Founders at Work.pdf

Ron Gruner 435
Of course, we had some really good breaks. The Web was a huge one. When
that developed, starting in ’95, we jumped right on that. People were saying,
“What are you going to do? You’re all telephone-based technology, and here’s
this thing called the Internet.” So we thought, “It’s just another technology.”
Having learned from Alliant about not moving quickly enough, we were on it
right away.
Campbell’s Soup, for example, was one of our earliest clients, and the first
time they had a corporate website was through us. If you look back at their
annual report in, I think, ’95, they said, “If you would like shareholder information,
please call 1-800-XXX-SOUP”—that was their Shareholder Direct line—
“or visit our website at www.shareholder.com/campbell.”
So we started the web service and took it a day at a time, built the business
up. We focused very strongly on client satisfaction. We’d do everything it took
to keep a client happy. And we focused on the bigger clients.
Livingston: The Internet was just making a splash in corporate America. Was it
hard to convince big companies to embrace the Internet?
Gruner: It really wasn’t too hard. The initial costs were very low. We would go
in and say, “Look, we are investor relations specialists. We know this area very
well and we know you have a web development team. But this is a very specialized
area. If you want to do this well, you need real-time SEC feeds and stock
quotes. When you put up a news release, it needs to be done”—even back
then—“in a few hours. You can’t wait a few days to put a news release up.” So
that wasn’t too hard to sell.
Livingston: They could outsource all these things to Shareholder.com?
Gruner: That’s right. In the ’80s and early ’90s, the investor relations officer
was really an underappreciated asset. They were understaffed and underbudgeted.
So we would go in and say, “Our job is to make your life easier. You send
us the information; we’ll take care of it.” And we told them discreetly, “If anything
gets screwed up, we take the bullet. We’re here to help you.”
Then we just kept adding functionality and functionality. And the government
helped us too. We had three big breaks with the SEC.
The first was in the early ’90s when the SEC put out a comfort letter saying
alternatives to the printed quarterly report should be considered, including
800-based telephone numbers. That’s essentially like the SEC jumping up and
saying, “Go, go, go!” That’s about as aggressive as they get. We had asked for a
comfort letter because some of the clients were saying, “We don’t even know
what the SEC says about this.” And the SEC said, “We won’t say ‘yes’ or ‘no,’
but we think it’s an interesting idea.”
Regulation FD came along in 2000. It had pros and cons, but, for us, it
opened things up tremendously. And then, of course, Sarbanes-Oxley came out
a few years ago. All of those things basically said that it’s much more important
to communicate with shareholders uniformly and democratically. Because,
believe me, even when I was at Alliant, and in the early ’90s, it was very
exclusionary—who could attend conference calls, for example.