Allen & Caron has, for more than 25 years, provided investor relations, media relations and corporate communications services to micro-, small- and mid-cap companies. Located in New York City, Irvine CA, London and Paris,, Allen & Caron is one of very few independently owned investor relations firms with a truly international reach. Most of our clients are US corporations headquartered in the US and trading on US exchanges, but we have developed a wide-ranging expertise as well in dealing with international corporations. Many clients are headquartered in Europe or Asia, but are trading on US exchanges, some with ADRs or GDRs, and others with "native" US shares. Some clients trade on multiple exchanges, and we are adept at understanding and applying the rules and customs of different exchanges.
Our professional staff has a broad range of backgrounds, formal education and streetwise experience that helps us bring a distinctive approach to the tasks of establishing an appropriate positioning strategy then creating and forwarding continuous, seamless communications strategies and pro-active awareness campaigns for our public-company clients.
We are experienced in organizing financial conferences; conducting opinion surveys of fund managers and analysts; and setting up and conducting non-deal road trips all over North America, the UK, and Europe. We have also worked with investment banks in developing target lists for public and private offerings, and have set up road trips for depositary banks on a private-label basis.
The most common goals of our investor relations programs are to improve awareness among target audiences - primarily institutional investors - and to improve liquidity in the trading of our clients' securities. Improved liquidity makes it possible for institutional investors to take positions more readily, and it frequently lowers the cost of capital, whether in public or private offerings.
Over many years we have developed a very large interactive database containing both buy- and sellside professionals, and believe that we have very strong access to the buyside professional who invests in small- and mid-cap companies across a wide spectrum of industry segments.
We book and conduct US and international investor roadshows composed primarily of one-on-one meetings, and maintain frequent and proactive communications with the investment community on behalf of our clients. With the goal of expanding institutional interest, our primary contacts are fund and portfolio managers and their analysts from mutual funds, retirement funds, philanthropic and family trusts, and hedge funds.
We are responsive to individual investors for our clients, but do not normally devote time or budget to increasing retail interest. We also help formulate, write and disseminate news via "exclusives" and traditional news releases, as well as conduct conference calls and web casts, design presentations, write speeches and devise strategic initiatives regarding major corporate events.
Allen & Caron Media Relations professionals concentrate primarily on high-level business and financial media: print, broadcast, wire services and electronic/Internet. Our record of achievement in media relations is, we believe, among the very finest. We work with the media primarily to improve the amount and quality of publicly available information on our clients.
Our Investor Outreach group works assiduously to enlarge and maintain the currency of our database of contacts, and to accrue audience interest for each of our clients. They are in contact with thousands of portfolio managers and sellside analysts each month, and are our "secret weapon" in broadening interest in conference calls, booking road trips, and contacting peer holders on a regular basis.
We offer strategic counseling/planning, and have frequently been helpful in major corporate undertakings, such as public or private financings (though we do not buy, sell or trade securities ourselves, nor do we base our compensation on transactions), repositioning, turnarounds, changes of management or business plan and crisis management.
Experienced, Senior-Level Professionals
Allen & Caron senior-level professionals have been involved in investor and shareholder relations, marketing communications, media relations, public relations, and other related disciplines for a major portion of their careers (see "Professional Staff" link at the bottom of this page). Our service base is international, with clients in a quarter of the 50 states in the US, Canada, the UK, Asia, and the European Union. Our proprietary databases, maintained for a decade in a detailed "contact manager," are national and international in scope, with more than 17,000 fund managers and 5,000 sellside analysts.
Our media relations professionals work closely with print, broadcast, wire-service and Internet media, including local and regional business editors and reporters, as well as the national business, financial and trade media. We also work well with other agencies on communications tasks that fall outside our parameters.
We are known for our writing skills, our acuity in presenting ideas, and our ability to convey complex concepts to non-technical audiences. We have, of course, written thousands of news releases, but we also often write annual and interim shareholder reports and policy speeches. We regularly prepare audiovisual presentations, roadshow handouts, white papers, by-lined articles, video b-roll, and numerous other documents and communications tools.
Cost-Effective Service
Allen & Caron services are based on a schedule of hourly rates and are billed monthly against an agreed monthly budget. Most important to our clients is the way we track our charges, which are based on daily time sheets prepared by each professional and accumulated monthly on a job or project basis. We never charge a retainer fee or a fee for "availability," and we do not exceed budgets other than with the permission of the client. We never mark up our expenses.
A Growing List of Satisfied Clients
Long-term account retention has been a hallmark of Allen & Caron, and client additions have been primarily secured as a result of current-client referrals or recommendations from investment banks, institutional portfolio managers and sellside analysts. We believe that the quality, scope and value of the services we provide our clients is reflected by their loyalty and by the fact that our primary sources of new business opportunities are our clients and industry associates.
Professional Staff
Employment Opportunities
