Rob Bradley is the Vice President of Investor Relations at LogMeIn, Inc., based in Boston, Massachusetts. Rob joined the company six years ago to build the Investor Relations function. He brings expertise in financial analysis and a knowledge base of the investor community.
1. What are your top priorities and biggest challenges?
My top priorities are to manage all the communications to Wall Street, whether that's analysts who cover us, the buy-side, or the sell-side, and to curate and deliver the messaging for many conferences, events and interactions that we have with investors. My goal is to be a conduit of information between investors and management, as well as from the management team to employees.
At LogMeIn, we recently completed a merger that has increased our revenue to more than a billion dollars. Since the merger, our share count and product set have doubled, and as we've grown our portfolio, I have expanded my efforts to gain expertise of the increased offerings. When significant business events occur like a merger or acquisition, it is critical that I stay current on our own products, as well as our competitors’ products.
Technology is a fast-changing market, so our strategy is continuously evolving as we grow and as markets develop. As the IRO, I am faced with the challenge of getting the message out to the Street and to investors and potential investors with clarity and consistency, while ensuring that all company representatives are aligned in how they describe the company and our end markets. In Investor Relations, you want to deliver a message that is both accurate and strategically representative of the company. You want people to make a fair evaluation of the company based on its strengths, weaknesses, opportunity and performance.
2. How have you seen the role and expectations of the IRO evolve in the past few years?
My particular role has evolved in lockstep with the growth of LogMeIn, and I believe that experience would be the same for IROs in general. Not only do you have a larger shareholder base that requires increased reach-out, but there are many more interested parties, such as increased analyst coverage and an expanded prospective investor base. This all results in higher demands of time and resources from the Investor Relations department.
Additionally, I have seen the Investor Relations role evolve to include internal messaging, which is something that I try to do more of now. LogMeIn is a big believer in the need for a consistent and positive company culture, and we want to relay to the various departments how important their individual success is to the company's overall success. Frequently, I meet with offices and departments and speak to them about how the company is being received and valued and how each function can make an impact. Whether it's renewing customers and cross-selling to clients and prospects, having a good customer care experience, or developing new products, all these efforts have a significant impact on the company. That is why I spend quite a bit of my time now engaging not only with external stakeholders but also with internal stakeholders too.
3. How can the IRO best engage the investment community?
Engagement of the investment community starts with the strengths of the IR team. This job is ideal for individuals who like people and thrive on interacting with others. If you were a true introvert, it might not be the best job for you because it's a lot of engagement. In a given year, our Investor Relations team will have over 250 face-to-face meetings, not to mention regular interactions on the phone, headquarters visits, and bus tour visits.
How do we do it? We are willing to genuinely engage with all interested parties. Because of our genesis as a small technology company, we didn't have the luxury of choosing who we interacted with, and we operate the same way today even though we’ve grown exponentially. So when the phone rings, we answer it. When people come to visit, we host them. If people want a product demo, we broker it.
We also do a lot of targeted engagement. Certainly, there's a huge amount of inbound interest, but we have a profile now that's evolving, which is focused as much on free cash flow and profit as it is growth. Our new profile of 30% free cash flow targets as a percentage of revenue, 40% margin targets, and growth approaching 10% provides us with a unique story to tell the investment community. We are constantly looking at what investors own and what our peer companies hold to reach out proactively and say, "If you like growth and profitability and cash flow, you should talk to us." So our best efforts of engagement are a deliberate mix of the responses to inbound inquiries and the proactive outbound messaging.
4. What is one important initiative that you’ve championed or experience that you’ve had as an IRO?
The merger with the GoTo business was a tremendous career experience for me and a transformative event in the life of LogMeIn. It was of a magnitude that's infrequent, which is why I really enjoyed learning throughout the process. My focus was primarily on messaging externally, although there were a number of various stakeholders who had different messaging responsibilities. We had a “war room” and worked tirelessly with a goal of doing a good job messaging the merger, our vision, and strategic rationale.
Through the work leading up to the merger announcement, it was clear to me that many people are new to Investor Relations or don't really know a lot about it, so it is hard for them to understand what the function requires. Our CEO talks about “demystifying” Investor Relations for people who don't get a lot of exposure to it, which is why I love interfacing with people within the company. I enjoy going to various offices and talking to different colleagues about how a company gets valued externally and helping people try to understand how they can contribute.
5. What resources do you rely on to stay up to date on the capital markets?
As an IRO, I rely on a number of tools on a daily, and even hourly, basis to try to stay current on capital markets and in particular, technology companies. In everything from earnings and acquisitions to take-outs and activism, there's no shortage of information available. As a Nasdaq-listed company, I leverage the Nasdaq platform pretty heavily. I'm certainly in Nasdaq IR Insight every single day. Whenever I'm trying to get information about investors to either target or as part of my meeting preparation, I rely on Nasdaq Corporate Solutions to understand what their holdings are and what their background is.
I also use Twitter because I believe it gives access to wide-ranging sources of interesting insights on companies. Additionally, I rely on a lot of public filings. It's always fascinating to see what is included in S-1s, 10Ks and 10Qs. It obviously takes a bit more time to read those disclosures, but as I found in graduate school, all the guts of a business reside in SEC filings. All those resources together help me stay abreast of what's happening with our company, peer companies, and even the broader capital markets.
6. What advice do you have for the next generation of IRO?
The secret is out that Investor Relations is a good career. It's a valuable function in any business, as it represents the intersection of strategy, leadership, communications and finance. I would tell the next generation of IROs that, as you have opportunity to spend time in the earlier stages of your career with management teams, don’t underestimate the importance of exposure to that senior leadership. Be a sponge for knowledge; listen and try to really soak it all in. Secondly, remember that you -- and not just management -- are the face of the company. I stress the importance of professionalism, candor and honesty.
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