The Message Has Two Audiences - CORE IR & PR Built One Room for Both

There is a peculiar moment in the life of a small public company when the science may be sound, the contracts may be signed, and the quarterly call may still land like a plate dropped in an empty restaurant. Nobody heard it. Or worse, the few people who heard it understood three different things.

CORE IR & PR makes its living in that moment. The Garden City firm serves small and mid-sized companies that need investors to understand a business, journalists to see a story and executives to repeat the same essential truth in both rooms. The work ranges from investor targeting and non-deal roadshows to earnings scripts, media training, crisis communications, websites, SEO and social media. The menu is wide because the problem is not.

The problem is translation. A technical founder speaks product. An analyst hears assumptions. A reporter listens for consequence. A retail investor looks for a sentence that can survive the trip home. CORE's proposition is that these are not four separate communications jobs. They are one story under four kinds of pressure.

The agency's product is not simply attention. It is agreement about what the company means before attention arrives.

A trader, an editor and a CEO walk into the same brief

Scott Gordon, CORE's president and co-founder, began on the New York Mercantile Exchange, clerking in the crude-oil and heating-oil pits before working in futures, fund operations, financial modeling and software marketing. That career is useful context. A trading floor is an unforgiving communications laboratory: price is the audience answering back.

Gordon and CEO Chuck Bennett founded the firm in 2009 under the name Cor Prominence. Over time, the practice widened. Investor relations came to sit alongside capital-markets advice, corporate communications, public relations and digital work. In 2020, CORE Public Relations was formed as a dedicated PR operation. This was less a leap into a neighboring business than an admission that the walls between audiences had already fallen.

A chief executive now moves from an analyst call to a podcast to LinkedIn without changing clothes, let alone mental models. A claim made for one audience can be clipped and delivered to every other audience before lunch. In that environment, the old organizational habit - IR over here, PR over there, digital somewhere near the interns - creates a liability. Contradictions travel faster than corrections.

The three-part machine

CORE describes its method with three blunt labels: right message, right audience, right execution. The simplicity is helpful. It also hides the amount of work underneath.

First, the firm turns the company into an intelligible argument. That may mean a presentation, an investment thesis, a press release, an earnings-call script or a cleaner explanation of value drivers beyond revenue and earnings. Then it matches that argument to people who might plausibly care: institutional investors, retail broker-dealers, fund managers, family offices, bankers, analysts and journalists. Finally, it manages the encounters - roadshows, conferences, interviews, calls and digital campaigns.

The useful twist comes afterward. CORE says its teams prepare post-roadshow and event reports, track interested relationships, record objections and analyze where the message went soft. Those findings feed SWOT reviews and the next version of the pitch. In other words, a meeting is not only distribution. It is research.

Those figures are company-reported, not audited operating data. Still, they make the firm's chosen advantage clear. CORE is selling accumulated pattern recognition: the memory of which sentence made a portfolio manager lean forward, which slide prompted the same skeptical question six times, and which conference looked impressive but produced no useful room.

What the client is actually buying

This is an outsourced communications department with a capital-markets accent. The visible customers include biotech and healthcare companies, cybersecurity businesses, bitcoin miners and, more recently, an advanced-nuclear developer. Bitfarms disclosed a broad engagement in 2021. Zerify followed in 2022. ImmunoPrecise Antibodies and Atossa Therapeutics announced mandates in 2025. Hadron Energy selected CORE in 2026 to lead shareholder engagement and investor communications.

The sector spread is not accidental. CORE organizes expertise around life sciences and healthcare, technology, financial services, energy and clean technology, and consumer businesses. These are categories where the product can be complex, the stakes can be regulated and the market may price uncertainty brutally. They reward communicators who can read a cap table and a room.

The first thing to fail is usually the sentence

Companies often diagnose an audience problem when they have a language problem. They want more investor meetings, more coverage, more followers. But doubling distribution only doubles the reach of a muddy claim. CORE's process puts message development before audience and execution for a reason.

Then reality gets a vote. If meetings repeatedly expose the same turn-off, management has evidence to revise the pitch. If the investor thesis and the public story drift apart, the integrated team can see it. The thing that changes minds is not an agency brainstorm in isolation; it is a pattern of reactions gathered from the people the company hoped to persuade.

That feedback discipline is the most portable part of the playbook. A company does not need CORE's contact list to copy it. Keep one message ledger across IR, PR and digital channels. Log the questions after every serious conversation. Separate confusion from disagreement. Fix the repeated confusion first. Choose conferences for audience fit, not lanyard prestige. Make the next deck answer the last room.

The method depends on a few conditions. Management has to tolerate unflattering feedback. There must be a real business underneath the narrative. The desired investors and journalists must have a plausible reason to care. And the company must be willing to maintain the cadence - CORE uses weekly or bi-weekly strategy reviews - rather than appear only when financing is urgent or a crisis has already started.

A communications loop can sharpen a credible company. It cannot manufacture credibility from an empty quarter.

Where CORE fits

At one end of the market sits the lone internal investor-relations officer, close to management but limited by hours and specialties. At the other sit large financial-communications agencies with global scale and a price structure to match. Generalist PR firms may know the press but not the mechanics of shareholder mix, Reg FD, analyst coverage or non-deal roadshows.

CORE occupies the middle: a boutique that wants to feel senior and personal while offering enough disciplines to replace several vendors. The firm has recruited people from equity research, investment banking, in-house communications, specialist IR agencies, journalism, design and social strategy. In June 2026, it added three healthcare veterans, reinforcing a practice that already reaches across biotech, diagnostics, medical technology and health services.

The competitive question is whether integration produces insight or merely a longer invoice. CORE's answer is the feedback loop. If the PR team learns which explanation makes a technical milestone legible, the IR team can use it. If investors keep rejecting a premise, the media pitch should not pretend the objection does not exist. If digital analytics reveal that one topic earns sustained attention, the next executive briefing begins with evidence rather than taste.

The room is the strategy

The image of an agency is usually external: a company pays for introductions to people it could not reach alone. CORE certainly sells relationships. Yet its more interesting service is internal. It puts the analyst, the journalist, the trader, the designer and the CEO into the same conceptual room, even when they are scattered across the country.

That room does not guarantee applause. It does something more modest and more useful. It makes it harder for the company to tell itself four different stories. For a public business, that may be the first audience worth persuading.

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