A CFO is required by the exchange as a director and officer. He is there to explain the balance sheet to any directors. These are not paid positions. Jr. Companies cannot and should not pay directors anything but nominal stipends for expenses and time to attend meetings. IR costs 5 to 10K a month whether you farm it out or not. All the outside IR firms do is run a mailing list. They have zero competence to schmooze the phoning-in shareholder. What you really need them to do is pub/office crawl and suck in the PP's. Few of them can do that, so really all you are getting is an expensive mailing list group. What you really need is a good director who can run/supervise the website, schmooze the phone, do the news releases, run the email list and make sure the mailouts are done regular. A competent small company needs a good relationship with a few contract geos and engineers who are computer competent and can travel at the drop of hat. Most of the successful ones do. Most companies pay professional writers with some geo training and/or experience to write their blurb phamplets. These ink jobs are really important to suck joe retail investor. Ink men are a pillar of the industry, and their ad writing skills are a component that is invisible to the average sharepaper chaser. I know a few people who make their living at that. People who do good Corel, autocad, website, poster are a trade that are indispensible. The jr/int geos who whomp up the poster displays etc are the mainstay of the conference set. That is a very time consuming occupation. You need major computer display. A lot is farmed out. Most geos I know are Kinko's experts. You need scads of software and some training to do that. I believe one year it was calculated the CDN jr. spent more on tech/office/software etc than they did on drilling! That was in the 90's I recall.
Damn few companies can afford to drill these days. If you have not kept up with the money raising aspect of the market, it bascially collapsed except for sporadic flow thru forays the august before last with the Conventry debacle. It has been declining steadily since. Fall was a disaster.
The sad fact is in junior mining you are 65% administration and 35% field work. It is a very top heavy industry. Everybody expects every dollar to go into the ground. You need three pros in your office. You need an office manager, shiva all around mail out, news, web, IR guy/gall. You needa prexy on cell phone and in office to raise money like a mad ho. You need a geo/gemcom/autocad/rockhammer traveller/QP associate/independent to do the geology log core, promote at meetings, do the dog and pony and point with light pen at the trend while he/she speaks lucidly and enticingly to a bunch of jaded steely eyed money managers/investment banking/broker/vestors. Few people realize the way this business was run from 1930 to lately was with really sleazy stock give aways to ho brokers who traded the stock of a company because the remembered the great blow out and hooker convention the company threw at the last conference. The drilling backs it up, but companies don't run on news. They run on faithful people buying the stock when asked to, to back up the news. A trap line of semi inside people have to make money on the stock to make it rise. You cannot induce joe public to buy the stock on great drilling news unless you hit 1000 feet of 0.20 OPT in a favourable political environment. Even then you will have to rub the public, or more importantly the brokers noses in it. You also need iron clad control of the issue. You ain't gonna get a run up with 30 million shares out in public hands they bought at 1.50 with the stock at 10 cents. you are dead until all that paper is sucked up. Dead dead dead dead dead. And that means 90% of the companies on the TSXV are on life support. As far as a future goes, they are 3 year old kids waiting for Santa on the 26th of December.
My perfect prexy would be a guy who had 25 years in the industry, knows most millionaire vestors on Bay street, chums with brokers for lunch every day and has ageology degree at least. That latter is optional. He has to know his onions or at least be partners with a geo/engineer/promoter who does. These guys really need to be all around. Finally the decisions have to be engineer/geo/miner driven. How do you get a democratic, semi pro board to follow the RIGHT development engineering pathway to get into a drilled off, ready to fease orebody positioned market wise in a tough market and an even tougher buy out development atmosphere? Well it takes some damned good farsighted experienced sagacious people running the company. Every move has to be deft and well planned. All minds on the board must think as one. If you have a fractious board, or a brain dead unit anywhere with his wallet on the exit ramp, you won't get a mine. You won't even get a stock at 15 cents. In this market even if you do everything right you can still fail easily. A must have "unit" is ten to 20 millionaire investors who really, really believe the company has a shot at developing their own mine.. (right now a pipe dream without a rich uncle group in the wings) or selling out. (Also probably a pipe dream at less than 4 million easy ounces of low product in a great political/environmental regime.)
There are about two or three groups out there who can run a stock. They have the access to the geos, the money and the power/knowledge to buy. I have seen them lose on some plays. Nobody these days can hold a stock at 5 bucks on a maybe. Without a clear upward path to production, the buying just ain't there. And even rich guys have to sell all that stock to somebody to make money. The somebodies are some scared these days. No market, equals no stock price as far as I know, no matter what you have in the ground..99% of the time..
Firing all those geos sounds troubling, but I think I know what happened. No money, who have all that staff around? Burn rate dictated they leave.
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