- Reduce your communications with retail investors to the lowest levels the law requires: True friends will really appreciate your thriftiness, no?
- When you DO communicate, be sure to stick to “legalese” for the lawyers and to “B-School-speak” for the analysts, arbs and academics. Drop that old-fashioned AR, and the “family photos” you used to send to your individual investor friends to stay in touch and show you care; Just send the 10-K. And why waste valuable time trying to make it “reader friendly”? No one important will notice—or care—right?
- Mark all your written communications with slogans—like “Important Information Inside”—or “Your Vote Is Important”—but send investors nothing they can act on easily, then and there: Why haven’t we stormed the SEC to call a halt to these money- wasting “Notices” …and to let us send a short summary of the issues—along with a proxy or VIF? Simple; no one seems to really care.
- If individual investors DO find their way to your website, given all the spare time they have these days, be sure to make the information they need to vote as hard to find and as opaque as possible. Make sure it’s impossible to navigate within the document, or from the document to the voting site: Hey, that might cost money!—And, above all, do not forget tips one and two.
- Be sure to tell callers to your shareholder help sites that “Your call is important to us”: Remind them every 30 seconds, as they wait on the phone for up to 25 minutes.
- Make it as hard as possible for shareholders to find their way to a real person who might help them: Bury this option deeply in your phone and web sites, and offer them self-help tools and “contact us” buttons instead—so they will do all the work that YOU, or your Agents, used to do for them.
- NEVER check your Agent’s call center or web-based help center to see how well or how badly it may be working. Why trouble trouble? Your true friends will understand that nothing really works the way it used to.
- Change your DRP or DSPP—not just to make participants “pay their way”—but to pay more than their way—and ideally, more than they’d pay a discount broker for the same services: The biggest trick here, so you don’t miss it, is to charge a percentage of each dividend for “automatic reinvestment.” SO WHAT that it costs the Agent way less to automatically reinvest dividends and post them to the accounts than it costs to print, mail and reconcile checks, and deal with the lost, stolen and un-cashed checks to boot. SO WHAT that most retail brokers reinvest dividends for FREE: After all, these are your friends: They, or at least the dumbest among them, won’t miss the money, will they?
- Send DRP & DSPP statements once a year at most, instead of quarterly: This virtually guarantees that your Plan will drop off investors’ radar screens—so you and your Agent won’t be bothered much with “optional cash investments”—and it will add every year to the number of “lost accounts” when owners forget to tell you they’ve moved. Then you can escheat them, and get them off the books altogether!
- Start charging shareholders who may want a stock certificate: Make it as hard to get one as humanly possible—and charge them through the nose: Once they understand about the Direct Registration System, and how dumb they are to want a certificate, they will surely thank you…Or maybe they will gladly pay $30–$100 for something a modern transfer agent can initiate with a single click on their computer…and thank you for THAT.
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