The Ones Who Didn't Care

Every buy side investor I know hates it when management teams talk about their stock price.

The CEO who steers every answer back to the multiple. The CFO who explains how this quarter's beat will support a re-rating. The investor day built around closing the valuation gap with peers. The whole conversation oriented to a number on a screen instead of the business that was supposed to produce it.

I have sat in those meetings more times than I can count. Within five minutes you can feel it. The energy is turned outward, toward the analyst audience in their head. The product, the customer, the actual work, has become background.

Almost without exception, those meetings ended with me less interested than when I walked in.

The best management teams I covered had the opposite quality. They did not want to talk about the stock at all.

If you brought it up, they would wave it off. It will work itself out, they would say. Follow the business. The stock will follow.

It was not false modesty. They actually believed it. And they had the track records to prove they were right.

Follow the business. The stock will follow.

I read a book on vacation last week that names what those CEOs already knew. It is called Obliquity, by John Kay. His argument is simple. Some goals can only be reached by not aiming at them.

Valuation is one of them. You build the upstream work, or you do not. The downstream number is not something you can grab.

The good teams I covered lived this without needing the vocabulary for it. What they wanted to talk about was the business. Is it getting better. Are we making decisions that will compound over ten years. Are we being honest about what is working. Are we the kind of place the right people want to join.

Their investor calls reflected it. The stock rarely came up unless someone asked, and when it did, they answered briefly and pivoted back. The talk was about products, customers, the mistake they made last year and what it taught them. You could sense they would say the same things whether the stock was up twenty percent or down twenty.

The other teams, the ones obsessed with the multiple, were almost always the ones who sensed, underneath, that their business was not going to earn it. The narrative work was a hedge against the fundamentals.

My kids have a word for the version of this they see in their own lives. They call it being a try hard. The person whose effort to impress is so obvious it has the opposite effect. The LinkedIn post that is a little too polished. The casual mention of the deal they just closed that is not casual. You can feel the aim.

It is the same pattern the bad management teams ran on. Skip the work. Manage the multiple directly. Hope no one notices the gap.

Most of us are managing some version of a valuation. And not only in how we come across socially.

The professional who manages their career narrative instead of building the skill underneath it. The title, the logo, the trajectory that reads well in one sentence. The multiple looks right from the outside. The craft underneath has thinned out.

The parent who manages how their parenting looks instead of how it actually is. The family photo. The narrated milestone. The performed involvement. Meanwhile the kid is quietly waiting to be actually seen.

The try hards are easy to spot because their aim is so visible. Our own is usually quieter. The work underneath thins out the same way.

The best ones I know stop watching the scoreboard. They are too busy with the game.

This week's questions:

Where are you managing a valuation instead of doing the work underneath it?

What would change if you stopped watching that particular scoreboard for a year?

Who in your life is doing the upstream work without managing the multiple, and what could you learn from them?