Betty Buyside: Preparing the office for Baby Buyside

Six weeks to go before I walk out of the office door, not to return for 20 weeks or so.

It hardly seems any time since I broke the news to my employer about the imminent arrival of Baby Buyside, but in fact it has been over two months since then; the regular readers among you will have spotted that this column last appeared at the end of August.

I can but apologise - as you will understand if you read on, life has been somewhat hectic.

The first project I was doing was to update all my valuation models. This has required a bit of working at home in the evening and the weekend; not something usually required of a buyside analyst.

Working on the buyside may be much worse paid than the same job on the sellside, but the quality of life advantages are many, including not having to talk to multiple bolshy buyside analysts, not having to explain things in one sentence - using words of no more than one syllable - to a largely uneducated salesforce and not having to spend time grovelling to corporate clients.

You also get to work much better hours and can almost always maintain an 8am to 5pm schedule.

As a result I find that many of my peers, at my own firm and elsewhere, rarely have laptop computers to use at home or while travelling. However, I have decided that this is a must.

If I can get them to let me have a laptop computer now, on the understanding that it will allow me to work unpaid overtime in preparation for my absence, then I will have it during that absence, allowing me to stay connected to my office email and check on the results statements of the companies that I follow.

I am currently borrowing one from my department, but a well written and concisely argued request from me for one to be bought exclusively for my use is currently in front of my department head.

On top of that, each day I arrive in the office, get a coffee and loudly bemoan another late night modelling the free cashflow of some impenetrable continental European company. This should do the trick, I reckon.

The next plan of my strategy is to get all the companies that need to be seen by my fund managers into the building before I depart. To this end I have employed Stalinesque methodology.

I have drawn up a list of all the companies in all my sectors and created a spreadsheet showing when the last date was that they reported, the last date that we saw the management, their close period dates and their current market capitalisation.

I am now in the process of taking the list around all the fund managers and asking them which companies on the list they would like to see before I go. If they request a company that we have seen in the last six months, I point this out and ask if it is really necessary to get them in again. If their close period rules them out, it's tough.

Thus I am assimilating a pared-down list of companies that will have to be seen in the next six weeks, in our office or elsewhere in London, as I am not really fit for travel.

Next I am telephoning the investor relations officer in each company, or the finance director if they don't have an IRO, and explaining my delicate state and the request for a meeting.

I am not finding too much resistance to this; in the current market conditions management are desperate to clutch at any initiative that might renew investor interest.

Rather depressing really - I am glad that I am going to be sitting out some of the bear market in great comfort at home, with my wonderful husband Anthony Academic bringing me the papers and tea in bed each day. Not long now!

You can contact Betty at: bettybuyside@efinancialcareers.com