Adam Torres and John Exley discuss the Microcap Conference.
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Show Notes:
Listen to the Microcap Conference coverage. In this episode, Adam Torres interviews John Exley, CEO of Acorn Management Partners, explore Acorn Management Partners and the Microcap Conference.
Watch Full Interview:
About John Exley
Every day “our” technology proves that traditional IR cannot compete with Acorn’s results. .
Acorn’s technology tracks every engagement with qualified brokers who have clients – that’s plural, clients. Real-time, they know what was read, ignored, forwarded…they track every phase of your engagement, and they share it with you. If brokers skip over a piece in your investment thesis, they’ll know, and course-correct.
Don’t use mailers, emails and Hype… Grow the right way! Not all volume is good volume! they’re brokers at heart, and in method – more calls with more results, backstopped with machine learning and tracking technology.
Acorn makes over 3,000 outbound calls monthly to brokers and institutions in our CRM on your company’s behalf explaining your investment thesis. They are constantly increasing the amount of broker/investor presentations thus creating a broader audience day after day, month after month.
An established investor pool is about 70% institutional and 30% individual investors. There are over 5,000 institutional investment managers in the US, and 600,000 registered brokers. Acorn focuses on brokers for both retail and institutional buyers.
More calls, more results, more metrics. Simple put measurables…
Quality outreach to investment professionals, a mandate to grow your total investor pool. Machine learning helps us target, deep analytics assess their success,
Shareholders, Market Cap, ETF, NYSE, NASDAQ, OTC, Distribution, Investor Relations, IR, Consulting,
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today I am in Atlantic city, New Jersey, and we are at the micro cap conference, 2025, it’s my first time coming out to this conference in person.
We’ve been covering the event. Remotely now for the last couple of years. And let me tell you, it is amazing. I went to the kickoff launch party yesterday. It was packed as companies from all over represented here. And I was able to snag one of the sponsors, John, to come on the show. So John man, first off, welcome.
Thank you. So is this your first time at, at this type of microcap conference? Or have you been to one of these before? I’ve been to, I’ve been to quite a few all the way back from when I was a broker and I would come to a lot of these, look at the companies. And now I come more from the sponsor side of showing how to bring brokers into these companies.
What, what keeps you coming back to this? Because I’m telling you, I do a lot of conferences, John, and this one is fun, man. There’s a lot of different people, a lot of different entrepreneurs from different companies, CEOs. It’s just a great time. What keeps you coming back? Really, the relationships, the people.
I like looking at the companies. I like talking. Maybe give some of these guys some insight to what I’ve learned over the years and Really drive some values and some perspectives that a lot of these issuers or companies don’t really look at in the way they should. Tell us a little bit more about, about your company.
So well, Acorn management partners, we are a, what we call a professional relations company. So we have offices in Atlanta and in Sarasota, Florida. And what we do is we’re hired by actual, the public companies and we call brokerage firms. So we talk to individual brokers on a rate. Of about 3000 phone calls per month, per client it equates to about 700 to 800 verbal presentations.
We’re not talking to brokers and saying, buy this stock. We’re not talking to them and saying, buy anything. What we’re saying is here’s the investment thesis. Does this make sense? They say, no, that’s fine. Next guy. The guy goes, yeah. What? Tell me more about this company. Why do you think it’s undervalued?
So then you go into the investment thesis. Then you go to comparables and catalysts. What companies can we compare this company to? What catalyst are they projecting to change that value gap of the next two to three years? I’m not looking for quick fixes. I’m not looking for something to move instantaneous.
I want, I want to show a value for a broker so that that broker can show that. So as we go through, we go through different steps of what we call a sales process. And then as we go through that, the broker says, Hey, I saw this company execute on their model. I saw this company do what they were supposed to do.
Then that broker starts opening that client to their clients. So they have an average broker has between three to five hundred accounts and runs probably anywhere between call it six hundred to a billion AUM. So assets under management. So what we want to do is that broker then finds the suitability for a company here and and I won’t name it but I was just talking to one guy here and I was talking to him and I mean he’s got a company that’s trading at a right under a twelve million dollar market cap.
69 million in revenues, right? Yeah. So if you take that, if you use a sprouts or somebody else in the industry, they’re trading a 0. 7 times revenues. He’s trading at less than 0. 001 times revenues. So if you look at that projected out, then what was my obvious question? Well, what are your revenues going to look like next year or the following year?
So let’s, let’s do what the U S military does and reverse map it. So let’s go three years forward. Where do you think your revenues are going to be? How are you going to get there? How much money will you need? And then let’s go to now and then let’s project a value moving forward. And so that’s kind of what we do.
And so without saying the company’s name, just to continue the story. So let’s say this particular company starts working with you. Now, what happens is within your model you would be reaching out or your team be reaching out to the brokers and telling their story. Am I off on that? I want to make sure I understand.
Correct. Right. It tells that investment thesis. That’s where you go. If the investor cares, what good does it do for an issue or a company? To do something and they create volume, right? Which that’s a misnomer in the first place. That’s really not a measurable number, but they create volume, but they come in and out.
Well, you wasted money, time and effort, because really if you look at a company and you want to know how to grow a company, and this is all from, you know, my hedge fund days. And so you want to look at shareholder base. So if you have five to 6, 000 shareholders round lot over 1, 000, you trade 100, 000 shares a day.
That’s your average. If you have 10 shareholders round lot over 1, 000, you trade a million shares a day. So volume is a byproduct of shareholder growth and expansion. Yeah. So why are you worried about volume worry about shareholder growth? Hmm, right. Basic economics 101, right? Supply and demand. If you reduce supply and increase demand you get market cap expansion and volume growth.
And it just takes time, but it’s based on shareholder growth and execution of the company. Speaking of the shareholder growth and just getting their investment thesis out there without a cut. Let’s juxtapose this with your company, obviously, then you have somebody that’s going out there. And, you know, I think you said 3, 000 contacts or relationships that you would be sharing that.
3, 000 phone calls per month, 700 to 800 presentations. And we do it through a CRM database management system. So we have 480, 000 brokers in our database. So we don’t go to the same. Every client builds their own network, broker network. So it’s independent. It’s not a Rolodex. So every company is built based upon that company’s fundamentals and that company’s model.
Because an oil and gas guy is not buying a biotech. Of course, of course. So, you’re going to talk PV10s with oil and gas, you’re going to talk about PDUFAs and different things with oil and, with biotechs or whatever. So, those metrics are different, so those brokers should be different and those pools of assets are different.
And so without a company like yours, how are microcap or how are people in this space? How are they trying to, you know, share that thesis in the tradition, let’s say without you there? Cause it feels like it’s a hard story to tell. Like you look at this particular company you’re talking about and you give those numbers and you’re like, well, they don’t necessarily specialize in going out there and doing what you just mentioned.
Like it’s a, it’s a different way to tell the story. Well. The, the truth is the way that it’s been set up for years and years is companies go to conferences. Yeah. And they try to get their story out. Yep. How many brokers have you met here? Yeah, none. None? None. So it’s neat for them to get it out to bankers or get in front of analysts in that direction.
The question is, how do you get out in front of the investment community? Yes. That’s what I built Acorn Torum. We’re the only company in the world that does it. Yeah. It’s new to me. Cause I, when you said it, I’m like, wait a minute, that is, that’s different. And I haven’t, I’ve done a lot of interviews, man.
I’m over 6, 000 interviews in and I’m like, what? You do it like this, but it makes it. But when you, when the way you explain it, it’s very logical. Like, what do you do? Otherwise you put out a press release, you do some other things. And I’ll get you that, right? There’s nothing wrong with that. But you know, that, that relationship side in those conversations, you’re, you’re doing a roadshow in mass, but at the like scaled roadshow.
But customized and tailored, not a random email that goes to somebody like you’ve done interviews. So yeah, how many interviews you have you done with somebody? You never talked to him, didn’t know anything about it, didn’t sit in front of him and didn’t create a relationship. How many of those weren’t?
Yeah, none. Yeah. You have to have a relationship, so you have to get that broker because the broker is going to have a need. Which is interesting because the broker’s need is going to be the exact same need that’s in that broker’s book. Because people do business with people they know or like. So, when you go back to a news release, so why do news releases not work?
Mm hmm. Because if you don’t understand the investment thesis, how that news release applies to the catalyst that we talked about that proves the comparable. Mm hmm. Then the news is nothing more than one sheet of paper. It means nothing. Yeah. But if you add that news to an understanding of the company, to how that company’s comparables work, and then what this catalyst is doing, this news event, a catalyst, right, which you turn actually what it changes from a catalyst to what we call a validator in the next step, because now the company’s validated their ability to execute turning the catalyst into a validator or a news release.
And it puts it back on the radar for that broker. Yeah, it puts it back on the radar so that now when it comes across the desk, if that happens to be how it comes across their desk, then, then it’s like, Oh, I remember these guys that are, I remember this company. Oh, they, they did it. Okay. Maybe we take another look.
Well, and then that’s the whole thing about us. We make seven to 800 conversations. That doesn’t mean they’re buying. Yeah. I don’t care about that. I hate to say it that way. Yeah. What I want to do is get it on their screen. Of course. So as they’re looking now, they’re like, Oh wow, that company has its own value right there.
Just on their radar amongst all the rest of the companies that aren’t working with a company like yours or don’t know, haven’t broken through the noise. Exactly. It’s awesome. John, last thing I want you to do, I know it’s a busy conference. You got a lot to do. I want you to look in the camera, tell people how they can follow up, how they can learn more about your company.
Well, I appreciate your time and then being here. We’re at WWW. I guess you don’t say that anymore. They were my partners. com. And we have our, our page there. We also have No, we work primarily only with issuers. Yeah, we don’t, we don’t do anybody else. Amazing. Everybody that’s watching, just so you know, we’ll definitely put the links in the show notes, so you can just click on the link and head right on over, check out the website.
And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re putting out new content, new ideas. And hopefully new inspiration to help you along in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button.
And Hey, John, appreciate you make some time for you so much. Thank you. And remember mission matters.