How I Force Change at Companies Wall Street Ignores

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When you're advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at accenture.com/spotify.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:30)
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**Tobias Carlisle** (1:00)
All right. We are live. This is Value After Hours. I'm Tobias Carlisle, joined as always by my co-host, Jake Taylor. Our special guest today is Ralph Moliner. He's a small cap activist. We're going to talk to him about some of his campaigns. How are you, Ralph? Welcome to the show.

**Ralph Moliner** (1:16)
Good. Good to be with you fellas.

**Tobias Carlisle** (1:19)
Tell us a little bit about your background and then we'll move on to your first campaign.

**Ralph Moliner** (1:25)
Yeah.
I have a very untraditional background and then also a traditional way of being involved in activist stuff.
I don't know if activism will be necessarily part of my future over the long term, but it seems like management teams like my background and like discussing things with me and I'll get into that. But I didn't want to be an investor. I had no interest in the stock market, and it wasn't until I met a mentor through my entrepreneur program in college. I went to a small school called San Diego State, and he gave me the idea of enlightenment for value investing. He said, Ralph, you don't have to be a small business owner like me. You can invest in small companies, same size as mine, but in the public stock market, you can do with companies like microcap companies. He even told me, Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's principal adopted from Ben Graham, which is investing is most intelligent when it is business-like. The idea that a share in a stock of a publicly traded company is simply just a portion of a business. That really set me on the path of, okay, how do I be a business owner in the most efficient way? I figured, okay, instead of going through tax filings and the audits, and that potentially bad financials, I might as well just do investing in the public stock markets, and so I have never invested in an index. I've always invested personally in small caps and micro caps, and that's been my history. I started working with a fund called Focus Compounding, who specialized in that kind of thing, more so overlook stocks, but a lot of them were small caps, micro caps or OTC or liquid stocks or, you know, companies that traded in foreign markets. And I worked with them for four years, and I was doing that while I was working with them part time on a project by project basis until they one day called me and said, Ralph, I know you've been doing invest relations at several publicly traded companies, but do you want to join us on the board slate and as an executive officer for one of our holdings because we have to go activists on a company called Parks America. At the time, they owned 40 percent of the company, and they believed that certain things were going materially wrong. And as a larger shareholder, they had no board seat or no say, and so they wanted to change those things. So after a six-month campaign, actually going to the annual meeting, and after a special meeting, Focus Compounding Slate got control of the board. And for a year, Jeff Gannon and I were on the management team, and then several others were on the board as well. And I was there for a year to help turn around the company. So that was my first stint into something that I totally did not predict as part of my career when I graduated in 2019

**SPEAKER_1** (4:44)
This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter the most. Learn more at accenture.com/spotify.