Modern IR, run as a system

🎯 Why we exist

The legacy wires charge $800–$1,500+ for a single press release — more once you exceed their word limit, add a photo, or want more than one region. And that's just the wire. To actually run investor relations, a small- or micro-cap issuer then stacks a separate IR retainer of C$75,000–200,000 a year on top, split across two or three vendors.

• Most of that money buys production a machine now does better — drafting, formatting, distribution, list-building, follow-up
• The part that needs a seasoned human gets diluted across a junior account manager's twelve other clients

👥 Who's behind it

Mark Solomon — Founder, 9GG LLC · CMO, Foundry IR

Mark Solomon bought his first stock at twelve, after reading a book one of his uncles had written called How to Pick Stocks. He has been in markets, one way or another, ever since.

He is an engineer by training, and formerly held the Series 7 and Series 3 registrations — specialising in commodity trading and alternative investments.

The other half of the job he learned on the other side of the table: running marketing and communications for operating companies from manufacturing to advertising, managing the online presence of growth companies, and directing six-figure advertising and PR campaigns — Google Ads certification behind the paid side of it. Stripped of the jargon, that is what investor relations is. You are explaining a company to an audience that has to decide something, earning its attention where you can, and buying it efficiently where you can't.

That combination is the firm. A small-cap resource issuer has to explain drill results, resource estimates and technical studies to generalist investors who will never open a 43-101 — and has to do it inside securities rules that punish enthusiasm. An engineer who has traded commodities can read the technical document. Someone who has run communications for real companies knows what an audience actually needs to hear. Most IR shops have one of those. A lot have neither.

Mark Solomon formerly held the FINRA Series 7 and Series 3 registrations. Those registrations are not currently active, he is not a registered representative, and FoundryIR is not a broker-dealer, investment adviser or exempt market dealer. Nothing on this site is investment advice.

🎥 Liz Stubbs — Media & Communications

Liz Stubbs — Media & Communications

Liz is a television producer and media manager with three decades directing media presence across CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX and the other major networks, for Fortune 500 clients.

She leads FoundryIR's broadcast and earned-media work: how a company gets on camera, what it says once it's there, and how a story survives contact with a producer who has thirty seconds to decide whether to care.

Earned media is where most small-cap IR quietly gives up. It is also the difference between a news release that lands in a vacuum and one that gets picked up.

Liz Stubbs's practice is media and communications. She is not a securities professional and provides no securities, legal or compliance advice.

🧩 How the firm is staffed

A senior review core, with proven specialists assigned per engagement rather than generalists on salary:

• Securities-experienced reviewers
• Technical editors
• Content and video producers
• Social-media managers and coordinators

Every artifact is directed and approved by a qualified reviewer before it publishes. Specialists never publish on their own authority, and neither do the agents.

What we are not: FoundryIR does not provide legal or compliance advice and does not act as your counsel. We build the disclosure requirements into every asset we produce, but anything filed or issued in your name is approved by you and your own lawyers before it goes out. An IR firm that told you otherwise would be selling you a risk, not a service.

This is the other half of the answer to why we cost a fraction. A conventional firm carries that bench as overhead and bills it to you whether your company needed a video editor or not. We engage the specialist your company actually needs, and the production work that used to justify the bench is now done by agents.

📈 Why we cost a fraction of a newswire + IR firm

Because most of what you are billed for is production and distribution overhead, not judgment — and the legacy wires are stuck in the 90s:

• A newswire charges you by the release and by the word for a distribution network built before modern search, social and syndication existed
• A conventional IR retainer buys a junior account manager whose week goes into drafting, formatting, monitoring, list-building and follow-up — the same for eleven other clients
• The senior person you met in the pitch signs off and moves on
• You pay enterprise rates for junior hours and last-decade plumbing

We inverted it. Purpose-built agents do the production work, at scale and around the clock. People do only the part that requires a person: direction, judgment, relationships, sign-off. Nothing publishes on autopilot — every artifact is approved by an accountable human before it leaves the building, and the required disclosure (TSXV Policy 3.4 / Form 3C, SEC §17(b)) is written into every asset in code rather than remembered by a junior at six in the evening.

The result is not less service — it's more reach, faster turnaround, and an honest per-release distribution rate instead of enterprise wire markups. It is a different cost structure, which is why a C$20-million issuer can afford a real IR function and modern distribution together, instead of choosing between an overpriced wire, an overpriced retainer, and none at all.

And our pricing is on the website. Every firm we compete with makes you book a call to find out what they charge. That should tell you something about which of us is comfortable being compared. See the plans →

⚖️ The rules we operate by

• No performance comp. Fees are never tied to share price or trading volume, per securities regulations. Our incentive is renewal, which only happens if the work is good.
• Everything disclosed. Canadian listed-issuer engagements are announced and filed (TSXV Policy 3.4 / Form 3C). Paid content carries attribution on every channel, in every jurisdiction.
• Human sign-off on every artifact. Agents draft; accountable people approve. Nothing publishes on autopilot.
• Investor relations, not stock promotion. We make companies understandable and reachable. We do not tout, predict prices, or manufacture excitement.

🏛️ Two sectors, one method

🔍 Get your Investor Visibility Audit

A concrete, issuer-specific report — built for your ticker, delivered in days:

• How visible your company actually is to the investors you want
• Where liquidity and disclosure hygiene are costing you
• The three fastest fixes