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I have been on the road a good bit during the past couple of years, and in my interactions with fellow travelers, I noticed that most of them tend to gripe about two issues: cab drivers and airlines. I thought I would add my perspective to the mass of (usually negative) opinions about these essential services. I absolutely agree that in a lot of areas the service provided by airlines usually leaves much to be desired. It could be the brusqueness of flight attendants or the lack of communication when the plane is waiting on the runway for a couple of hours, or sudden cancellation of flights. Having said that, there is a whole other side to this, where I am absolutely grateful to the airline...

Another observation I made while going through the recent road show is that because of the tension and the tiredness that everyone involved experiences, emotional reactions also tend to become more magnified and intense. So, when you are happy you experience a real buzz and show it, and when you are upset you feel terribly low. This dramatic range of emotions that you go through can play havoc in the next meeting if it shows up in your facial expressions and in your body language, and the buy side makes judgments based on what it sees in your face. On one instance during our road show, three consecutive meetings had gone particularly well, and when I attended the fourth one someone actually ...

When you’re doing a road show to raise $140 million, if you have a two percent error rate, that will cost the company about $3 million, which is by any standards a large amount of money, probably more money than an average American would earn in a lifetime or maybe even two. While going through the road show and reflecting about the areas in which one can make mistakes, it was humbling to realize that the final one or two percent can make such a huge difference. If I was a salesperson and I was off by one or two percent, that might not merely mean that I lost out on one or two percent of sales; in the larger picture it might mean the difference between winning and losing. The result of...

When the road show comes to its natural conclusion, the pricing takes place on the evening after the market closes on the last day of the road show. At that point in time the executive team is totally exhausted and completely at the mercy of the market, necessarily having to comply with the market’s decision. The exhaustion also puts one at a decided disadvantage as the negotiations begin. One of the things I have learned is to be well prepared to go through the negotiation process and to be alert during that final stretch. The wherewithal and the discipline to execute the back-end is something people sometimes forget. This is the time when the greatest focus and highest amount of stam...

The process itself can be extremely tiring on the executive team so if you are not prepared for the grueling pace, what happens is that you find yourself wearing down by the time the third or fourth day comes around. Part of the weariness sets in due to the endless repetition—you make the same presentation over and over again, facing similar questions from the buy side. The problem is that if you are not focused you might not remember the answer you gave to the same question when it was posed by someone at an earlier meeting. One day during Kenexa’s recent road show, we traveled through six states: we began the day in Maryland, then went on to Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania ...

When the road show begins, the schedule is extremely grueling. Meetings generally begin between 7.00 am and 7.45 am and can last on an average about 45 minutes each, going on until about 6.30 or 7.00 pm. Breakfast and lunch are usually spent talking about your company to representatives from a large number of funds and there may also be the occasional dinner where you are still talking to people! You then generally catch a late flight to the next city on the itinerary, where the process begins all over again at 7.00 am. Rarely does one spend more than one day in each city. One of the observations that I made during Kenexa’s recent road show was the efficiency, professionalism and effe...