Blackline Safety was well covered when Bristol was engaged in May 2023. Nine sell-side analysts followed the company and the research was solid.

The business was performing. What had not kept pace was the breadth of the shareholder base. The stock traded just over $2.00 with a market capitalization of roughly $150M CAD. The company's SaaS-driven revenue model was not widely understood outside its existing investor group, and U.S. institutional awareness was limited.

Blackline's materials and messaging were sound. What the company wanted was a wider audience.

Blackline engaged Bristol to reach the professional investor community that sits outside sell-side distribution. Rather than an extended sequence of individual roadshow meetings, the program was built around investor webinars followed by carefully filtered follow-up meetings.

Execution: Three Investor Webinars

Each webinar was a 60-minute virtual event, comprising a 30-minute management presentation and 30 minutes of live Q&A.

Webinar 1, June 29, 2023

• 264 registrants
• Strong U.S. institutional turnout, particularly East Coast and Midwest
• Many attendees were hearing the Blackline story for the first time

Webinar 2, February 22, 2024

• 272 registrants
• Marked improvement in domestic fund engagement and sell-side analyst interest
• Blackline's second largest shareholder at the time of the sale first learned about the company through this webinar

Webinar 3, February 5, 2025

• 354 registrants
• Widened U.S. and international reach with broader buy-side diversity
• Strongest conversion into qualified one-on-one meetings

Attendance across the three events overlapped to some degree, and that repetition was valuable. A small percentage of investors following the company closely attended more than once and each presentation deepened their understanding of the model. Every event also reached a significant number of new investors who were hearing the Blackline story for the first time. Some had not engaged with earlier presentations. Others could not consider the company at its previous size and became able to as the valuation grew into their mandate. Each webinar added to the shareholder base rather than re-presenting to the same room.

Every Blackline press release was distributed to Bristol's professional investor network, consistently generating open rates in the 30 to 40 percent range. Releases referenced in analyst and investor reports drew higher aggregate views, indicating reinforced recognition over time. Investor deck downloads through the network supported discovery ahead of follow-up meetings.

Quarterly reporting carried the most weight. Blackline's argument to investors was that Blackline had become a recurring revenue business, and that argument was only credible if the numbers kept arriving. They did, quarter after quarter, eventually reaching 36 consecutive quarters of year-over-year growth. Bristol treated each of those reports as an event in its own right, distributing the release to the community and arranging one-on-one meetings with management for investors who wanted to examine the recurring revenue, the retention figures and the margin trajectory themselves.

Over three years that rhythm did something a webinar cannot do on its own. It turned a story investors had heard into a track record they had watched.

"I had no idea this was a SaaS play, the recurring model is attractive."

"Very strong tech foundation and credible execution history."

"This webinar was the best use of my time this month."

"Great discovery, already asked to set up a follow-up."

Bristol's third and final webinar for Blackline was held on February 5, 2025.

Bristol's work continued until the go private transaction. Company updates and news releases were circulated to the investor community on an ongoing basis.

One-on-one meetings continued as well, and by that stage they were arising on their own. Blackline had a large enough following among professional investors that meeting requests came in without Bristol having to generate them. That is the point at which an investor relations program starts working on its own momentum.

The valuation held and continued to build over that period.

This matters for any management team weighing an investor relations program. Well-executed investor engagement is not a treadmill that has to be run indefinitely to hold its position. A professional shareholder base, once built, tends to be durable so long as the company continues to perform to expectations.

Blackline was acquired by an affiliate of Francisco Partners. The transaction closed on June 30, 2026 and the company was delisted from the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Shareholders received $9.00 per share in cash plus a contingent value right of up to $0.50 per share, valuing the company at up to $850 million.

Bristol's engagement ran through to the completion of the transaction.

Blackline's management built a business that delivered 36 consecutive quarters of year-over-year revenue growth. Bristol's contribution over the engagement was more specific:

• Shareholder base: two of Blackline's largest shareholders were introduced through Bristol webinars and subsequent one-on-one activity, and both remained on the register at the time of the sale
• S. investor base: broadened with high-conviction small-cap specialists who had not previously been reached
• Legacy shareholders: re-engaged with the business and the direction of the model
• Liquidity: improved significantly over the engagement, supporting new institutional participation
• Financings: two completed during the engagement
• Model understanding: the recurring revenue characteristics of the business became better understood among investors and brokers who had previously read it as a hardware story

Over the same period the share price moved from just over $2.00 CAD to $9.00 CAD in cash plus a contingent value right of up to $0.50, and the valuation from approximately $150M CAD to a transaction worth up to $850M.