Chuck Bennett's Business Begins Before the Bell

When a company reaches the stock market, the opening bell supplies the photograph. The acknowledgments tell another story. In February 2026, as the Denver technology company ROC prepared to begin trading on Nasdaq, its lawyer Joseph Lucosky thanked the bankers, lawyers and company executives involved. Among them were Chuck Bennett and Bret Shapiro of CORE IR & PR, credited with supporting ROC throughout the process. Bennett's place in that list offers a useful introduction to his working life: close to the transaction, alongside the people helping a business explain itself.

ROC began trading on February 20. Its initial public offering closed three days later, with four million shares sold at $6 apiece and $24 million in gross proceeds before underwriting discounts, commissions and expenses. The Benchmark Company was the sole book running manager. Bennett's contribution belonged to the supporting cast Lucosky named. There is a great deal of work in that phrase, “supporting cast.” Finance has unusually elaborate closing credits.

Bennett is CEO and co-founder of CORE IR & PR, the business founded in 2009 as Cor Prominence. His earlier career included selling financial information and creating a membership operation for securities professionals. Those are distinct businesses with a recurring audience: people who need to make decisions about companies, money and professional relationships. Following that audience through his career tells a more useful story than treating each job title as a fresh beginning.

A broker's problem, before a company's story

Bennett studied at Long Island University, earning a Bachelor of Science in finance. He attended from 1985 to 1990. Before CORE, he was vice president of sales and marketing at CreditRiskMonitor.com, a financial-information business. That position put selling and financial analysis in the same sentence well before investor relations became his principal business. The product was information; the commercial task was finding people who would pay to use it.

His next venture addressed another part of the securities industry. In 2003, Bennett created Registered Representatives Arbitration Defense Associates, known as RRADA. Its membership structure served individual registered representatives, or stockbrokers, and extended to broker-dealers through their representatives. The service concerned access to legal assistance. Even its name dispensed with romance: five words, each carrying a piece of the business proposition. Nobody was likely to mistake it for a lifestyle brand.

RRADA brought Bennett into a business organized around the needs of brokers and their firms. His later market-outreach role at CorProminence focused on retail broker-dealer and institutional buy-side relationships. The continuity is visible in the people involved. Brokers remained part of the audience; company management teams became part of the assignment. Instead of treating financial communication as a document sent into the world, the work required knowing who might receive it.

Two founders, several kinds of conversation

At CORE, Bennett holds the CEO role while fellow co-founder Scott Gordon serves as president. Gordon manages client corporate-communications strategy. Their responsibilities place the business of running the firm alongside the business of helping clients speak. Bennett oversees investor relations, corporate advisory and public relations. The scope matters because a company can encounter investors, journalists and prospective business partners within the same week, each asking a different version of what happens next.

The firm's market-outreach work includes introductions to institutional investors, retail broker-dealers, fund managers, family offices, investment bankers and analysts. These audiences have different functions. An analyst's questions about a company do not automatically become a fund manager's decision to own its shares. A meeting is a meeting, even when everybody leaves with an impressive business card. CORE's range of relationships describes the routes available for a conversation, rather than a promised destination.

The corporate-communications work supplies the material for those conversations: presentations, investment theses, press releases, earnings-call scripts and responses to investor inquiries. These are practical objects, each with an audience and an occasion. Bennett's remit brings them into the same organization as the people arranging introductions. A presentation needs someone to read it; a relationship needs something worth discussing. His firm works on both sides of that exchange.

The calendar has an opinion

Conferences are a recurring part of Bennett's work. In July 2024, Benzinga identified him as a member of the advisory council for its SmallCap Conference. The event's September announcement also listed him among its featured speakers. That placed him in a group drawn from investor relations, investment banking, portfolio management and other financial services. It was an industry gathering built around precisely the companies and audiences CORE serves.

For January 2025, Bennett announced CORE's participation as a Gold Sponsor of The Microcap Conference at the Borgata Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City. His post described the January 28-30 event as a chance to meet the team and discuss company visibility and investor engagement. The accompanying graphic carried both CORE IR and CORE Digital branding. A casino hotel is a wonderfully literal setting for a discussion of risk, although the conference's business was introductions.

CORE's approach to these events includes selecting conferences around client needs and, where possible, arranging roadshows around the same dates. The firm explicitly considers management's time and budget. That gives the conference circuit a less glamorous but more useful dimension: scheduling. One executive trip can contain several investor conversations. The gathering provides a location; planning determines what can happen while the company is there.

Afterward comes the part that rarely makes the event photograph. CORE's program-management work includes reports on roadshows and meetings, analysis of feedback, and regular strategy calls with client teams. Those conversations examine what interested investors, what discouraged them and where the message needed work. Weekly or fortnightly reviews keep the process moving. The resulting cycle gives Bennett's communications business an essential second audience: the client needs to hear what the investor heard.

Public relations joins the brief

CORE Public Relations was founded in 2020, adding a dedicated agency operation to the wider business. Bennett is listed as its CEO and co-founder. Its services include brand positioning, content, digital communication and work with executives on their public presence. The expansion widened the set of people a client's story might need to reach. Shareholders remained part of the picture, alongside audiences encountering the company through media coverage and its own communications.

The firm's team makes those different assignments visible. Alongside the investor-relations and corporate-access specialists are public-relations professionals, a presentation specialist, social-media staff and a graphic designer. Bennett's CEO remit spans that collection of jobs. The arrangement puts the written investment case in the same business as the slide on which it appears and the public messages surrounding it. Even a carefully considered argument eventually needs a readable slide.

His own public messages sometimes turn toward colleagues. Sharing a team introduction for Kati Waldenburg, CORE's managing director of public relations, he wrote: “Thankful for our PR rockstar, Kati Waldenburg”. It is a brief note, with a much lighter register than an investor presentation. It also gives a small, direct glimpse of Bennett speaking in his own voice: naming a colleague and offering thanks, without turning the moment into a management lecture.

“Thankful for our PR rockstar, Kati Waldenburg”

Chuck Bennett, on LinkedIn

A second ledger in Sea Cliff

Outside the firm, Bennett manages the Beacon Light Foundation, a family foundation whose giving has supported more than 50 charitable organizations nationwide each year. The number describes the breadth of its giving, rather than a disclosed dollar total. It adds a different set of organizations to a career otherwise crowded with companies and market participants. He lives in Sea Cliff, New York, with his wife and two children.

That brings the story back to the scale of the individual. Bennett's working address is associated with CORE in Garden City; his home is in another Long Island community. His education, earlier ventures and current business connect him to the same region, while the firm's conference activity takes the work elsewhere. Chicago, Atlantic City and New York appear in the professional record as places to meet people, rather than trophies on a travel map.

CORE also offers advice before and after an initial public offering, including business-plan development, corporate structure, board and executive-team composition, and introductions connected with capital formation. Those assignments can precede a full investor-relations engagement. They give Bennett's firm a place in the preparation as well as the continuing communications work. The distinction helps explain why an adviser may enter a company's story before the stock has a trading history. There are decisions to discuss, people to introduce and a business to describe while the public-market chapter is still being written. The opening date is a milestone in that work, with more communication to follow it.

The February 2026 acknowledgment from ROC's counsel gives those relationships a concrete recent setting. A company reached Nasdaq. Its advisers named the people who helped it get there. Bennett appeared beside his CORE colleague, with the bankers and lawyers credited for their own responsibilities. For a CEO whose business includes introductions, messages and the conversations that follow, being named in that company is an apt place to end: the bell has rung, and someone remembered the work before it.