How to Prepare a Team for IPO
If you are preparing your IPO presentation, then you’ll want to do everything to make it a success.
We’ve been advising IPOs for 15 years and in that time we have seen the difference between a successful and unsuccessful float.
When you prepare an IPO presentation you cannot put too much effort into polishing your presentation.
That means polishing how your team handles each investor meeting (not just creating prettier slides)
Successful IPOs mean clear, simple & consistent investor meetings
Looking across the dozens of deals we have supported, we’ve identified six key themes:
Be comfortable
Be simple and clear
Address investor concerns
Paint a picture of the future
Show the quality of the team
Be consistent
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For any management team, the IPO process is probably one of the most gruelling processes that you ever go through. There’s so much going on, you may be getting, over a six-month period, you might be just having two- or three-hours sleep. I don’t envy any, anyone in a management team having to do it. If you’re doing five meetings a day, you just get brain fog. You don’t know whether you answered a question five minutes ago or five hours ago. So, how do you prepare for that properly? It’s about practising, lots of practice, so that on the day you know you’ve ironed out all the difficulties. It’s about having a really simple story, the easier the story is, the more likely you’ll get it across well. And then it’s about looking really good as a team, how you interact, how that works and that’s when we practise teams over and over and again. But my gosh you get a lot of the added value from doing that. And that’s how you prepare a management team for an IPO.
When your team is preparing for an IPO, it can be a very stressful time and very often we see people preparing by making huge lists of possible questions that investors might ask and then hugely detailed answers and I work with a lot of senior managers of businesses who are ‘IPO’ing who find that overwhelming. It’s just not really possible to memorise every single possible question and every single possible answer. So, often our approach is to focus more on what the really important messages are that we think about going to press investors buttons. And then we focus on making sure that every question is an access point to those messages. And of course, you know what the negatives are likely to be, negative tough questions. So, prepare for those, make sure you’ve got ways to leave them, that leave a positive thought in investors’ minds.
People sometimes ask us how you should prepare a team for IPO. There are lots of things. You need the right presentation, you need the right materials, you also need to look like a team. One of the biggest problems for management teams is when investors can tell that they’re not really a team, they’re not operating like a team. So, when we do our role play for people who are preparing for an IPO, we get the team together in a very realistic scenario, we act the role of prospective investors, and we get them to pitch to us. So, we can see them acting like a team, they can interrelate with each other and then when they go out and meet real investors, it works.
Get free tips and advice at:
Benjamin Ball Associates Investor Presentation Coaching website https://benjaminball.com
Free advice and blog articles. https://benjaminball.com/bba-blog/
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