I tell my clients all the time that a quarterly report consists of at least three major things: 1) the published numbers from the quarter, 2) management commentary, and 3) guidance.

Very often, when I'm working with a client to help them simplify their story into easily digestible bullets, they say to me, "our existing investors already know this...why do we need to say this again? It feels so repetitive."

What feels like "annoyingly repetitive" to you, is probably "refreshingly simple" to your investors.

In the late 90s, a really good sell-side analyst might cover 8 or 10 stocks. They would be on every earnings call and would know every detail about every line in the model. Today however, analysts frequently cover 40 or more stocks.

Read on only if you're willing to throw out what they teach you in business school. Namely, that stock prices are simply the market's representation of the discounted present value of a future stream of cash flows.

Being a public company includes a lot more regulatory headaches. And winning over investors doesn’t end after the IPO.