make their clients believe they can deliver a wide array of services. This usually includes press releases, media options, webcasts, blogs, social media, phone rooms, newsletters, paid for research, road shows, institutional and retail contacts, large email lists etc.... the list of services goes on to infinity. Now, consider the cost basis of delivering a platform this large and wieldly. Of course the expense is prohibitive so we all know that these services are not fully provided by a singular firm no matter how much they swear by it. The entire costs of these ineffective platforms are passed on to the client. This is simply business as usual in the industry and all the firms of any size and market share pitch this same story. The reality is that after 90 days max they have exhausted whatever depth they have in delivering service. The reason for this is they are not integrated and they do not share the market place with any of their perceived competitors which is every other IR firm in the universe.
The answer to this is so simple and yet totally ignored by the industry. I will introduce concepts in the coming days,