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Ep. 2 Pitch Perfect: Investor Intel Edition with Dan Ferry
50 Plays1 year ago
Join us as we discuss with Dan Ferry how he has witnessed the importance of a well-executed communication strategy to drive scientific innovation to transformative change.
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Transcript
Introduction to Mighty Spark Communications
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, everyone, and welcome to Spark Time. I'm Dani Stoltzfus. And I'm Will Riedl of Mighty Spark Communications. Our mission is to use scientific innovation to drive transformative change. We believe that compelling storytelling is the most effective tool we have in our arsenal to motivate and inspire audiences to invest themselves in audacious goals. We are scientists by training, storytellers by experience, and entrepreneurs by nature. Let's get started.
The Role of Communication Strategy in Biotech
00:00:28
Speaker
In today's episode, we are discussing communication strategy amongst other things with our guest, Dan Ferry. Well, what are you excited to tell people about this episode? Hey, Danny. This was a fun episode discussing with Dan from Lifeside Advisors why a trusted communication partner is so important for biotech companies. We all know leadership teams have to wear many hats, but maybe this isn't one of them. What are you excited about?
00:00:53
Speaker
Honestly, I love diving into the importance of online presence. It's easy to overlook the value that a strong drumbeat provides in the early days of a biotech startup. So it was a really nice reminder from Dan that people do actually pay attention to what you have to say. Also, I'm really excited by what he had to say about the biotech industry as a whole for 2024. There's no giveaways here, though. You've got to stay tuned for the deets. Yes, let's dive in.
Dan Ferry's Professional Journey
00:01:20
Speaker
We're joined today by Dan Ferry, who is currently a managing director at Lifeside Advisors, where he's been for about seven years. He joined Lifeside Advisors from Guggenheim Securities, where he specialized in connecting healthcare companies with buy side investors, venture capitalists, KOLs, sell side analysts, and the investment bank. He spent nearly four years at Guggenheim putting together numerous non-deal road shows, collecting feedback from investors, and helping shape investor outreach strategies.
00:01:47
Speaker
Prior to Guggenheim, Dan worked at Lazard Capital Markets, where he participated in many successful healthcare company financings. Over the course of his career, Dan has developed long-standing relationships with the healthcare investment community. We're really excited to have you here today, Dan. You are someone who has a ton of experience in communications between investors and founders, and you can really speak to the types of products that we at Mighty Spark work with, like pitch decks and corporate decks.
00:02:12
Speaker
Because you have such a depth of experience, we're excited about the opportunity to pick your brain and find some real gems for our clients and listeners. So welcome. Thank you for being here. And do you mind telling us a little bit about yourself?
00:02:24
Speaker
Of course. Thanks, Will. Thanks, Danny, for having me here.
From Banking to Investor Relations
00:02:30
Speaker
I came from a banking background. As you stated, I've been with Lifesight Advisors for close to seven years now. Prior to joining Lifesight, I worked at various different banks, specifically with
00:02:47
Speaker
all aspects of the banks, so working with coverage health care bankers, equity capital markets, the covering analysts on the sell side as well that were covering individual health care companies, and then basically coordinating all those different pools of intellectual capital and connecting the health care company with the buy side, the investors. I moved to life side because a lot of my colleagues
00:03:16
Speaker
had moved from the sell side over to IR agencies such as Lifeside Advisors. It was a great step in my career, spent a lot of time, 10, 15 years at various sell side banks, but never had worked on the other side and really got a glimpse working with companies directly on kind of, so to speak, how the sausage is made.
00:03:39
Speaker
And so what I try to do here is take my experience from the banks. It gives me an edge with an approach to capital formation. But it was a great step for me from a learning perspective, moving over to the IR side.
00:03:55
Speaker
So I love that you're the link between the investment community as well as the CEO community. And as you say, I love that expression, how you now get to see how the sausage is made. I think that's so awesome. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you do that in your current role and how you see the value of having that communication link?
Effective Message Development in IR
00:04:14
Speaker
Absolutely. Thanks, Danny. Yes, I think first and foremost, dealing with healthcare CEOs, many of these CEOs are extremely good at drug discovery, extremely good at drug development. One of my first goals when I engage with these companies is to make sure that the CEO has the time and bandwidth
00:04:39
Speaker
to continue to execute on that strategy of drug discovery and drug development. So I strive to optimize their time spent on IR activities. So regarding my role, your original question, right, regarding my role and the value of that communication link, it's an interesting question. And I think, Danny, it starts with message development. And so when we think about message development and the opportunities to create messaging,
00:05:09
Speaker
It evolves or it stems from progress, right? So anytime CEO or a management team makes a step forward, what we do from an IR perspective is we help evaluate
00:05:23
Speaker
What is the message with this progress? And then what's the best medium? What's the best communication tool to use to help evangelize what that step forward is? And this can be something as simple as reporting a quarter end cash number and earnings press release. Or Danny, this could be something as complicated as reporting out data on a clinical study that maybe had mixed results. Yeah.
00:05:46
Speaker
much showed activity in the therapeutic asset, right? So it's all about taking inventory of that progress, of that news flow, evaluating what the best medium to externalize that message and then work on the message and kind of what is the takeaway.
Synergy Between IR and PR Teams
00:06:03
Speaker
Yeah, that's really valuable because I can only imagine as a CEO that you're trying to juggle so many different balls at the same time. And that is already really challenging. So having a trusted communication partner would be so critical. And obviously your communications are focused on investor relations and speaking to that community. But I was just curious, do you have any sort of interaction with PR teams in the process that you do in terms of developing the strategy of the messaging?
00:06:32
Speaker
Absolutely, because from my vantage point, I'm usually hyper focused on the investor community alone. But we have to understand here that there's so many different stakeholders out there, Danny, that we need to reach. And that could be the media community, that could be key opinion leaders in that indication or a key opinion leader in that modality.
00:06:56
Speaker
So there's so many different angles. And so where we synergize with media and communication firms is not only taking what we're trying to message to investors, but opening that up and taking a hard look at the other audiences and working with our partners to make sure that we're hitting and approaching all the key stakeholders other than just investors.
00:07:21
Speaker
It sounds like what I'm hearing is that you really need this communication support team to be really effective at communicating what's going on within a company. I think that's a really valuable concept that Will and I talk about all the time is that there's experts who know how to do communication really, really well. We see ourselves as being one of those communication expert teams.
00:07:44
Speaker
We know that there's so much value to be added by bringing in external people who live and breathe communications every day. And it just really resonates with me that you also understand the value of that. Absolutely.
00:07:56
Speaker
Yeah, I want to bring it back to basics a little bit.
Crafting Impactful Corporate Pitches
00:08:00
Speaker
I want to ask Dan about some of his experiences in seeing companies pitch their ideas, pitch their ideas either in the beginning when they're an early stage company or as they get bigger and they're on the clinical side or the public side. Dan, when you're seeing someone pitch a corporate deck,
00:08:20
Speaker
What elements when you're in the room with investors, what do you see resonating well with that audience? And maybe what are some of like an example of a classic mistake you see with those pitch decks?
00:08:32
Speaker
Great question. We see this quite a bit where a CEO, a clinical team, a management team overall at a healthcare company might say, we think this is exactly what people need to hear. And we found just through doing hundreds and hundreds of meetings, maybe in thousands of meetings over the years, both at different sell side banks and at my current IR agency,
00:08:59
Speaker
Is there's definitely is a road map here and i think it stems from the point of when an investor or stakeholder sits on the other side of the table. And is reviewing the deck with the management team i think that the real key here is in the initial call it three four five slides.
00:09:19
Speaker
That the management team the ceo really has set the stage. What is the investment thesis here what is that what is the value to sell back to danny's point if we do. To think about media and other stakeholders even above and beyond investors is what's the value proposition of the company and so what we're trying to do and some of the classic mistakes is. In the first three to five minutes can't go on too long without communicating to the person on the opposite side of the table.
00:09:50
Speaker
what the value proposition is, and what happens with the investor is they understand the high-level takeaways first, and you're kind of cueing them to look for the management team to unpack those throughout the rest of the presentation, whether it's 20, 30, or 45 minutes. So that cue to the listener of what's to come
00:10:12
Speaker
I think is super important, and we often coach the presenter to walk through this investment highlight slide, you can call it what you want, and literally go through the main points, the investment thesis, and then say something in the tune of, hey, let's unpack these over the course of our meeting. The second, I would say pet peeve here is data.
00:10:33
Speaker
And we often fall into this trap of waiting too long in the presentation to start to show the data, the preclinical data, the clinical data, right?
00:10:48
Speaker
Again, the challenge here is we live in an impatient world. Investors are very busy. Stakeholders, media, they're all very busy. I think the challenge here is to keep the investor's attention with the proof behind that elevator thesis or that elevator pitch, so to speak. Yes. Yes. This is something we talk about all the time is pairing up that elevator pitch with the data that follows.
00:11:16
Speaker
In your opinion, is this something that people usually get right? Well, I don't think so. I think this is the first thing that we evaluate when we first work with a company is we take a look at the deck immediately and take a look at the materials and say, do we have these ingredients? Do we have these elements to properly pitch your story to the stakeholder?
00:11:45
Speaker
Yeah. And the other thing I'd mention, Will, the last thing is just reminding the audience before we close the meeting of the milestones.
00:11:56
Speaker
Right? You learned a lot about our healthcare, our biotechnology company this afternoon. Let me remind you of where we are and where we're going. We have a plan. We're gonna execute on this plan. And it's funny, Will, the last thing I'll mention on this point is I had a friend, a client who worked at a very large pharma company. I won't mention the name, but my friend Michael said that the CEO of this very large pharma company said to him one day, he said, Michael,
00:12:26
Speaker
You know what my IR plan is? And Michael said, what is it? And he said, it's very simple. We're going to tell them what we're going to do. We're going to do it. And then we're going to tell them that we did it. Yeah. Right. So I don't want to oversimplify this, but it is those key ingredients making it simple for that stakeholder across the table to understand what the value proposition is.
00:12:54
Speaker
completely agree. It does come down to being that simple. Because of that, there's a real art to doing this. You have to pack so much information into a presentation that describes the entirety of your company and the lives of everyone in that company.
00:13:16
Speaker
And to do it in a compelling manner, I think, can be pretty difficult. And obviously, that's what Danny and I think about and try to do. But I think hearing it again and again helps people understand that it's something that does take time. And to get the messaging right is really of utmost importance.
00:13:37
Speaker
Dan, I wanted to go back to your comment about the data because we have this ongoing debate with some of our clients about data and how to present it and how much of it to present as well. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on, do we just want to see the data that really speaks to the fact that the company is tracking against the milestones that they sent or do you think investors want to see
00:14:01
Speaker
you know, really detailed scientific understanding in those data slides because, you know, we would love to get your thoughts because, you know, we have this battle with people all the time as to what is actually to include and not include.
Balancing Data in Pitch Decks
00:14:18
Speaker
That's a great question, Danny, and this is something that we do a lot of hands-on work with our clients on and with our partners at communications agencies. And I think this comes back to what is the key takeaway? For example, if we were to put together a bunch of data slides, we have to challenge ourselves and try and understand what is the key takeaway from each of these data slides?
00:14:44
Speaker
What is this proving? What is this, given this piece of data, where does this lead us? What are we gonna act upon based on these findings? So there is definitely a relevancy check. We often find there are extraneous data slides, Dani, that we will sometimes put into the appendix or tell the stakeholder after we're finished with the meeting, look, there is more data
00:15:11
Speaker
that we can provide you, right, and have that door open for a follow-up conversation or a follow-up meeting.
00:15:22
Speaker
Yes, that's exactly how we like to think about it as well, Dan. So when we first start working with a company, what we do is we take them through our Spark process. And one of the things we do in that process is look at the data that they have and understand whether that data is something that's really pertinent to the discussion at hand right now, or if that's something that we kind of shift off to an appendix slide that our founders or presenters can refer to if needed.
00:15:49
Speaker
No, I agree, Danny. And I think that's where the work that different agencies can do in advance of those communications, those meetings where we're very thoughtful about what are the pertinent data slides and what are the other data slides that we can follow up with or move to an appendix. I think that's exactly right. But that's the work in advance of that announcement.
00:16:11
Speaker
And I just want to circle back now to communication strategy, which is kind of where we started. And, you know, obviously you work with companies that are both early stage and much later stage.
Evolving Communication Strategies
00:16:23
Speaker
And I was wondering if you could speak to how communication strategy changes over time from an early stage to a late stage. For example, you know, do the effective communication strategies differ at early stage versus later?
00:16:41
Speaker
I definitely think they do. I think the way I view this, Danny, is I look at the target audiences, and I think that the targets change over time as well. With an earlier stage company,
00:16:57
Speaker
There's a lot more storytelling involved, a lot more emphasis on the modality, the method of action, how these particularly lend itself to a specific indication or maybe even a disease area. Maybe you have to lean more on incorporating data and input from publications or key opinion leaders.
00:17:19
Speaker
into a narrative that that audience will grasp onto. And typically it's the venture capital community within IR that we're targeting at that point.
00:17:31
Speaker
And then that will evolve eventually as the audience changes from maybe venture capital to the next bucket of investors that might do both public and private financings. And this is where we migrate from maybe the majority of which is storytelling to more of a narrative of taking that preclinical evidence
00:17:50
Speaker
you know, that body of data, if you will, and laying out a plan on entering the clinic with human trials. And so the narrative starts to shift that will appeal to that next target audience. But yes, I think earlier stage, it's a lot of storytelling. And again, there's a lot of communications work that goes into that.
00:18:14
Speaker
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I guess, you know, it's like, you know, early stages spoke about, you know, VCs being the primary audience. Who do you see it being at the later stage?
00:18:24
Speaker
The later stage, you open up a broader range of investors. You migrate from venture capitalists to crossover round investors, to tier one fundamental dedicated healthcare investors, you gravitate to mutual funds. Then even if you go further down the clinical trial spectrum more towards phase three,
00:18:51
Speaker
Maybe you have a new drug application into the FDA, right? Then you get into high net worth and family offices. So you almost look at it like a funnel that just kind of opens up quite a bit as you move further down the regulatory process. Yeah, I really like that way of thinking about it as well. That's really good visual. Thank you, Dan.
00:19:14
Speaker
Yeah, and I think as you list the number of different types of investors and different types of audiences, it's so apparent that that audience changes so much, and so your communications to those different audiences have to change accordingly. And one of those big things that changes over time, I think, is online presence.
Social Media's Role for Startups
00:19:36
Speaker
So we know for later stage companies, folks who are in the clinic, maybe phase three and are interacting with healthcare providers and patients, we know that for those companies, a strong drumbeat in social media and a high quality website and among a ton of other things are really important. But in your experience, what does a strong online presence look like for an earlier stage company, someone who's still in that sort of storytelling phase?
00:20:06
Speaker
Definitely. It goes back to this earlier point, Will, that we discussed about evaluating progress and what is newsworthy, what is press releasable. What we often find is, say the management team, the clinical team, the CEO are going to a major medical meeting.
00:20:28
Speaker
The management team may not be presenting new splashy data at that medical meeting, but they're going to be there in person. Here's a great example of something that's not press release worthy.
00:20:41
Speaker
But wow, this is great for social media. You know, company X is in rare diseases and we're going to be at that rare disease medical meeting. Perfect for social media. Perfect for digital. Yeah, please. Dan, who responds to that? Who looks at that online presence and reacts, you know, maybe not clicking the like button, but what kind of behavior is driven by that type of activity?
00:21:07
Speaker
Definitely. I think this is evangelization across retail investors. I think this is evangelization across different patients who might be searching for, for example, again, on a rare disease, they might be searching for news
00:21:24
Speaker
on their disease that's either affecting them or a loved one. And, you know, they'll see that, you know, wow, here's an interesting, innovative company that'll be, you know, at a major medical meeting where tons of patients will be there. So I think this is all about broad evangelization and getting your message out there. And then it allows to, I find it drives people well to your website.
00:21:52
Speaker
And that's a case, again, for having a website that is up to date, doesn't have to be necessarily too fancy in an earlier stage company, but clearly articulating, again, that value proposition. Because again, it's not just the deck, you know, those first three slides that we're talking about, it carries over to your website, it carries over to the boilerplate and the press release. It really starts there. Absolutely.
00:22:19
Speaker
Yeah, I just want to follow on from that, Dan, because I think that's so insightful. One of the things that we see people frequently, well, frankly, make the mistake of is not considering to have that kind of continuity of their messaging throughout different platforms. So you need your corporate deck to reflect your LinkedIn presence, to reflect your website and
00:22:42
Speaker
I know it's a lot to manage and that's why we're here to help these companies because we're the experts in doing this. But really hearing the value that comes from having a kind of a unified presence both online and in other interactions is really helpful. I really, I strongly believe in that.
00:23:01
Speaker
continuity of messaging as well. And yeah, thanks for sharing your insights on that. I guess that the next kind of like juicy question I wanted to ask you, Dan was, you know, we'd love to hear what you're excited about right now. I mean, obviously, you know, we've just been through JPM season and a lot's happening off the back of that. I'd love to hear, you know, your thoughts on what you're excited on for 2024.
Biotech Industry Prospects for 2024
00:23:28
Speaker
I'm cautiously optimistic that this is going to be a very exciting year for biotechnology overall.
00:23:35
Speaker
As you mentioned, the majority of the healthcare investor ecosystem heads out to San Francisco in the first few weeks of January every year. It happens to be JP Morgan Healthcare Conference going out at the same time. What we saw this year that was really interesting was a change in the margin from previous years where investors used to come in and meet with companies and basically it was a speed date.
00:24:02
Speaker
Talk to me about your company, maybe it's a 20-minute meeting, and let's connect later if there's interest. This year, it felt a little different. It felt that investors were coming in with prepared questions. Now, we don't need to go through the deck. Let's go to slide five. I have some questions about the phase two data.
00:24:20
Speaker
That was a really interesting change and I saw a lot of that, all the meetings that I sat in on. That coupled with some of the good M&A activity that we saw going into JP Morgan and then of course the interest rate environment. I think a lot of investors probably generalist money.
00:24:41
Speaker
has been on the sidelines and as interest rates maybe start to soften, that could be coming here mid-year, maybe even second quarter. A lot of people are eyeing that. So that coupled with the M&A activity and then just very recently, the performance of some of these initial public offerings.
00:25:02
Speaker
Yeah, has also been helpful. And then the last data point I'd suggest too is, you know, some of these biotech companies have been doing secondary offerings. In other words, they're already public, but they're issuing more shares in the form of a secondary. And some of these secondaries, I think a bank, a well known investment bank said late on Friday,
00:25:27
Speaker
They had suggested that half of these secondaries were not tied to a catalyst, a data event. They were opportunistic financings at a healthy to no discount rate with decent aftermarket trading. All these data points, Danny, suggest that
00:25:49
Speaker
There is a light at the end of the tunnel here off of arguably a year, year and a half of tough sledding as it relates to capital deployment. Very exciting. I think you just described a lot of different events. The first one is that at JPM, people are being
00:26:09
Speaker
you know, really specific about who they interact with and why and they want to get their answers. But on the back end of that, it sounds like there's some real positivity that that mood is going to shift in the coming year. And obviously, that's what everyone wants to hear. But it sounds like some real data is behind that sentiment. So that's really cool to hear.
00:26:30
Speaker
Absolutely. Dan, is there anything going on in your life that you'd like to plug for our listeners to hear about aside from what's going on in the market? Thanks,
Networking and Collaboration in Biotech
00:26:41
Speaker
Will. I think just after commenting on how there's a light at the end of the tunnel here and things seem to be perking up,
00:26:49
Speaker
I think the good news is I'm starting to get more busy. I find that companies, CEOs, CFOs that I've worked with in the past are definitely doing more networking. They're connecting with business development partners. They're connecting with people like me who they've worked with in the past.
00:27:13
Speaker
And I think the volume of interactions, the cross pollination, so to speak, is exciting. So definitely having more conversations and starting to get more busy. So obviously that's good and bad.
00:27:29
Speaker
But it is exciting. So yes. Dan, thank you so much for all the wisdom you've been sharing with us. We knew beforehand and we just heard again that you're extremely busy. And so we're really honored to have you here and share these gems of wisdom with us and with our listeners.
00:27:51
Speaker
because I think what we're all trying to do together is to take awesome scientific innovation and turn it into transformative change. And the things that you've talked to, I think are really going to enable people to continue doing that mission. So thank you again for being here.
00:28:07
Speaker
Thank you, Will, for having me. Thank you, Danny. Really appreciate it. Thanks, Dan. What a great time we had chatting to Dan today. He definitely understands the value of good communication. It seems like he's seen it from all angles and has a really well-rounded perspective on the value of a good communication strategy. I love how he said he now gets to see how the sausage is made, and thankfully no one gets to see us make sausage because that would be super messy.
Episode Key Takeaways
00:28:32
Speaker
Yes, totally Danny. And I'm checking my notes now and we hadn't actually planned on talking about sausage today, but I am glad that we got there. Anyway, I think you came at communication from a very logical place. There are so many people who need to hear your company's message and they all hear it in very different language. And so accordingly, a company's communication strategy, their storytelling and the tools they use to spread it, it has to change along with the consumers of those messages.
00:28:59
Speaker
So what did you think of the idea of starting with an elevator pitch? I mean, to me that makes a lot of sense because, you know, everyone has tight schedules and getting to the point quickly and then setting the stage for the rest of the conversation, like queuing up the audience seems like a winning strategy to me.
00:29:15
Speaker
Yeah, so sometimes I have this reaction to the words elevator pitch, like it doesn't quite fit the gravity of what we're discussing. But I think that the concept of setting expectations and unpacking all of those expectations and the remainder of the stakeholder meeting is really valuable and practical advice from Dan. Of course, that doesn't always make it easy. And it's often the hardest part for people who are very close to that pitch.
00:29:40
Speaker
Meanwhile, I was also really excited to hear what Dan had to say about the biotech industry. I feel like after talking to him, I'm even more optimistic about what's to come for 2024. It feels really telling that all of these secondary offerings are happening and many of them aren't even being tied to a data catalyst. Yes, totally agree, Danny.
00:30:00
Speaker
Well, I hope our listeners enjoyed hearing Dan's thoughts on communication strategies. We love talking about this at Mighty Spark, and we'd welcome anyone who wants to continue that conversation with us to reach out. So join us next time as we continue to power scientific innovation with storytelling to drive transformative change and solve our most demanding issues.