John Exley Interviewed at the Microcap Conference in Atlantic City

Hey, I'd like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you'd like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today I am in Atlantic city, New Jersey, and we are at the micro cap conference, 2025, it's my first time coming out to this conference in person. We've been covering the event. Remotely now for the last couple of years. And let me tell you, it is amazing. I went to the kickoff launch party yesterday. It was packed as companies from all over represented here. And I was able to snag one of the sponsors, John, to come on the show. So John man, first off, welcome. Thank you. So is this your first time at, at this type of microcap conference? Or have you been to one of these before? I've been to, I've been to quite a few all the way back from when I was a broker and I would come to a lot of these, look at the companies. And now I come more from the sponsor side of showing how to bring brokers into these companies. What, what keeps you coming back to this? Because I'm telling you, I do a lot of conferences, John, and this one is fun, man. There's a lot of different people, a lot of different entrepreneurs from different companies, CEOs. It's just a great time. What keeps you coming back? Really, the relationships, the people. I like looking at the companies. I like talking. Maybe give some of these guys some insight to what I've learned over the years and Really drive some values and some perspectives that a lot of these issuers or companies don't really look at in the way they should. Tell us a little bit more about, about your company. So well, Acorn management partners, we are a, what we call a professional relations company. So we have offices in Atlanta and in Sarasota, Florida. And what we do is we're hired by actual, the public companies and we call brokerage firms. So we talk to individual brokers on a rate. Of about 3000 phone calls per month, per client it equates to about 700 to 800 verbal presentations. We're not talking to brokers and saying, buy this stock. We're not talking to them and saying, buy anything. What we're saying is here's the investment thesis. Does this make sense? They say, no, that's fine. Next guy. The guy goes, yeah. What? Tell me more about this company. Why do you think it's undervalued? So then you go into the investment thesis. Then you go to comparables and catalysts. What companies can we compare this company to? What catalyst are they projecting to change that value gap of the next two to three years? I'm not looking for quick fixes. I'm not looking for something to move instantaneous. I want, I want to show a value for a broker so that that broker can show that. So as we go through, we go through different steps of what we call a sales process. And then as we go through that, the broker says, Hey, I saw this company execute on their model. I saw this company do what they were supposed to do. Then that broker starts opening that client to their clients. So they have an average broker has between three to five hundred accounts and runs probably anywhere between call it six hundred to a billion AUM. So assets under management. So what we want to do is that broker then finds the suitability for a company here and and I won't name it but I was just talking to one guy here and I was talking to him and I mean he's got a company that's trading at a right under a twelve million dollar market cap. 69 million in revenues, right? Yeah. So if you take that, if you use a sprouts or somebody else in the industry, they're trading a 0. 7 times revenues. He's trading at less than 0. 001 times revenues. So if you look at that projected out, then what was my obvious question? Well, what are your revenues going to look like next year or the following year? So let's, let's do what the U S military does and reverse map it. So let's go three years forward. Where do you think your revenues are going to be? How are you going to get there? How much money will you need? And then let's go to now and then let's project a value moving forward. And so that's kind of what we do. And so without saying the company's name, just to continue the story. So let's say this particular company starts working with you. Now, what happens is within your model you would be reaching out or your team be reaching out to the brokers and telling their story. Am I off on that? I want to make sure I understand. Correct. Right. It tells that investment thesis. That's where you go. If the investor cares, what good does it do for an issue or a company? To do something and they create volume, right? Which that's a misnomer in the first place. That's really not a measurable number, but they create volume, but they come in and out. Well, you wasted money, time and effort, because really if you look at a company and you want to know how to grow a company, and this is all from, you know, my hedge fun

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