Conference Calls

Apr 27, 2012

Jeffrey L Minch
President, CEO
512-656-1383 cell
jminch@littlefield.com

I received a phone call from a shareholder earlier this week inquiring about how we managed our conference calls.

He was interested in the mechanics of the conference calls in general and how we had evolved from purely verbal reports to a mix of multi-media including both voice and visual.

Part of the question was targeted toward the subject of the evolution of regulatory messaging and communication in general from the perspective of using all available technology to broaden the appeal and breadth of the message — more info to more people in a timelier manner.

A good question and one that provoked some thought on my part.

We have historically conducted quarterly earnings conference calls using VCall, a division of Precision IR with the IR standing for investor relations.  This company, with its different divisions, provides such services to public companies of all types.

Vcall also provides the opportunity to use slides which are displayed in conjunction with the conference call.  Several quarters ago, we added the slides.  The slides as presented on the Vcall site are next to indecipherable.  You cannot effectively see them.

We also provide a written transcript, a voice recording and the slides on our website after the conference call.  The slides on our website are much easier to read and understand just because of their larger format.

I have received a number of appreciative utterances from folks who have reviewed the slides on our website.  This is gratifying as we had some misgivings as to whether this would be effective.  It obviously is effective.

In all, we have taken an “old school” and traditional approach to this communication challenge.  I would give us passing grades for having incorporated the verbal and the visual.  In the future we may change that approach.

We have put up a better website though we need to update some content and we have reached out to our shareholders, stakeholders and other interested parties through the blog which provides a more timely and more detailed insight into the Company.  More like a conversation.

We have not provoked any meaningful conversation on the web blog but I do receive a substantial amount of conversation from folks who have been to the website.

One of the natural outgrowths of this conversation is to question whether we might some day simply use the website as the sole locus for the conference call slide presentation and use a “phone bridge” for the verbal portion of the communication.  This can certainly be done given current technology.  This was, in part, the purpose of the gentleman’s phone call.

The only other consideration is whether using the website and the phone bridge would satisfy the Security and Exchange Commission’s requirements under Regulation FD.  This is a bit of fiction really as Regulation FD is really all about “fair disclosure” rather than “full disclosure.”  I suspect it would.

In any event, there is no question that the Company could use its current technology platform to subsume the requirements for a conference call and this is an idea that we will evaluate and upon which we will likely conduct an experiment.  Like a lot of things in life, it is an iterative approach in which small steps accumulate into big changes.  In this instance, it would also likely be a money saver. 

This conversation reminds me of one of my favorite pictures — the juxtaposition of a 1982 vintage Compaq computer (Osborne Executive) and a 2007 iPhone.  Already the 2007 iPhone is a bit long in the tooth.  But the quarter of a century difference in time is a show stopper.

The comparison is quite stark.

• The iPhone has 100 x the computing capacity of the Compaq computer.
  
• The iPhone is 100 x as fast as the Compaq computer.
  
• The iPhone costs 1/10^th of the cost of the Compaq computer.
  
• The iPhone is 1/100^th the size and weight of the Compaq computer.

If you are familiar with Moore’s Law — computing capacity doubles every 18-24 months at a decreasing cost — then the comparison is not totally unexpected.  We touched on this subject in this blog post http://littlefield.com/2012/04/21/technology-in-a-bingo-hall/.

In some ways that is what is happening in this conversation — the evolution of communication and messaging technology with the passage of time and the development of organic capabilities that did not exist just a short period of time ago.

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