January 29, 2025

How Many Healthcare Investor Conferences Should a Biotech Attend Each Year?

Going to healthcare conferences takes a lot of time and money. Typically, both a biotech’s CEO and CFO are in attendance for one or more days. Then there’s the amount of downtime associated with traveling to and from each conference (which is more for West Coast biotechs, given most healthcare investor conferences are on the East Coast).

As such, biotechs are right to ask, “How many is enough?” or put another way, “How many is too many?”

The answer is that the number likely starts lower in the first year following your IPO and increases the longer you are a public company – assuming you are successful, and your market capitalization grows on the back of positive clinical trial results and successful follow-on financings.

Now, the average biotech’s IPO syndicate typically contains four investment banks (in rare cases five, in even rarer cases six) whose equity research departments typically launch coverage 25 days (not business days) after your IPO is announced (not priced).

In its first year following an IPO, a biotech should be invited by all of its covering analysts, or sometimes their banking counterparts, to their respective bank’s annual healthcare investor conference. So, let’s call that four healthcare investor conferences, assuming you stacked your syndicate wisely.

Add to those four a potential presence at the “must-be-seen-at” J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, and you get to five (but please see our blog on whether or not a presence on the fringe of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference is actually valuable for biotechs).
Then maybe add one more conference invitation from a non-syndicate banker that’s trying to woo you, or else an equity analyst who took up coverage of your company “at risk.”

In total then, that brings you to around six healthcare investor conferences in your first year, or roughly one every two months.

If that doesn’t sound like a lot, remember that in the first year following your IPO, you’re not expected to have much to say. If you marketed your IPO well, your shareholder base should remain relatively static leading up to your first data announcement as a public company, so attendance at healthcare conferences in that first year typically involves you telling much the same story you told at IPO, albeit hopefully to at least some new investors.

In the years that follow though, as your banking relationships increase and you’re covered by more and more analysts, you may find you have enough invitations that you could attend a healthcare investor conference every month. Should you do this? No.

First of all, you should create some scarcity value for management’s time and not cannibalize each appearance by participating in conferences shortly before or shortly thereafter.

Furthermore, not all healthcare investor conferences are created equal.

Your IRO or IR agency should be able to put together a 12-month plan for you that minimizes the disruption to management’s time but takes in all the key regions of the U.S. (and potentially Europe), so as to meet as many existing and quality investors as possible.

For example – J.P. Morgan’s January conference is in San Francisco, Cowen’s March conference is in Boston, Jefferies’ June conference is in New York, while William Blair typically hosts its conferences in Chicago.

Space your appearances out, reward those analysts and bankers you like with your presence, and try to eventually cap the number of conferences you go to at around 8-10.

A good way to avoid fatigue by the way – and having one c-suite member spending too much time out of the office – is to have two teams that can travel and represent the company. Perhaps your CEO and IRO as one, and your CFO and CMO as another (depending on their collective ability to be able to answer the vast majority of investor questions)?

Take note if the number of your one-on-ones starts to fall at certain conferences, or if the quality of investor meetings underwhelms. Healthcare conferences are an efficient way to meet with investors, but they have to be worth it and shouldn’t become an unrewarding obligation.

Laurence Watts