Regina Broadband's Earnings Conference Call (a)

Abstract

Rhonda Magee, a new employee at Regina Broadband, was tasked to prepare slides for the company's next earnings conference call. The company had seen good growth through acquisitions, but now was pursuing a strategy of organic growth. Recent changes had raised potential questions about the company's leadership and compensation. As a policy, Regina's management provided limited future earnings guidance to investors. Since the most recent Q4 and year-end earnings data were still being gathered, Magee decided to draft the slides with provisional headlines and insert placeholders for data and results that the CFO could complete before the earnings conference call later in the week.This disguised case sets the stage for the accompanying B case (UVA-C-2368), which takes place directly after Regina releases its earnings. Excerpt UVA-C-2367 Rev. Aug. 21, 2015 Regina Broadband's Earnings Conference Call (A) As a Seattle native, Rhonda Magee had been looking forward to Super Bowl XLVIII, which was to air that day, February 2, 2014, at 6:30 p.m. (EST), or 3:30 p.m. (PST) in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she now lived. Magee's beloved Seattle Seahawks would play for the championship title against the Denver Broncos at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. So Magee grimaced when she saw an urgent e-mail that Sunday morning from Regina Broadband's CFO, Kory Miyaka. According to Miyaka, Magee's colleague in investor relations, Joe Filipowski, who had been out on Friday, was in the hospital recovering from an emergency appendectomy. Normally it was Filipowski's responsibility to prepare the PowerPoint slides for the company's earnings conference calls, the next of which was scheduled for Thursday, February 6, at 5:00 p.m. (EST). Now he was in no condition to get the deck started, and Miyaka didn't have access to Filipowski's computer files. Could Magee please draft the first five slides? Miyaka would add fourth-quarter revenue and earnings numbers himself later, when the data were available. Magee was a relatively new employee at Regina, so contributing to this important financial communication was a great opportunity. She had joined the company only a few months earlier, after graduating from the MBA for Executives program at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business. Magee was a bit nervous about the surprise assignment, but she had read that the Seahawks incorporated meditation into their training regimen. She took a moment to close her eyes and take three deep breaths. One…two…three… . . .