OK. So far as this subject of Conversing with Investment Advisory Organizations, I guess I finally made myself clearer in my last message than when I first brought it up on this Message Hub. Those who read and recall what I had said earlier surely will, at least, remember my rock-hard beliefs came from the twenty years, in sales jobs, I’ve spent practicing what I believe in.

In my last message, I stuck to the simple self-evident nature of what there’s no arguing about: That is, having continuing conversations with Respected and Trusted Investing Advocates is better than leaving it all up to Press Releases. There’s hardly anything controversial about the logic and the common sense of talking to people who can be helpful in important ways compared to sitting back and doing nothing.

Besides that, the benefit of going out-of-our-way to make ourselves well known is more than plain logic. Not only do I know it from direct experience, it’s also very familiar to anyone who ever had the common experience of explaining something to someone to make a sale. As in making sales, conversations with Investment Advisory Organizations brings a monetary reward.

Say, it takes 10 phone calls to make one sale, which nets a $100 profit. It’s a telemarketing maxim that, in such a case, it’s fair to value each phone call made as worth $10. That is, the mere chance to make a profit is worth $10 should that chance convert to a $100 profit 10% of the time.

True, what we’re doing (or should be doing) is not telemarketing. More properly defined, it’s tele-prospecting. As is the case when doing any kind of serious prospecting, the relationships we’re after are more complex than one-shot sales attempts. Nonetheless, the principle holds that the activity itself has value, even without 100% success every minute of the day. Not to be overly technical (to make my point), we have approximately 100 million shares outstanding. One cent up in the price per share equals $1 million (give or take).

Will we be able to afford what it would cost us to boost our share price one cent? Again, not to be overly technical (to make my point), say we budget $100,000 a year for starters. We need to hire someone (not me) to do the job and pay for a thousand or so brochures to reinforce and to enhance the information we give out about the company.

$90,000 per year = Pay someone to have 10 in-depth conversations per week (500 per year).
$10,000 per year = Brochures (2000 X $5 each).

Possibly, this can be done for less than the very rough budget I’ve just outlined. But you get the general idea. This is on the order of $100,000 per year. This will not cost millions of dollars.

I don’t mean to downplay the expense or the difficulty. We should not do this to prove how ultra-cheap we can be. We are not out to make an exhausting series of annoying one-size-fits-all robotic phone calls to whoever picks up. This is poles apart. One real conversation in the morning and one in the afternoon is a good day’s work. Building and coordinating essential and enduring and long-term business-to-business relationships is not to be taken lightly.

Do you think the basic arithmetic of something on the order of $100,000 a year to get a one cent a year or more increase in our share price is worth it? The payoff would be multiples of those millions in growing market valuations.

What do you think the chances of success would be? The idea (reinforced and advanced hour-by-hour and day-by-day) would be to reach, in the exploration and mining industries, every single significant player who influences retail and institutional investors.

This would mean indispensable recognition by hundreds of key people in hundreds of key positions who haven’t otherwise heard of us (or who barely know we exist). As I’ve said before, this would include investment advisors and investment fund managers and researchers and investment advisory magazine and media reporters. Moreover, as we become better acquainted with these people and what they have to tell us, we will learn of other groups we hadn’t considered in the beginning.

Would you feel more comfortable with your investment knowing we were always on the job conscientiously getting to know these people and, besides introducing them to us, keeping them abreast with new developments? Or, would we be better off saving the $100,000 cost per year and, instead, earmark that money to increase our drilling?

As part of our regular multi-million dollar budget, should we spend $100,000 to:

Option A) Speak to Key People (to increase, by millions of dollars, our market valuation)?
Option B) Drill Extra Holes (to uncover hidden riches or to enhance our resource estimates)?