Dear Investor Relations

Dear LampLand Investor Relations,

My name is Alexander F. Drake and my investment firm AFD Capital is a significant shareholder in LampLand. I’d like to congratulate you on your business pivot from being a distributor of “The Clapper” to a lighting store consolidator.  I’m extremely bullish on the lighting industry and I believe LampLand is perfectly positioned as the Louis Vuitton of lighting. I’m also hopeful that the Watt’s Up! promotional sales event will be accretive to Q1 financial results. 

I believe that lighting solutions is the last remaining industry that hasn’t been consolidated by private equity and I think there’s a huge opportunity to roll-up “mom and pop” lighting stores. Overall, you’re all doing a great job. However, I would like to offer you a few suggestions to improve your investor relations efforts. 

I’d like to focus my suggestions on your quarterly conference calls. I have to say, I appreciate you doing these because a lot of microcap companies don’t. I’m not sure if these other companies don’t do calls because they think most investors are uninterested in microcap companies (they’d be right) or they’re scared nobody will show up for the call (probably true). Or maybe they don’t want to call attention to the fact that they have no revenues. I really don’t know why these other microcap companies avoid doing calls, but I applaud your efforts to do them.

My first suggestion is that I think you should hire a professional conference call service instead of having Jerry from the IT department run the calls. I know Jerry from IT is pretty good with technology and I get that you want to save some money. But on the last call, I would have preferred not to hear someone eating a bag of potato chips midway through the call when Jerry forgot to put all the lines on mute.  Same goes for the toilet flush at the end of the call. You’re already paying $10,000 a month for IR services, so I’m sure they can figure out a more professional option.  

For my second suggestion, I think you should skip the long-winded prepared remarks and go straight to Q&A. On the last LampLand call, these prepared remarks consisted of CEO Charles reading your twelve page financial results press release verbatim. I know this because I was following along reading the press release as Charles was speaking. I noticed the words he was narrating were the exact same as the written press release except for the opening sentence where he said “we had another sex full quarter”.  I’m pretty sure he meant to say “successful”. But either way, it sounds like it was a good quarter.  

If you insist on opening remarks before the Q&A, my suggestion would be to keep it to two minutes or less with a few highlights from the quarter. I think it would be acceptable to also have a minute or two of friendly banter back and forth between Charles and CFO Nancy. Or maybe even a comment about the weather. But if you keep the prepared remarks short, I guarantee your audience will be much happier.  Plus, if no analysts show up for the call, and it only lasts a few minutes, you all get the morning off to go play pickleball. 

That reminds me, for my next suggestion, could you also start the calls a bit later than 8 am EST.  Maybe the reason you hold them so early is because you think the financial world revolves around the east coast. Or maybe it’s because you hope nobody will show up at the crack of dawn. Regardless, 8 am PST or later would be appreciated because I would like to be fully caffeinated and alert for the call.

The next suggestion is to avoid using a conference room that backs onto the fire hall because a four alarm fire inevitably breaks out right in the middle of every LampLand conference call. It would be a little less distracting for all if we didn’t have to hear that. 

My last suggestion would surely result in a more pleasant experience for all participants. I know you only take questions from analysts and I’m OK with that. But I think you should make a hard rule that their lines get terminated if:

a) they say “I missed the first part of the call and this question may have already been asked…….”;

b) they say “I’d like to double click on…..”;

c) the operator says “our next question comes from so and so”, and there’s a long delay because the analyst forgot to unmute themselves.  And then finally they say “hello, hello, can you hear me?”;

d) anyone that says "good quarter guys" when it wasn't a good quarter.

In my opinion, these should all be automatic call terminations and maybe should even result in a ban from next quarter’s call.

I hope these suggestions are helpful and I look forward to seeing some of these suggestions implemented for the year-end conference call. If I get some positive feedback from your department, I’d be willing to provide some feedback on your investor relations website.

Sincerely,

Alexander F. Drake

AFD Capital

AFD = April Fool's Day 😄

_{MicroCapClub is an exclusive forum for experienced microcap investors focused on microcap companies (sub $500m market cap) trading on United States, Canadian, European, and Australian markets. MicroCapClub was created to be a platform for experienced microcap investors to share and discuss stock ideas. Since 2011, our members have profiled 1000+ microcap companies. Investors can join our community by applying to become a member or subscribing to gain instant view only access. MicroCapClub’s mission is to foster the highest quality microcap investor Community, produce Educational content for investors, and promote better Leadership in the microcap arena. For more information, visit https://microcapclub.com/ and https://microcapclub.com/summit/}