Ten notes on building an IR function before you go public.

Start two years out, and do it in sequence.

The work is the same whether you begin now or during the filing. The only difference is whether it happens in order or all at once. Sharpen the story for institutional investors on the next round first; then lay in the earnings process, the investor targeting, and the disclosure discipline a public debut demands.

Companies that do this a year or two ahead debut from a position of strength. Everyone else scrambles.

Pick an IPO date — not as a commitment, as an anchor.

Set a target date, not as a hard line in the sand, but as an end point from which to draw the critical path backwards. The banker bake-off, the S-1 draft, testing the waters, the analyst day, the guidance model, mock earnings — each one gets a real deadline the moment there is a date to count back from.

Without one, everything is important and nothing is scheduled.

Your most important relationship is FP&A.

An IR function lives or dies inside the finance team — those people are your brothers and sisters in fighting. Get a genuinely good FP&A partner early and protect that relationship.

The reason is not collegiality. The single non-negotiable requirement for going public is the ability to forecast your own business with consistency: the market will forgive a modest quarter, but it will not underwrite a company that cannot predict itself, and a business that misses its own plan twice loses the multiple long before it loses the quarter. That capability is built inside FP&A years before it is ever tested on an earnings call.

Six kinds of investor. Six different conversations.

Venture, private equity, crossovers, the public mutual fund complexes, sovereign wealth, and strategics are built differently and are underwriting entirely different things. Running the same deck at all six is the most common unforced error in a pre-IPO process.

Venture is buying a founder and a market. Private equity is buying durable cash generation and asking what the business looks like levered. Crossovers are the bridge — they will hold you private and public, so every meeting is an audition for the public-company version of you. The long-only complexes are deciding whether you are a decade-long position, which is why hard questions from a good one are a buy signal and an easy meeting is the bad outcome. Sovereign wealth brings patience and scale on a different horizon, with its own governance sensitivities. Strategics are dual-use in every conversation: part partner, part competitor, always taking notes.

Same company, same numbers. Six different orders of emphasis, six different relationships, six different definitions of a good meeting.

Management time is the scarcest asset you have. Spend it surgically.

Conferences are useful with precise targeting and a reason to be in the room. They are a genuine waste otherwise — a CEO spending two days in front of investors who will never own the stock is the most expensive line item nobody records. Two well-chosen conferences a year usually beats five, and the right advice is sometimes to skip one.

A non-deal roadshow to five or eight high-priority accounts, on their territory, generally does more than a conference does. You are not there to pitch a raise. You are there because you care enough about the fit to show up in person.

This is precisely why IR belongs on the front lines before you are public. Someone has to take the first meeting, qualify the room, and protect the calendar — so that when management does show up, it is in front of the accounts that matter.

Tell the story. Revise it when you must. Then repeat it relentlessly.

Simplify past the point where you are bored of hearing yourself say it — that is roughly where the market is starting to hear it for the first time. Watch the comparison that gets attached to you, because the wrong one is fatal: being called a legacy category’s 2.0 is a death sentence for how you get valued.

Then give investors a way to track you. A standing quarterly update to thirty or forty funds, whether or not you are raising: here is what we said we would do, here is what we did, check back in three months and watch us execute again. Adjust the story when the business genuinely changes — and be explicit that you are adjusting it, rather than hoping nobody noticed.

Conviction is built by watching a company hit what it said it would hit, on a schedule. There is no shortcut that substitutes for the schedule.

Five good investors beat fifty. Start warming them six months early.

Quality, not quantity. Build a target list of forty to fifty names, cross-reference it against everyone you have already met, and give yourself the balance of the year to make one real point of contact with each.

Colder but high-quality funds need six to nine months of lead time before they are useful to you. Start early for an unglamorous reason: nobody wants fifteen calls on their calendar in a single week.

Do not ignore the sell-side just because you are private.

Analysts talk to the buy side about private companies. Think of them as quasi-journalists who amplify your message, and as a buffer that tells you what sentiment actually is, separate from the investors themselves.

You do not need broad coverage yet — two or three influential names is the goal. The highest-leverage version of this: have one genuinely friendly analyst host a prepped roundtable, with questions agreed in advance, and write the note that frames you the way you intend to be framed.

Run mock earnings two quarters out. Build the big four.

CEO script, CFO script, Q&A, press release. Getting those four shells drafted and into a binder does more for IPO preparedness than any deck, because they are the artifacts you will reuse every quarter for the rest of the company’s life. Run live mock Q&A with bankers, existing investors, and advisors who will actually push.

And draft the S-1 before the bankers touch it, so the message starts from the company rather than the banking team.

Done well, this is worth a turn or two of the multiple.

Your multiple is not set by your numbers alone. It is set by how confidently the market can underwrite the durability behind them — which category you get filed under, how legible the disclosure is, and who is on the other side of the table. Two companies with identical financials routinely trade at very different multiples, and the gap is narrative, evidence, and ownership.

The category question alone can be worth several turns. Investors are constantly calibrating where between two categories a company actually sits, and they see straight through a company marketing itself into the more expensive one without the evidence to hold it.

Run the arithmetic once. At any real scale, a turn or two of revenue multiple is worth more than a decade of what a serious IR function costs. That is the case for doing this properly, and it is the only case that matters.