Six cities, four days: how road-show travel actually gets done

By the time a company gets to the road-show phase of an IPO, the founder is exhausted, the CFO is exhausted, and the bankers are running on a kind of coffee-and-adrenaline metabolism that medicine has not yet named. The travel is the last thing anyone should be thinking about — but it's the thing most likely to break the trip.

We ran a recent six-city, four-day road show that hit San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, New York, and Greenwich. Twenty-six meetings, two media stops, one analyst day. Each city got a full day on the ground; each day ended with a wheels-up in time for the team to land, eat, sleep, and arrive at the next opening meeting on time.

The airplane work was the easy part — a midsize jet routed by our trip-owner, with crew duty time managed across the whole week, FBO handling pre-arranged at each stop. The hard part was the ground game: car services that knew which entrance to use at the Marriott Marquis, ground-handling that could meet the airplane on arrival and beat the team to the FBO on departure, catering that respected the CFO's actual eating preferences instead of the catering company's standard luxury menu.

The lesson, repeated across maybe forty road shows since: if the airplane is the most-discussed part of the planning, something else has been under-attended. Get a trip-owner who's run a road show before, and the airplane gets pre-decided and ignored. Everyone's energy goes to the things that actually move the deal.

If you're a banker reading this and you've got a road show coming up — call us before the calendars are locked. We can save you a week of email by getting on a thirty-minute kickoff and laying out the trip top to bottom.