Board Deference & Investor Meetings: A Potentially Lethal Combination
Small-cap boards need to consider making some preliminary determinations about how involved they will be in monitoring management’s preparation for financings and investor meetings. Why? Because CEOs of small-cap companies often lack appreciable experience running public companies. Risk is relative. To the uninitiated, launching at warp speed off a 90-meter ski jump is the epitome […]
3 Reasons Small-Caps Should Actively Engage In Nasdaq’s “Revitalize” Blueprint
By Adam J. Epstein | Nasdaq MarketInsite | October 17, 2017 Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of public companies in the United States have market capitalizations below $1 billion, the structure and regulation of capital markets in the U.S. have always been one size (i.e., large) fits all. The result has been […]
Bucking the Fortune 500 Trend: Middle-Market Companies are Adding Non-CEO Women to Their Boards
By Adam J. Epstein and Coco Brown | Directorship Magazine | September/October 2017 For any director who attended last year’s NACD 2016 Global Board Leaders’ Summit or the NACD Technology Symposium in Silicon Valley in July, two takeaways are crystal clear: every company is now a technology company, and boards increasingly require a new kind […]
Buy-Side Memo to Small-Cap CEOs: Hire In-House Counsel ASAP
By Adam J. Epstein | medium.com | September 20, 2017 After the 2008 financial crisis, micro- and small-cap companies, to reduce costs, broadly recast in-house counsel as a luxury, and despite the resiliency of the financial markets, many small, public companies never re-hired legal staff. Savvy institutional investors have taken note and cautiously approach […]
Buybacks, Investor Communication… and Bad Small-Cap Lawyering
As I wrote about recently in an American Bar Association corporate governance publication, my firm’s small-cap clients regularly change law firms due to bad advice (i.e., not because of fees, staffing, or responsiveness). As a former large-firm lawyer and institutional investor, I see two principal culprits: Capital markets and corporate finance issues are not fungible. […]
CEO Newsflash: Are You Getting Your Money’s Worth from Boardroom Counsel?
As CEO of a publicly traded company, you may think your company’s law firm offers comprehensive, high-quality boardroom counsel – and they might. But as a former lawyer and institutional investor who now advises many pre-IPO and small-cap boards about how to navigate the boardroom issues investors care most about, I am constantly in boardrooms. Whether […]
Book Review: “Women Make Great Leaders”
In an era where women still struggle to penetrate C-suites and boardrooms, Jill Griffin’s Women Make Great Leaders (Jill Griffin Books, 2017) is a poignant, timely compendium of corporate and life lessons from celebrated women leaders. Griffin knows a thing or two about succeeding in business. She has been advising Fortune 500 companies about brand […]
Finding Value in Boardroom Failure
Richard Branson is an iconoclastic entrepreneur. I appreciate his vitality, his willingness to never stop learning, and how he talks about the importance of failure. He famously said, “Every successful person has at least one thing in common: they’ve got things wrong over and over again before finding the right solution.” Amen. Discussing Failure Maybe […]
Three Blunt Reasons Most People Don’t Get A Board Seat
Well-credentialed candidates who are in search of their first board seat routinely approach me and I repeatedly hear the following refrain: “I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to get a board seat for years. None of the advice I’ve received has been helpful.” As someone who is in boardrooms on a weekly basis, I don’t think that […]
Thought Diversity In Boardrooms Is Just Good Business
Savvy investors are paying more and more attention to board composition and thought diversity in boardrooms for one reason you rarely read about. Somewhere along the way it became standard operating procedure for many boards and search firms to recruit new board members predominantly from the ranks of sitting and retired CEOs and CFOs. In […]