Moira Conlon has a way of spoiling a perfectly pleasant answer. An investor says, yes, they understand the company’s strategy. Everything appears to be going nicely. Then comes the follow-up: explain it back. In conversations she has described, the confidence sometimes evaporates. People who thought they understood the plan discover that they cannot quite put it into words. Somewhere between the presentation and the listener, the company’s future has gone missing.
It is a small test with uncomfortable implications. A management team can spend weeks polishing its account of the business and still leave the room misunderstood. Conlon has built a working life around that distance. As founder and CEO of Financial Profiles, she advises executives and boards whose plans must make sense to investors, analysts, employees and reporters, each arriving with different questions and a limited supply of patience.
An awkward year to open the doors
She founded Financial Profiles in 2007. Anyone choosing a moment to sell confidence to the capital markets could have wished for a kinder calendar. The financial crisis would give companies plenty to explain, with fewer reassuring answers to hand. Starting then helped shape her firm’s belief that companies need a coherent account of themselves through difficult periods as well as prosperous ones.
Conlon brought financial experience to the problem. She had worked in investment banking at Merrill Lynch, spent 12 years helping build Financial Relations Board, and served as a managing director at Abernathy MacGregor. She also held a BA from Georgetown. By the time she started her own firm, she had experience of both the financial machinery and the language used to describe it.
The opening came after the sale of Financial Relations Board. A group of experienced colleagues saw room for a firm organized around senior expertise and attentive service. That founding proposition had a practical appeal: clients facing consequential questions would work with people who had encountered consequential questions before. A new company could begin with considerable professional mileage.
The nod is not the measurement
Her follow-up question offers a glimpse of how she works. The important event happens after someone has said the right thing. Conlon wants to know what they can repeat, what they have retained and whether it resembles what management intended. A courteous meeting can conceal a substantial failure of communication. Politeness, unfortunately, comes with no error message.
“How would you articulate it?”
Moira Conlon, on testing investor understanding
This attention to the listener also appears in her public advice on investor targeting. In her reflections on NIRI’s 2026 gathering, she emphasized finding the right investors and building direct relationships with them. A convincing presentation still needs somebody appropriate to hear it. She encouraged investor relations professionals to know their companies and industries, keep approaching prospective investors and maintain those relationships themselves.
The work is patient and rather less cinematic than a trading floor. Find the audience. Understand its interests. Keep the relationship alive. For Conlon, a company’s account of its future has a destination, and the destination matters as much as the document.
No prize for corporate dodgeball
Conlon’s writing has a tart streak when executives begin avoiding their audience. She has described familiar evasions: dropping the question-and-answer session because the quarter was disappointing, abandoning previously disclosed metrics, or waiting to meet investors until the business has a more flattering story. Corporate life supplies an impressive vocabulary for hoping the awkward question will go away.
These examples make her advice feel lived rather than ceremonial. An earnings call is a recurring encounter with people who remember what management said last time. Changing the conversation may be reasonable; declining to explain the change gives the audience another problem to solve. The adviser’s job includes making that consequence clear before a nervous executive reaches for the delete key.
She has written that she has encountered almost every investor relations mistake among newly public companies. Her answer is to establish habits that hold up under pressure. Results will vary. An organization’s willingness to account for them can be more consistent. That is a demanding form of storytelling because the next installment arrives whether the storyteller feels ready or not.
The interview before the interview
Her approach to media appearances begins well before the microphone is switched on. Conlon has trained hundreds of executives and treats preparation as part of the assignment. She asks who the reporter is, who the audience is, what the format requires and why the conversation is happening now. Expertise in running a business does not automatically supply expertise in explaining it under questioning.
She describes the interview as an encounter between people with different objectives. The executive wants to convey a company’s message; the reporter wants something useful and interesting for the audience. Recognizing both interests makes preparation more realistic. An executive who arrives expecting a friendly recital may discover that somebody else has brought a different program.
Her advice favors a clear conclusion followed by evidence and examples. That order respects the listener’s time. It also reveals something about the craft she teaches: clarity requires decisions before delivery. A spokesperson must work out what matters, what supports it and what can survive the pressure of an unexpected question. Eloquence is welcome. Homework gets there first.
The morning after the bell
Conlon’s transaction experience includes companies such as ChargePoint and AEye, and her firm’s SPAC work reaches back to Two Harbors Investment Corp. in 2009. Business Insider recognized her among 18 communications professionals working with companies on IPOs and SPAC transactions. Those assignments put her near moments when a business acquires a new audience and a much more public set of expectations.
She is particularly interested in what follows the debut. In her post-IPO advice, the celebration gives way to building support for the stock, reviewing analyst coverage and establishing disclosure practices. Listing day makes a wonderful photograph. The days afterward involve policies, estimates, incoming questions and the promises executives have made to people who now own part of the business.
She urges care over guidance and metrics, and over information a company may later wish it had never promised to provide. A private company’s conversational habits also need adjustment as employees, customers, investors and journalists can all encounter the same statement. The audience has expanded. Casual remarks have acquired a longer itinerary.
This is where her background in finance becomes useful to the storyteller. A company’s narrative contains commitments with consequences. The phrasing has to fit the business, and the business will eventually have to fit what was said.
A complaint becomes a diagnosis
In 2025, Conlon addressed a complaint she said she heard repeatedly from public-company leaders: their stock was undervalued. Her discussion allowed for several possible explanations rather than assuming that a better presentation would settle the matter. Financial performance, capital allocation, market conditions and perceptions can all enter the picture. The first useful task is to examine the gap.
On September 23, 2026, Financial Profiles launched ValueView360, an assessment aimed at companies with market capitalizations from $500 million to $5 billion. It examines financial, market and communications factors, then provides recommendations. Companies can implement them themselves or seek the firm’s help. The structure gives a recurring executive frustration a defined research assignment.
Why isn’t the market giving us credit?
Editorial schematic of the assessment’s stated approach; no valuation outcome is implied.
The launch brings together themes running through Conlon’s career: financial analysis, the audience’s interpretation and the need to act on what is learned. It also leaves room for an inconvenient answer. If the business itself needs to change, communications advice has to accommodate that conclusion. A persuasive sentence can carry evidence; it cannot manufacture the evidence it needs.
The arithmetic of a better firm
Conlon’s practical advice can be unexpectedly hospitable. When discussing investor days, she recommends making room for conversation over breakfast, lunch or breaks. She also questions holding an event simply because the calendar says it is time. Give people something new, prepare the speakers and ask attendees what they understood afterward. Even an elaborate financial presentation benefits from remembering that people have come to visit.
Her professional interests have moved further into the boardroom. She serves on the board of NACD’s Pacific Southwest Chapter and has been recognized in NACD’s Directorship 100. She has addressed how boards can work with communications teams during CEO transitions, a subject where investors and employees may be reading the same announcement for quite different reasons.
There is a parallel question inside her own company: what should success look like now? In a 2026 interview, Conlon discussed a shift from building a bigger firm toward building a better one, with good people able to be themselves. She spoke about building through client work, learning which engagements fit, and the value of experience that accumulates through practice.
For a founder who helps other leaders describe their ambitions, that is a revealing choice of ambition. Headcount is easy to count. The quality of the work and the company of colleagues require a more personal judgment. Nearly two decades after opening the doors, Conlon is still considering what a business should promise, how it should behave and what the people listening will take away.