Things Geologists Do.

Marketing.

Listen up, all you young whippersnapper geologists out there. Yes, you at the back, the spotty one staring down the microscope. Are you looking to forge a career in the junior sector? Do you yearn for financial success? Are you driven by the tingly thrill of discovery? Do you see yourself as a future captain of the extractive industry? Yes?

Well then, there’s a key skill you need to learn if you want to rise above humble core logging and soil sampling. It’s called prostitution marketing.

Goddam marketing. I spit on your marketing.

Prostitution Is Fun.

For most geologists, the words “marketing” and “fun” go together like “testicles” and “cancer”. It’s not something they look forward to or do willingly without being blackmailed or threatened. But pitching shamelessly for that all-important injection of cash to drill the discovery hole is a vital skill.

Next stop, Wall Street.

See, the average earth scientist doesn’t want to be sitting across the board room table from some bored suits. It’s a world they don’t understand. Units, discounts to market, debentures, warrants, secured debt, hold periods. Good God, it’s really confusing and feels so… so… dirty when all they actually want to do is hammer rocks and drink beer.

There are many different flavours of financing, some explained here in a previous blog posting, and one feature common to all of them is the marketing road trip. You and the boss, going from board room to bored room, cap in hand, telling the company tale, united by the humiliations you endured on the road. Marketing trips can be a day, a week, 2 weeks on the road, and it’s hard work. Keeping your sanity 4 days in to a trip, with markets tumbling all around you, is brutally hard.

As a particularly forlorn specimen once commented: “If I died and went to hell, it would take me at least a week to notice I wasn’t still on that marketing trip.”

Who Invited The Geologist?

Do NOT allow this man into a meeting

It’s important to remember that under NO circumstances should geologists be sent to market on their own. DO NOT allow one into a meeting with a fund or a corporate finance team without adult supervision. The risk of them blathering on about their pet geological theory is just too horrible a scenario for any competent CEO to allow.

What’s it like on the road you ask? Well, at best, road trips are a grim daily routine of taxis, 45-minute meetings and hurried lunches on the fly as you and the boss tell the company story over and over and over. And over (Stoppit. We get the point. Ed.) Each time you tell it you refine it slightly, incorporating changes prompted by the subtle clues you’ve gleaned from the previous meeting’s audience. Yawning, giggling, vomiting, hives – that sort of thing. By the last meeting, it’s perfection; convincing, professional, and all too fucking late.

Buy A Decent Suit, You Slob.

Dressed in all-fitting suit, or that nasty tweed jacket which was briefly fashionable in the mid-1980s, you step off a frozen Bay Street sidewalk into the 24th floor reception area of MegaBank. Weighed down by 30 copies of the corporate powerpoint, your glasses steam up as you search through your ratty backpack for the roll of crumpled up maps and sections; the one you left on the food hall table at lunch but haven’t realized yet.

Nay, nay, thrice nay.

The beautiful receptionist offers you water or coffee from the glitzy chrome steampunk thing around the corner, just as your lunchtime curry begins the fight for freedom whatever way it can get out. After a hasty toilet break, best described as a primitive artistic rendition of a flock of sparrows, you’re finally ushered into the meeting room. With your hands still wet from the loo break, redolent with the heady scent of toilet deodorizer, you now have to shake the hand of your 1.30pm meeting. They notice they’re still damp. Nice.

Coffee is served.

Twenty-five interminable minutes later, it’s over and you’re back on the sidewalk, freezing your nuts off. Fifteen minutes into your pitch, the money manager told you he’s still dealing with redemptions and won’t be deploying any capital until Q4 2037. Root canal work would’ve been more fun than the last 10 minutes of that meeting.

Leaving On A Jet Plane

International trips can be really gruelling. Meetings all day, a hurried taxi ride to Heathrow to catch the 7pm to Frankfurt. Hotel by 11pm and up early for the 7.30am breakfast meeting. Another full day with a lunchtime presentation to 5 high-net-worths who won’t drink anything that costs less than $350 a bottle, followed by a dinner meeting. Rinse. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat.

Sorry. You’re Cancelled.

Meetings are frequently cancelled at the last moment. As a fund manager friend told me last week, while we watched geologist after geologist drone on at a conference, the money people really don’t care about you or your microscopic company until they figure out how they can make money off you.

Once you’ve got your head around that -properly around it, not just lip service- the trips get easier. You have to stop taking it personally. It’s a bit like the line from the TV series Band of Brothers when Sergeant Spiers tells the men that the only way they can become effective soldiers is to realise that they’re already dead. Only then can they do their jobs.

Listen son, the fund managers don’t care. The sooner you get it, the sooner you can market effectively.

There’s Thousands Of The Buggers

It’s not about you or your projects. It’s just maths. There are 1,200 other resource companies just like yours in Canada and hundreds more in Australia (although they’re run by Australians so you have a natural advantage over them.) Mr Fund Manager has to filter all of them down to a portfolio of maybe 30 companies at most. So, your amazing outcrop of dumortierite with its staggering implications for the metallogeny of your Greenlandic moose pasture doesn’t fucking matter if they can’t make money off it.

Tell me again, how am I going to make money?

If something more compelling crops up, or one of their portfolio companies publishes a hot news release, you’re shit out of luck; they’ll cancel your 11am without compunction.

During one particularly gloomy trip I went on to New York, every meeting bar one was cancelled on one of the days. Me and the IR consultant stared at each all day across numerous cups of cold, over-strong coffee. I resented him for wasting my time with a bunch of cancellations and he knew I wouldn’t use him again. What fun we had.

Hello. Is It Me You’re Looking For?

Half the time the bankers are doing someone a favour by meeting with you. They’re filling up the road trip schedule for the IR consultant buddy you hired to walk you around town for 2 days.

Others might be genuinely curious about your silver or gold exploration pitch but only because they’re taking a broader look at the sector. Then there are the serial monologuers who love to hear themselves talk. They’ll treat you to a 45 minute lecture on the supply and demand of Albanian met’ coal. Joy. Some will be so disinterested that you wonder why you’re even there. You spend 30 minutes watching your 3pm answer text messages, while you bravely push on to the investment highlights on page 17 of your deck.

Coal. It’s bought and sold.

Nyet.

If you’re really unlucky, you run up against the hard-nosed analyst. The polymath buy-side quant from Russia or India, out to impress the portfolio manager boss. They’re really clever, much cleverer than you and they’re sadists who love to humiliate idiot earth scientists. The moment you start, they’re barking questions about power costs, reagent consumption and the grinding index for your ore, even though 1) they know you can’t answer, 2) you’re pitching a grass roots exploration play on Baffin Island, and 3) you’re using up precious pitching time answering their bloody irrelevant questions. Ding. Time’s up.

Soul destroying doesn’t adequately describe those meetings.

The Clouds Parted

But one day, one precious gorgeous day, as you look around the table at the end of the meeting, you realise the mining team from the bank likes it. They get it. You gave a top-notch explanation, sharpened and honed by years of sordid, stinky road show experiences, and now it’s odds on they’ll help you find investors for your financing, arrange a buy-side roadshow for you AND perhaps even initiate research coverage.

On your way to the airport you phone your mum in Vancouver to tell her you finally had a good day and they really liked your project. “That’s nice, dear” she says. Woohoo. Winning.

Don’t Forget

Just like those dodgy PhD’s from the weird on line universities, this story is based on my personal life experiences. If you recognise any of your own experiences in here, I’d love to hear from you via the underused comments box. Actually it does get used quite a bit, but it’s mostly garbage from some strange religious nutbar spammer who’s started spamming me in German. Verdammter Idiot. Anywho, if this piece hasn’t put you off being a geologist, or caused you to resign from your new geologist IR role, please subscribe to urbancrows.com via the cheap and nasty subscription box that I artlessly chucked in near the top of the page. I’ll be sure to email you more sleaze about the junior sector from time to time.

28 thoughts on “Things Geologists Do.”

  1. Speaking of Germans, but not in German, I always love Frankfurt lunches where they don’t have the decency to quietly play with their phone but have loud conversations amongst themselves while you drone on about robust economics and how the locals at the project support mining.

    1. years since I marketed in Germany. The toughest was Scandinavia where every meeting is 2 hours long.

  2. Although I have largely been spared these types of interactions with external financiers, much of what you have described reminds me of meetings with some managers within the mining houses that I’ve worked for. Two quite large South African companies, one of which has since morphed into something else (more than once) and the other took it’s own head off towards the end of the last century. I think you get the picture.
    Sometimes you find yourself trying to convince a senior manager that your project in West Africa DOES have potential, if we could only spend a bit more time and money, sometimes you’re trying to explain to a similar person that their promise to the boardroom that we would find a 10 million ounce deposit within a year or so, was not entirely realistic.
    History indicates that some of those abandoned projects have turned into million ounce gold projects for someone else. Let’s blame the economics, that are so different now, of course :).

  4. Oh!oh! Prefect description, now it’s going to give the old nightmares again! Why I retired!

  5. Great writing style, thanks! I started off as a consultant fresh from University (sounds pretty lame, and so it probably was; besides, studying economics and business in Russia in the 90s was so much fun, with Karl Marx in the morning and praise to free market economy in the afternoon), and by the end of those 8 years in a small consulting company I only knew that I want to look at rocks for a living and hopefully never to encounter a human dressed in a suit. Did a master’s in geology, continued into PhD, and now by the end of the 4th year I still love to look into the microscope, but I start talking to the microscope, too, and think that maybe there is nothing wrong with suits provided there are people inside; and I would dearly like to get a feel of teamwork again, even if that involves meetings.

    1. The biz development side of the resource sector is a good compromise. You get to look at rocks regularly but you also get to sit in the odd board room. Identifying a good project always imparts a certain thrill.

      1. Thanks, that sounds like a good compromise indeed. After 4 years of satisfying one’s own curiosity at the expense of the taxpayers and giving back something only in the form of teaching assistance, I would really aim for something where I can see that value is created, not consumed.

    2. My MSc was fluid inclusion work. Long hours with head phones on, staring at 5 micron bubbles while popping liquid nitrogen burns.

      1. That’s hilarious!!! And I have a galena-sphalerite-chalcopyrite sample from Bulgaria, too, from Madan, famous for its open fluid inclusion cavities and crystals with depression pits above the inclusions, violating the constant volume assumption. Fluid inclusions are fun, I even read of cases of flincs being used as an exploration vector in Soviet Union.

  6. All too true! And getting harder to find $$s. Luckily those cannabis companies mostly tanked and the price of gold went up. Maybe there’s some upside in 2020!

  7. Sooooo spot on. When I finally made it to the my first manager of an international minerals fund, my IR flunky and I were two of the lucky few SOBs who were able to navigate Bay Street and slammed doors. The fund kingpin was at the head of the boardroom table surrounded by a half dozen of his analysts. Five minutes into the scheduled hour meeting his admin assistant calls him away for a conference call only to return for the closing remarks. Judging from the clueless analysts who knew less about metal deposits than cheetos, they looked passionately at the leader hoping for guidance of which there was zero. After a month of silence, we knew that it was a thanks but no thanks.

    Then when the industry evolved, analysts would take an intro geo course and often ranted about their knowledge of the only one type of coal mine they visited. They often insisted that the same economics governed your gold discovery. You nod and try to get a word in and finally ascribe to their narrow knowledge base. Putting aside all common sense on 10’s of years of experience and training, you build off their ego and minuscule knowledge base, recommending lunch at their favorite hangout. At lunch you invite him to the site. Boom…you have capital.

    Alas as you gain more and more experience in the ruse., the analysts have more PhD’s than your entire technical team. Now you fight not to get lost in the minutia about the theoretical emplacement of a batholith 50 km from your VMS deposit…go figure.

    After 40 years of major discoveries and raising billions of dollars for mining executives and investors, I still enjoy a cold day drilling in Siberia or a sweltering, rainy night stuck in the mud in the jungle than hawking for that desperately needed capital infusion.

    So if you decide geology is your destiny, look for a job in government or put your head in a vice.
    SC

    1. I feel your pain. It was a steep learning curve for me, particularly meeting the super-aggressive A types who run their own money. One of them tried to fight me once in London years ago when he decided I didn’t have enough “skin in the game” compared to him. He actually called me out into the car park of a high end Sushi restaurant during a closing dinner, which is when the boss suggested I leave.

  9. Having worked on both sides of the fence I congratulate you on nailing it! However, after over 30 years of experience I’m pleased to note that honesty and sincerity usually pays off.

  10. This is soooo spot-on. I am a geologist and this provides validation for my earlier decisions to avoid this trap of going on the fund-raising circuit of meetings with analysts/investors for funding an exploration project/company. I did this because I knew that i would not be good at it. Presenting geo-information to people who don’t understand or care about that or any other information that doesn’t explicitly and specifically show how they (the listeners) will make money strikes me as situations to be avoided. I knew that I was unlikely to be any good at it. I could be so arrogant to suggest that i do this even though I imagine that I know what the key to success in such meetings is. In fact, this simple idea can be applied to those eager for success in this world. “Lie sincerely”

    Lying sincerely does not make for a respected geologist reputation but you can rich. If you do it well enough, you can get rich and you don’t even have to make a discovery.

  11. Loving your articles Ralph and delivery style! While I do enjoy life in a large company I do miss many of the very diverse challenges of Junior Mining so humorously delivered by you! Ahh the PDAC, those indeterminable meetings, late night and that sense of thrill and growing a company!

  12. OMG, I cant tell you how hard i laughed, i spent many many days running management teams around only wanting to gouge my eyes out through my nostrils as the tube of maps came out and everyone glossed over and tapped out. Sweat pouring off their nose and onto the crusted up 100 year old map thats been rerolled and stuffed into that tube more than tobacco into a pipe. I told you they were investment bankers you twit,

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