Marketing.

Listen up, all you young whippersnapper geologists out there. Yes, you at the back, the spotty one staring down the microscope. Are you looking to forge a career in the junior sector? Do you yearn for financial success? Are you driven by the tingly thrill of discovery? Do you see yourself as a future captain of the extractive industry? Yes?

Well then, there’s a key skill you need to learn if you want to rise above humble core logging and soil sampling. It’s called prostitution marketing.

Prostitution Is Fun.

For most geologists, the words “marketing” and “fun” go together like “testicles” and “cancer”. It’s not something they look forward to or do willingly without being blackmailed or threatened. But pitching shamelessly for that all-important injection of cash to drill the discovery hole is a vital skill.

See, the average earth scientist doesn’t want to be sitting across the board room table from some bored suits. It’s a world they don’t understand. Units, discounts to market, debentures, warrants, secured debt, hold periods. Good God, it’s really confusing and feels so… so… dirty when all they actually want to do is hammer rocks and drink beer.

There are many different flavours of financing, some explained here in a previous blog posting, and one feature common to all of them is the marketing road trip. You and the boss, going from board room to bored room, cap in hand, telling the company tale, united by the humiliations you endured on the road. Marketing trips can be a day, a week, 2 weeks on the road, and it’s hard work. Keeping your sanity 4 days in to a trip, with markets tumbling all around you, is brutally hard.

As a particularly forlorn specimen once commented: “If I died and went to hell, it would take me at least a week to notice I wasn’t still on that marketing trip.”

Who Invited The Geologist?

It’s important to remember that under NO circumstances should geologists be sent to market on their own. DO NOT allow one into a Meeting with a fund or a corporate finance team without adult supervision. The risk of them blathering on about their pet geological theory is just too horrible a scenario for any competent CEO to allow.

What’s it like on the road you ask? Well, at best, road trips are a grim daily routine of taxis, 45-minute meetings and hurried lunches on the fly as you and the boss tell the company story over and over and over. And over (Stoppit. We get the point. Ed.) Each time you tell it you refine it slightly, incorporating changes prompted by the subtle clues you’ve gleaned from the previous meeting’s audience. Yawning, giggling, vomiting, hives – that sort of thing. By the last meeting, it’s perfection; convincing, professional, and all too fucking late.

Buy A Decent Suit, You Slob.

Dressed in all-fitting suit, or that nasty tweed jacket which was briefly fashionable in the mid-1980s, you step off a frozen Bay Street sidewalk into the 24th floor reception area of MegaBank. Weighed down by 30 copies of the corporate powerpoint, your glasses steam up as you search through your ratty backpack for the roll of crumpled up maps and sections; the one you left on the food hall table at lunch but haven’t realized yet.

The beautiful receptionist offers you water or coffee from the glitzy chrome steampunk thing around the corner, just as your lunchtime curry begins the fight for freedom whatever way it can get out. After a hasty toilet break, best described as a primitive artistic rendition of a flock of sparrows, you’re finally ushered into the meeting room. With your hands still wet from the loo break, redolent with the heady scent of toilet deodorizer, you now have to shake the hand of your 1.30pm meeting. They notice they’re still damp. Nice.

Twenty-five interminable minutes later, it’s over and you’re back on the sidewalk, freezing your nuts off. Fifteen minutes into your pitch, the money manager told you he’s still dealing with redemptions and won’t be deploying any capital until Q4 2037. Root canal work would’ve been more fun than the last 10 minutes of that meeting.

Leaving On A Jet Plane

International trips can be really gruelling. Meetings all day, a hurried taxi ride to Heathrow to catch the 7pm to Frankfurt. Hotel by 11pm and up early for the 7.30am breakfast meeting. Another full day with a lunchtime presentation to 5 high-net-worths who won’t drink anything that costs less than $350 a bottle, followed by a dinner meeting. Rinse. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat.

Sorry. You’re Cancelled.

Meetings are frequently cancelled at the last moment. As a fund manager friend told me last week, while we watched geologist after geologist drone on at a conference, the money people really don’t care about you or your microscopic company until they figure out how they can make money off you.

Once you’ve got your head around that -properly around it, not just lip service- the trips get easier. You have to stop taking it personally. It’s a bit like the line from the TV series Band of Brothers when Sergeant Spiers tells the men that the only way they can become effective soldiers is to realise that they’re already dead. Only then can they do their jobs.

There’s Thousands Of The Buggers

It’s not about you or your projects. It’s just maths. There are 1,200 other resource companies just like yours in Canada and hundreds more in Australia (although they’re run by Australians so you have a natural advantage over them.) Mr Fund Manager has to filter all of them down to a portfolio of maybe 30 companies at most. So, your amazing outcrop of dumortierite with its staggering implications for the metallogeny of your Greenlandic moose pasture doesn’t fucking matter if they can’t make money off it.

If something more compelling crops up, or one of their portfolio companies publishes a hot news release, you’re shit out of luck; they’ll cancel your 11am without compunction.

During one particularly gloomy trip I went on to New York, every meeting bar one was cancelled on one of the days. Me and the IR consultant stared at each all day across numerous cups of cold, over-strong coffee. I resented him for wasting my time with a bunch of cancellations and he knew I wouldn’t use him again. What fun we had.

Hello. Is It Me You’re Looking For?

Half the time the bankers are doing someone a favour by meeting with you. They’re filling up the road trip schedule for the IR consultant buddy you hired to walk you around town for 2 days.

Others might be genuinely curious about your silver or gold exploration pitch but only because they’re taking a broader look at the sector. Then there are the serial monologuers who love to hear themselves talk. They’ll treat you to a 45 minute lecture on the supply and demand of Albanian met’ coal. Joy. Some will be so disinterested that you wonder why you’re even there. You spend 30 minutes watching your 3pm answer text messages, while you bravely push on to the investment highlights on page 17 of your deck.

Nyet.

If you’re really unlucky, you run up against the hard-nosed analyst. The polymath buy-side quant from Russia or India, out to impress the portfolio manager boss. They’re really clever, much cleverer than you and they’re sadists who love to humiliate idiot earth scientists. The moment you start, they’re barking questions about power costs, reagent consumption and the grinding index for your ore, even though 1) they know you can’t answer, 2) you’re pitching a grass roots exploration play on Baffin Island, and 3) you’re using up precious pitching time answering their bloody irrelevant questions. Ding. Time’s up.

Soul destroying doesn’t adequately describe those meetings.

The Clouds Parted

But one day, one precious gorgeous day, as you look around the table at the end of the meeting, you realise the mining team from the bank likes it. They get it. You gave a top-notch explanation, sharpened and honed by years of sordid, stinky road show experiences, and now it’s odds on they’ll help you find investors for your financing, arrange a buy-side roadshow for you AND perhaps even initiate research coverage.

On your way to the airport you phone your mum in Vancouver to tell her you finally had a good day and they really liked your project. “That’s nice, dear” she says. Woohoo. Winning.

Don’t Forget

Just like those dodgy PhD’s from the weird on line universities, this story is based on my personal life experiences. If you recognise any of your own experiences in here, I’d love to hear from you via the underused comments box. Actually it does get used quite a bit, but it’s mostly garbage from some strange religious nutbar spammer who’s started spamming me in German. Verdammter Idiot. Anywho, if this piece hasn’t put you off being a geologist, or caused you to resign from your new geologist IR role, please subscribe to urbancrows.com via the cheap and nasty subscription box that I artlessly chucked in near the top of the page. I’ll be sure to email you more sleaze about the junior sector from time to time.

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