27 times that the struggle was real
1. Quarterly reporting means you absolutely hate your job. Exactly four times a year.
2. Spotting a typo in an annual report – after it’s gone to the printers.
3. Realizing the web page you’ve sent prospective investors to for the past three months is a 404.
4. Investors like consistency. And repetitiveness is another word for consistency.
5. Flippancy in investor meetings can have distinctly non-flippant repercussions.
6. Your PR person is too scared to tell your narcissistic CEO that he is terrible on camera – so you have to.
7. When your boss wants to give himself a pay rise, it is something you have to deal with.
8. When your boss gets angry with you because the investment community has a negative view of your company, and she acts like it’s your fault.
9. When your boss tells the analysts their valuations are ‘wrong’. Helpful.
10. You jokingly say you need to get company T-shirts printed saying: ‘We Are Not Evil, Just Misunderstood’. No one laughs.
11. Your boss refuses to talk to an analyst because ‘he put a sell recommendation on us last year’.
12. You have an IFRS manual on your bookshelf.
13. House guests shoot you a pitying look when they spy an IFRS manual on your bookshelf.
14. No one in your family knows what you do all day.
15. People sometimes think you work in international relations and ask for your view on Nato.
16. You get judged for your accountancy background.
17. You get judged because you don’t have an accountancy background.
18. Your old colleagues from investment banking have been unusually friendly since you switched to IR.
19. When you find one of your spokespeople is leakier than a chocolate teapot.
20. Journalists looking for ‘clarification’ when they’re actually looking for dirt.
21. You find an activist shareholder in your register.
22. You dream about pivot tables.
23. Finding new ways to say ‘challenging headwinds’.
24. Having to politely point out that an analyst has mixed you up with one of your competitors to her face, without sounding at all sarcastic.
25. You have nightmares about making a mistake in your SEC filing.
26. Those times when your company’s share price is sinking more rapidly than Trump’s approval rating – and you don’t know why.
27. When your CEO asks why your share price is sinking more rapidly than Trump’s approval rating – and you have no idea why.
This article appeared in the Fall 2017 issue of IR Magazine
