How a Chauffeur Service Can Make or Break Your Roadshow

When a company is looking for capital or preparing for an initial public offering (IPO), they head out on a roadshow with their bank to meet with and pitch to potential investors. Through a series of short, 45-minute meetings, the company tells their story, presents their financials, shares their outlook and/or five-year plan, to secure interest (and hopefully funds) from institutional investors.

When you take a company’s senior management team out on a roadshow, you need to be confident that even with constant scheduling changes, you will be able to get that CEO, CFO, and CTO to every meeting on time, fully prepared, and able to present their best.

Roadshows require a perfect presentation every single time.

Investors typically book back-to-back pitch sessions so that they can hear from all the available options within a day or two. They make their decisions quickly. If you’re late to a meeting because of poor planning or traffic, the executive team won’t have sufficient time to make their pitch. It may be impossible to reschedule their pitch for another day, either because of the investor’s schedule or theirs. Even if your client does manage to make their pitch, it will be tainted by a bad impression and will be less likely to woo that investor.

Presenting to multiple investors in different cities or states in one week requires a grueling pace. All that travel can wear on personnel who need to be at their best each time they pitch their business. You need someone you trust to ensure your people get where they need to be with minimal hassle so they can be relaxed and refreshed for every presentation.

Doing this requires a team of coordinators who are continually watching the scheduling, looking for changes, checking traffic and mapping routes, and communicating anything relevant to the chauffeur. Making a right turn and taking an alternate route to arrive a few minutes earlier might be the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful pitch.

Arrive at each meeting on time and fully prepared.

Going from meeting to meeting to airport to hotel in different cities requires a fleet of chauffeurs and coordinators accustomed to transporting C-level executives and who understand the grueling logistics of a roadshow schedule.

To give your clients the highest chances of success, and ensure issues don’t arise because of transportation and scheduling surprises, hire a chauffeur service that has a dedicated roadshow division. Even better, find one who started as a roadshow service before they expanded to provide other chauffeur services. If you choose a company like that, you’ll be selecting one that sees its roadshow division as the backbone of their business and the most important part of what they do. They will have experience with every type of roadshow, for every size of business, and can leverage their experience to support your roadshow’s success.

A chauffeur service with a successful track record of coordinating large IPO roadshows will avoid the problems that less experienced services may not be able to overcome. A team has five or six days to raise $500 million. Don’t let a poor choice in chauffeur service reduce the success rate of the roadshow.