Both Sides of the Table: What IR Taught Me About Being a Production Partner
I have sat in two chairs during my career, and they face each other.
For years I sat on the client side of investor relations for the largest hospitality asset management firm publicly traded at that time. I lived the quarters, the investor days, the announcements that could not slip, and the moments when shareholder activism turned a normal week into a war room. Then I crossed the table. I co-founded an investor relations creative production agency built specifically for those moments. Earlier this year I presented this dual perspective to one of the leading strategic communications firms in the country, and the conversation that followed convinced me it was worth writing down.
This piece is for agency leaders. Not because agencies are the problem. Because agencies are closest to the fix.
The Moments That Matter Look Different From Each Chair
Every public company has a short list of moments where trust is gained or lost based on execution. Investor Days. IPO roadshows. Management transitions. Activist situations. Transaction announcements. The strategy behind these moments can be months in the making. The judgment of them happens in hours.
Here is what I did not fully appreciate until I had worked both sides. The client and the agency are experiencing the same moment through different fears.
The client is worried about their audience. Investors, analysts, employees, the board. Trust with those audiences is gained or lost in real time, and there is no replay.
The agency is worried about the client. Their trust is gained or lost based on how the moment executes. A brilliant strategy that stumbles on stage does not get graded as a brilliant strategy.
Both sides face the same unforgiving math: high complexity, hard deadlines, no second chances. Which means both sides need the same thing. Strategic intelligence, creative excellence, and flawless execution, together, from the start. Not one or two of the three. All three.
Breakdowns Don’t Come From Bad Ideas
In all my years on both sides of the table, I can count on one hand the failures I attribute to a bad strategy. Almost none of the breakdowns I witnessed came from weak thinking. The strategists were smart. The teams were competent. Everyone was well-intentioned.
The breakdowns came from fragmentation.
Too many vendors. Too many handoffs. A video team that never spoke to the presentation designer. A webcast provider who saw the run of show for the first time the night before. An event crew executing a stage design that contradicted the narrative the strategy team had spent months refining. Each vendor doing their fragment competently, and nobody accountable for the whole.
Investor relations and communications teams are still piecing together vendors and tools, each handling a fragment of what should be one unified, controlled experience. When the stakes are low, the seams don’t show. When the stakes go up, the seams are the first thing to tear.
What I Learned When I Switched Sides
When I moved from the client chair to the agency chair, three things became obvious quickly.
Most agencies outsource the services their clients judge them on. Very few firms have the internal resources to be an all-in-one solution, so production gets subcontracted to third parties. That is a rational business decision. It is also a quiet transfer of risk. The agency’s reputation now rests on vendors the client never chose and the agency may barely know.
Most production vendors don’t understand the IR landscape. They can execute. They can light a stage and cut a film. But they don’t know why a disclosure review changes an edit, why the sequencing of a guidance slide matters, or why an activist situation changes the tone of everything. They execute. They don’t develop strategy. In high-stakes capital markets moments, that gap is where mistakes live.
The integration gap is the opportunity. What the market lacks is a partner with a foundational understanding of the IR space and the creative acumen to produce work that holds up on the biggest stage. Not a strategy firm that dabbles in production. Not a production shop that skims a press release. A partner fluent in both.
What Integration Actually Looks Like
Integration is not a philosophy. It shows up in specific moments. Three patterns come up constantly.
When the stakes suddenly go up
Management changes, major announcements, shareholder activism. These are the moments when a narrative needs visual components fast: explainer and narrative films, launch videos, and microsites built to hold and control the story. Speed and message control matter equally, which is why full-service video production and web need to run as one workstream, not two.
When the client has one shot
Pre-IPO roadshows and Investor Days. There are no second chances at a first impression. These moments demand live, hybrid, or virtual event production, executive films, animation, presentation design, and end-to-end project oversight, all pulling in the same direction. This is Investor Day production as a discipline, not a checklist of deliverables.
When there are too many moving parts
Sometimes the client already has the pieces. What they lack is orchestration. The internal point of contact is overwhelmed, and the agency needs someone acting as executive producer: managing vendors, owning timelines, overseeing logistics, and reducing risk for the agency and the client at once. This is the least glamorous version of the work and often the most valuable.
When Should a Production Partner Get Involved?
Earlier than you think. The pattern I saw repeatedly on the client side, and see now from the agency side, is simple: earlier involvement leads to broader impact and less risk.
When production joins at the end, it inherits decisions it cannot fix. The venue is booked, the deck is locked, the timeline is fixed, and the production partner is reduced to damage control. When production joins at the start, staging informs the narrative, the film supports the presentation, the microsite extends the event, and the whole moment reads as one coherent experience.
And to be clear about what this is not. A production partner should never replace an agency’s strategy. The right model enables the agency team to perform at its best and protects the long-term trust the agency has built with its client. The strategy firm owns the thinking. The production partner makes the thinking undeniable in the room.
A Note to Agency Leaders
If you lead a strategic communications or IR advisory firm, here is the honest audit I would run.
Look at your last three high-stakes client moments. Count the vendors. Map the handoffs. Ask who was accountable for the whole experience rather than a fragment of it. If the answer is “our account lead, on top of everything else,” you have found your exposure.
Your clients do not separate your strategy from its execution. Investors in the room do not either. They evaluate confidence, coherence, and credibility as a single impression. The firms that win the next decade of this work will be the ones that close the gap between what they recommend and what actually happens on stage, on screen, and online.
I have sat in both chairs. The view is better when they are on the same side of the table.
Jeremy Robinson is the co-founder and CEO of Cardboard Spaceship, a production partner for investor relations and high-stakes corporate communications. If a moment that matters is on your calendar, the best conversation is the one that happens early. Reach out at [email protected].
FAQ
What is an investor relations production partner? A production partner for IR is a firm that executes the visual and experiential components of investor communications, including video, live events, presentation design, and microsites, with working fluency in capital markets context. It complements a strategy or communications firm rather than replacing it.
Why do Investor Days break down even with strong strategy? Most breakdowns come from fragmentation rather than weak ideas. When multiple disconnected vendors each handle a piece of one investor experience, accountability gaps appear at exactly the moments when deadlines are least forgiving.
Should agencies outsource production for high-stakes client moments? Outsourcing itself is not the problem. Outsourcing to vendors who lack IR fluency, without a single point of accountability for the full experience, is. Agencies protect their client relationships by choosing integrated partners who understand the stakes.
When should a production partner join an engagement? As early as possible. Early involvement lets production decisions inform strategy, broadens the partner’s impact, and reduces execution risk. Late involvement limits the partner to damage control.
