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 Starting a New Story: Blueshirt Group profiled in Fast Company By Heath Row
About half of the people I met at The Blueshirt Group, a boutique investor-relations firm on Battery Street behind the Transamerica Tower, were wearing blue shirts. The firm's name stems from the fact that many bankers and industry analysts wear French blue shirts, that two of the firm's three partners often wear the same style of blue shirt to work, and that the 10-person company takes what they call a "blue-collar approach" to investor relations (IR). By that they mean hands-on, proactive, and personal. Sitting in partner Chris Danne's fifth-floor office-cum-conference-room, I met with several of Blueshirt's principals and discussed how the story of San Francisco's business community and investment stories are changing -- and how companies can better tell their stories in the new business climate. Here's Blueshirt's three-part plan to sharing solid stories. GO STRAIGHT TO THE TOP. "Investor relations is really about working with CEOs and CFOs and giving them strategic advice. Our work is senior-level consulting. There was a lot of volatility in the market for technology stocks. Bringing our high-level advice in-house could be very expensive." -- Chris Danne, partner "Because we work directly with CEOs and CFOs, we've been relatively impervious to budget cuts. Cutting a PR company that charges $30,000 to $40,000 a month is easy. We charge rates that are more commensurate with the market. Typically, IR reports to the CFO while PR reports to the VP of marketing. We believe IR and PR need to be closely aligned. We hear so often that a PR firm took executives on the road just before the company missed a quarter's projections. You need to get your financial messaging across even in your product news releases." -- Alex Wellins, partner 
FOLLOW THE MONEY. "When we started in 1999, we didn't plan this, but a large part of our business is working with VCs. Part of our role has been to introduce companies to analysts and bankers. We want companies to have the widest exposure on Wall Street as possible. The VCs are always trying to be a value add for their portfolio companies. We've also done a little bit of matchmaking with our client companies, but it's not really how we generate fees." -- Chris "We also pay a lot of attention to how we measure success. What are the metrics that are important at this time? During the bubble, companies were making up metrics: page views, unique visitors, and 'stickiness.' Now the metrics that are important are cash, profits, and earnings per share. Before, those things all went out the window. You had to scale. That was it. Companies got too big too fast, and that's why everything came crashing down." -- Alex SAVE YOUR STORIES. "When we started, we were getting a lot of private companies, because private companies thought that they were going to go public in the next year. Companies were going public so quickly that it was almost impossible to connect with bankers and analysts. Private companies want to get on the map, but they might not go public for a couple of years now. You need to tell your story at the right time. Get some coverage in the trade publications. Raise your profile with the industry analysts. Then go after the business press." -- Alex "For the past five years, you couldn't hype yourself enough. Now it might be better not to have your name in the press. We might not have as many placements as we had a year ago, but when we do, we have a more important story to tell." -- Scott Marx, vice president "You need to tell your story at the right time. What's the management story? The personality story? What's the product or service? What's the financial story? If a company isn't doing well, you might want to look at another angle." -- Alex COORDINATES: Chris Danne, Scott Marx, Alex Wellins |
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