Last week a couple of representatives from NASDAQ came into the agency. Strategic Communications Group handles a number of public companies, and has taken clients through the IPO process. IR is not Strategic’s specialty, but we frequently get asked for counsel by our clients on these issues. So we wanted Jason and Steven to give us their pitch on the services they provided their client companies.
Every company that lists on NASDAQ gets a Relationship Manager, whose job is to provide “full value” for the listing. There is a lot of competition between exchanges, and NASDAQ was all about value adds. The exchange has been expanding, purchasing the OMX, the Baltic countries exchanges, and Primenewswire.com, its own release distribution service. It also set up a Market Intelligence Desk, which Jason candidly said was done specifically done to compete with the NYSE.
Some basic questions we posed:
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Why go public? — to raise capital, attract the best talent, unlock value (i.e. for the founders, principals)
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How much does Sarbanes-Oxley compliance cost a year? — they would only estimate “several hundred thousands of dollars,” Strategic has heard estimates as high as $3 million
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How large do you need to be for it to make sense? — didn’t want to answer directly, but said the average company market cap is around $250 million
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First steps? — risk management and corporate governance, get your D&O insurance, get content for IR page planned out. NASDAQ owns a brokerage that offers D&O, can host IR pages for clients, can help you find directors for the board — hmm, I sense a pattern here!
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Who owns NASDAQ — used to be run by the National Association of Security Dealers, now is a public company itself.
So, how can Strategic help our clients ring the bell? Turns out that is scheduled by the relationship managers, and while Global Select companies — the big ones — get precedence, they’ll work to find a date for our companies.