What moves you?
I gave it thought during ModernIR’s tenth NIRI National (I think 18 of them total for me now) at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago, here looking north across the river from the 33rd floor. It’s easy to fall into habits and skirt that unique brand of satisfaction bred in a job done well. We humans are given to routine.
Worn out after, Karen and I repaired last weekend to a resort on Arizona’s Carefree Highway, inspiration for an iconic Gordon Lightfoot tune, and were moved to tranquility despite the anvil heat. The desert offers a rich diversity of flora and fauna (extra points for spotting the cottontail) easy to miss in the confrontational brutishness of its mid-June exterior. We embraced it and reflected.
To give our best we must be motivated. A week ago in Chicago, we were clustered at evening with others in the Purple Pig, dining on that gastropub’s moving cuisine. We’ve done it twice now and relished both occasions. This one offered something special.
Space is a premium and so we were seated by another couple, kind and engaged youngsters by Karen’s and my estimation, a few years in age behind us (how time flies). We struck up a conversation.
I didn’t ask them if could share it so I’ll change names to protect privacy. I’ll call him Novak, her Andrea. He was born in Serbia, then Yugoslavia, the son of wealthy parents who lost most everything when war erupted there in the 1990s. They came to the US.
Novak found real estate. What he lacked in language and knowledge he offset with motivation. In realty then, the fax machine was dominating communication and Novak found a man to modify a PC circuit board so it could continuously dispense listings. He’d collect them all in the office and cut and paste and copy and fax, the PC dialing nonstop.
Of course faxing drove people crazy, both recipients and colleagues. But “every morning I had an offer,” Novak said. He was a machine himself. With indomitable motivation to be the best he became it, selling a billion dollars of real estate.
A buyer for a building he was selling was Andrea, and they married and now ten years later they have two children and a real estate development firm with a hundred people and millions in assets and they support a charity theater they created to perpetuate their own sense of what it means to be inspired and moved.
One of my favorite IROs talks about the line between what she calls “mailing it in” and setting oneself apart in our profession. If you’re not careful, investor-relations becomes repetitious. Quarterly reporting, annual reports, road shows, conferences, it runs together. You start dismissing new thinking as an affront to convention (this is true in politics too).
What’s the secret to fresh and new every day? Being Novak. Finding inspiration that moves you to set yourself apart.
What thrills about market structure still after ten years is its never-ending novelty. Today’s investor-relations officer must know Story, sure. But that’s just half the job. The rest today is Structure – the way the market works. The knowledge of it is powerful and it breathes added vigor into the patterns of our profession.
Motivation. I remember when Tim Tebow tweeted that one-word anthem. We don’t all have to be Novak, conquering heights. But learning market structure today is motivation – and since Structure is as important to price now as Story (yup, true), you’ll be enhancing your career.
And that’s uniquely satisfying.
