Profiling UK Public Leaders: Interview with Simon Deacon (AIM:LST)

Profiling UK Public Leaders, Episode 6

Simon Deacon spent 30 years building private companies before floating Light Science Technologies on AIM four years ago, mid-pandemic. His observation about arriving: there is no manual for running a public company, and nobody holds your hand.

For the first couple of years he did what new CEOs are told to do. An RNS a month, a couple of webinars a year. Eighteen months ago he stepped back and asked who was actually reading any of it.

Quality of announcement beats frequency

Simon is wary of the pressure to feed the market constant news. His company put out more than twenty announcements last year, but his conclusion is that volume without substance trains investors to stop paying attention. He would rather publish fewer, deeper announcements than be pushed into sending something irrelevant.

He also notes that impact is hard to predict. A million pounds of contract wins can land flat while something cosmetic gets a reaction. His response is to plan news flow well ahead rather than react to it.

Rebuilding IR around how people actually consume

The bigger shift was accepting that investors no longer digest information the way an RNS assumes. People might listen while running, or they want something visual they can grasp in seconds. So each announcement now travels in layers:

• A short visual alongside every RNS, so the story lands in seconds
• An interview adding flavour and detail the sanitised announcement cannot carry
• A deeper conversation with the relevant divisional head, so investors see the team behind the business rather than one face

Everything points back to the company's own website. The aim is that whatever platform someone finds you on, they end up somewhere you control, wanting to know more.

On being told not to talk to retail

Deacon still gets the traditional advice: leave retail alone, talk to brokers and institutions. He heard it as recently as last week. His view is that the caution is misplaced. A public company director is trained in what can and cannot be said, the same rules apply over lunch with an institution, and recorded content can be checked before it goes out. If the message is consistent and stays within public information, he sees no reason not to communicate directly.

He also thinks the audience itself is changing. The investors at traditional shows skew older. The younger generation, often more comfortable with investment risk, do their research through video and are almost never in those rooms at all. If a company only shows up at physical events, it never meets them. Today's shareholders will not all be there in ten years, and the content, in his view, is how you build the foundation for the ones who come next.