Head of Investor Relations, UNITED THERAPEUTICS CORP
Pulling Focus | Dewey Steadman - United Therapeutics
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About Dewey Steadman
Dewey Steadman, Head of Investor Relations at United Therapeutics, discussed the company's growth and communication strategy in a February 2025 podcast. He stated that since joining the company five years ago, United Therapeutics more than doubled its revenue run rate, tripled its share price, and increased its employee count by approximately 50%. Steadman described his role as the primary spokesperson for both investor and media relations, and noted that the company is a public benefit corporation, which he said allows it to consider patients, shareholders, employees, and communities equally in corporate decisions. Steadman said the company aims to create value with "the right investors" rather than driving up the stock price with a generic presentation. He acknowledged that the company has not implemented standard marketing metrics such as click-through rates, but has received anecdotal feedback from investors who appreciate video content, particularly about the company's Phase 5 Net Zero Warehouse and its designated pathogen free facility. He also noted that the brand is managed by the general counsel's office, separate from commercial product marketing, and that the company operates in a highly regulated environment where the FDA dictates much of what can be said in marketing materials.
Transcript (49 segments)
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Ryan0:08
Welcome back to Pulling Focus. I'm Ryan, and today we're here with Dewey Steadman from United Therapeutics. Thanks for being here.
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Dewey Steadman0:13
Thanks for having me. I really appreciate the time.
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Ryan0:15
So for those who don't know what United Therapeutics is, can you talk a little bit about the company?
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Dewey Steadman0:19
Yeah, so we were founded in 1996 by a family seeking a cure for their daughter's rare disease. Almost 30 years later, we treat around 15,000 patients with rare disease. We're also seeking technologies to extend the lives of patients through an unlimited supply of transplantable organs. We have about 1,300 employees now, 500 of them are in North Carolina, and we've got a $3 billion run rate, all because we're trying to find a cure.
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Ryan0:54
Incredible growth over the last few years too, right?
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Dewey Steadman0:56
Yeah. Since I joined five years ago, I think we've more than doubled our revenue run rate, probably tripled our share price, and we have probably 50% more employees.
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Ryan1:12
That's incredible in five years. Tell us about your position and what you do there.
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Dewey Steadman1:16
So I run investor relations and also media relations. I am the primary spokesperson for the company, believe it or not. They trust me with that, I don't know why. I'm responsible for communicating the UT story to all outside stakeholders, especially investors and media, and also folks interested in ESG initiatives. That transparency function runs up through me.
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Ryan1:46
And your background is from Wall Street, right? How do you transition from Wall Street to PR, being in charge of the story of this huge company? Walk me through that.
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Dewey Steadman1:57
Yeah, so on Wall Street I was actually in specialty pharma and generics companies, so a little bit lower science than biotech companies like us now. I've been familiar with the industry since I started in equity research in 2006. I wanted a better quality of life. My wife and I were having our daughter, and I wanted not necessarily less hours but more predictable hours. Wall Street is pretty intense. It's rewarding, but it's incredibly intense. The people on Wall Street are extremely smart. I've been in rooms where I'm the dumbest person in the room. But everybody else on Wall Street tends to focus on money and earnings. What I really like about working in industry is being able to focus on patients, especially at UT where we're very patient-centric.
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Ryan2:47
I think that's the part that fascinates me about your story, how empathetic and compassionate you are as a person, that it seeps its way into your work and has kind of led you in this direction. I'm curious, part of what you're in charge of is the investor relations side, understanding that you're in charge of the story and the public-facing message from a PR side, but also what the investors see and how you utilize assets from that angle. Can we talk about some of the challenges? United Therapeutics is the type of company that doesn't market through traditional channels to try and get new customers. It's a very different approach. Can you give me the high-level view for people who might be in different industries to understand some of those challenges?
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Dewey Steadman3:40
Yeah, so on the marketing side, we're in a highly regulated environment. The FDA dictates a lot of what we can say and can't say in our marketing materials. When we're advertising a drug, you've got to demonstrate the benefits and risks. If you mention the indication of any drug, then you have a whole slew of disclaimers that you have to present as well. So it's very regimented marketing, very different from someone used to industrial widgets. On the investor side, we still have to follow those rules of the road, but we have to be able to tell a good story to get investors interested in us. The rules change once you have an FDA-approved drug. A lot of smaller biotech companies that advertise on CNBC aren't approved yet, so they're not under the purview of the FDA in terms of what they market. It's very difficult for us to walk that tightrope and get investors excited about the story while staying within the bounds of regulation.
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Ryan4:47
How important is the story aspect to the investors?
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Dewey Steadman4:50
I think telling a story conveys who we are at UT much better than a typical marketing message. Some of our peers will give their key catalysts, cash flow, stock price, and how people love them. But we don't like to talk about ourselves that way. We like to tell stories and talk about our culture because it's very unique. We're very patient-focused. We're actually a public benefit corporation, so we have a corporate structure that allows us to put patients, shareholders, employees, and communities at large shoulder-to-shoulder when making corporate decisions. We act a little bit different than our peers. Using different kinds of marketing materials like videos really helps us convey how different we are from that typical biotech company.
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Ryan5:54
Was there a moment, a directive, or feedback that you got from somebody that said we should be thinking about telling our story in these meetings, or does that come from your experience on Wall Street making investments or helping other companies?
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Dewey Steadman6:05
It's both, actually. It's the way I prefer to tell stories and convey a message about a company. At the three companies I've worked at in industry, I've tried to tell the story a little bit different than everyone else, so it's a fresh and clean message compared to the generic messaging of everybody else. We also had an initiative internally where we were telling stories before I even started. We had a very creative team that came in and did some flashy storytelling messaging, slide decks, things like that, which was very good for who we were at the time. But we've evolved, we've become bigger, and we need to tell a deeper story to a broader audience. I think video is definitely a way to do that, and it's compelling not only to investors but also to the physicians we market to and the communities at large.
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Ryan7:07
So you're able to leverage making content about the discoveries and what is happening there to serve all these different audiences because the story is still the same?
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Dewey Steadman7:18
The story is still the same. That's what we want. We don't want to have to tailor our story to various constituencies. Everybody should like it. We run into a lot of situations where investors want us to communicate identically to everyone else in our comp set, and we just don't want to do that because that's not us and that's not the way we operate. It is extremely deep in the business. The way we make business decisions is different than all of our peers, so we can't communicate the same way as our peers because we don't operate that way.
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Ryan7:55
Over the last few months, we've been working together on a really large brand film for United Therapeutics. I've conducted interviews with probably over 40 people now at different stages of the company all over the country and multiple countries. I feel from everybody that we talk to that they are bought in on this message, but they feel the power of that story at every level, which I think is very unique to United Therapeutics. There are probably other companies of that size and scale where the people at the bottom and the people at the top are not communicating with each other in the same way. Working together to beat that drum helps champion that through the organization in a way that is very unique to United Therapeutics' origin, creativity, and innovation. All of those things really come through all of the people that you talk to, which is unique.
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Dewey Steadman8:49
It is very unique. I think the videos really help us convey our culture not only to current employees but to future employees. As they do their research and diligence on us to take a potential position, they can see who we are through these videos and understand who we are. We spend a lot of time in the recruitment and interview process selecting people who can fit in our culture. We do a lot of deep questions and different kinds of questions in our interviews to select for that. My interview process was six months long because I met with so many different people and had so many different kinds of questions and settings just to see who I was and if I would fit in with the team. Even with my team of two, Katherine and Harry, we worked very hard to find those two folks who could purposely fit into our organization and thrive from day one, and they've both done a great job.
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Ryan9:55
Having met them and other members of the team, they are great fits. I know you travel a bit, so I'm curious what feedback you've gotten from either investors or management about using content like that in these presentations. Maybe we can talk about how you're using them in the presentations and the methodology behind leveraging the content.
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Dewey Steadman10:20
We haven't done an investor day in quite a while, partly because of COVID and partly because there hasn't been much to talk about. But we're coming up on an inflection point where we likely will do one or two investor events next year, and the video component will be a key part of that. It breaks up the monotony of PowerPoint presentations and people coming up to speak about mechanisms of action and market opportunity. Folks generally enjoy that kind of break in the day. We've also been able to give investors insight into our business that we wouldn't normally be able to give. In investor relations, certain people in the organization are trained to interact with investors and no one else can. If we can get folks who don't normally interact with investors on screen in a natural environment, and we've scrubbed it for regulatory compliance and accuracy, we can give exposure to investors of parts of the business they would never normally see, even on a site visit. We haven't been able to do site visits as much as our peers, so the videos really help convey who we are.
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Ryan11:37
That's really powerful. I was unaware of how much regulatory stuff there is in the way of people interacting with those investors. I'm curious about your experience with these investors. There are a lot of challenges around how to explain complex ideas, and some of the science you guys are doing is very cutting edge. Are some of these folks savvy in that world, or is it totally over their head?
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Dewey Steadman12:06
Some of these investors are smarter than us in terms of science. Some are MDs, some are PhDs who have chosen to move into the investment industry for various reasons, so they know this very well. One of our covering sell-side analysts who I enjoy interacting with actually worked in an immunology lab that is currently helping us with xenotransplantation efforts, so he knows this space better than any of us do because he worked in it. It's really interesting to be able to interact with those kinds of folks. It's been difficult internally to convey to people that some of these investors may know more than you. When they ask a question, they're testing you. But being able to uniquely convey a story helps break through the challenge of conveying something scientific to a generalist investor who may be looking at a mining company in the morning and then us in the afternoon.
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Ryan13:16
I know that part of some of the challenges we've talked about in making these videos is how to convey these complex ideas in a way that is digestible for both someone who is really savvy and understands the science and technology, but is also low enough for somebody like me who has no idea what some of the definitions are. Is that something you've received feedback on from either side, internal or external, about conveying those complex ideas?
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Dewey Steadman13:48
It's really me reaching out to folks internally saying, 'Cut the jargon down, cut the science down. We've got to make this simple for a generalist investor.' I've gotten feedback from generalists that they appreciate the efforts. I've looked at some of our peer companies, especially in the oncology space where it's very serious stuff, but it's all mechanisms and drawings of how the molecule enters the cell and kills the cell, and all kinds of molecular pathways. I'm a molecular biologist by training, so I get it, but the generalist investor who runs a pension fund in Singapore is not going to understand that. They'll look at the presentation and think they can't understand it, so they can't invest. We want to break it down to make it easy for a generalist investor to come into the story and say, 'I get this. This is rare disease, this is what they've been doing for 20 years, this is the organ opportunity, and this is where they're going in the future.' We want to make it as simple as possible, and then cater to the folks who want to dive in with separate presentations.
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Ryan15:02
Have you seen measurable impact from using this with investors or internally? Ways you've been able to feel the impact of making these?
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Dewey Steadman15:11
I'm good at relating with people, I'm not good at actually marketing, so we haven't implemented the kind of metrics a normal marketer would have. We don't have click-throughs or anything like that. But we have received anecdotal feedback from investors that they appreciate the videos, especially the ones we've done with you on Project Lightyear, the Phase 5 Net Zero Warehouse here in Research Triangle Park, as well as the Christiansburg designated pathogen-free facility. There was a lot of interest in that, so being able to show footage of that and some of the b-roll we captured inside the barrier has been invaluable to share with investors. Internally, some of the feedback has been extremely positive. Martine Rothblatt, our CEO, mentioned that the DPF video was the most elegant video she's seen describing UT. I can't get a better compliment than that, so we're only going downhill from here.
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Ryan16:12
It's flattering to hear that from Martine. I'm excited for you and your team to have these assets and to have champions internally and externally. You mentioned you don't have traditional ways to measure marketing like click-through rates or view counts. How do you measure the success of making videos? What levers are you actually looking at?
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Dewey Steadman16:42
I'm looking at praise from the management team and from investors, and also other external parties like potential employees and what HR thinks about using these videos in their recruiting efforts. It's really kind of anecdotal. As I go deeper into PR and communications, we'll develop metrics and measures to evaluate the success of these. But for now, it's really just the right thing for us to do to convey our culture.
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Ryan17:16
When you think about sharing the story of somebody like Dave Ayares at Revivicor or some of these other folks, how do you prioritize? How do you decide what part of that story is worth telling and when to employ it?
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Dewey Steadman17:36
That's a good question. We want to make the story as simple as possible. Dave is the smartest person in every room I've ever been in, in terms of his knowledge of genetic engineering, creating and cloning sheep, cows, and pigs, and everything he's done over the last three or four decades. It's amazing, but the challenge I have in communications is breaking it down simply. What I'm able to do through these videos and leveraging Press Record is conveying a simple story and getting people interested. If they want to dive in more, we can get Dave on the phone and dive in more. We've done that with major media outlets, and they can go as deep as they want after they see the video and understand the high-level part of the story. I want to do that with Dave's team at Revivicor and the other research teams we have internally at UT.
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Ryan18:40
It kind of creates the window of opportunity for the viewer. It's just enough, and if they need to get deeper, here's how to get in touch with the right people. But it opens the door for some who are maybe just at the surface level curious.
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Dewey Steadman18:53
The benchmark I have for that is my daughter. When we're editing these videos, I show them to my daughter and ask, 'Do you get this?' And she gets it. She's like, 'Oh, pigs, oh wonderful,' and she kind of understands what I'm doing. I have a couple of friends too who have no science background, no science experience, actually no finance experience, and I show it to them and get feedback. If they can get it and understand it within the three or four minutes of the science videos we've been doing, then we've done a good job.
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Ryan19:28
What I love about working with your team is that village of feedback effect. In some cases, it's easy for anybody to create an echo chamber of just wanting someone to tell you what's wrong, not necessarily seeing the good or seeing the forest through the trees. Part of what UT is so great at with all of their diversity in culture internally and externally is that somebody might make a point and there's an equally weighted counterpoint to a change or an angle of a story. It really empowers us as creators, and hopefully the viewers as well, with the product that gets all the way to the end. It's been distilled through so many filters that it positively impacts the story instead of continuing to whittle down and remove to the point where we've lost the soul or the message.
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Dewey Steadman20:23
That feeds into one of the frustrations I have as an ex-Wall Streeter. I want things done now, I want things done yesterday. Even though I grew up in the South, the 10 years I had in New York and Chicago reflect on me now where I want things done now. A lot of this back and forth really frustrates me because it takes longer. But I've understood now that we end up with a better product because of that, whether it's the videos or our IR materials. That feedback is important, and it's also a culture aspect. We're run by attorneys. Martine was an attorney, our general counsel obviously is an attorney, the president of the company was an attorney by training. A lot of days I go in and debate class, and I hate debate class. But we do openly discuss things, and we're not afraid to share feedback, even tough feedback, with each other. We don't hold back. I think that's important to be able to do the revolutionary work we're doing and also communicate it in an effective way.
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Ryan21:27
I think that transparency from the top, that no-filter approach to how you guys communicate, makes its way into those final projects and gets out to the viewer. Not that these things are not compliant, but they tell this story in a way that is true to the people who are living it and making the discoveries or performing the experiments. It is very authentic and organic to them and their situations, which is what I think makes them so strong.
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Dewey Steadman21:55
We want to be true to ourselves and the way we communicate. We could put together the most generic PowerPoint presentation that could get every science specialist investor interested in us and drive the stock up to $800 a share tomorrow, but it's not a true story to ourselves. We want to be able to create value in the right way with the right investors riding along with us.
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Ryan22:24
Thanks for that. We're in the middle of Research Triangle Park, one of the biggest research parks in the world. There are all kinds of other biotech companies around us and probably other people who are handling investor relations like you do. What advice would you give for somebody who maybe has your position but at a different company about telling these stories in an authentic way, the power of that, or why it's important?
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Dewey Steadman22:48
Every IR professional would know this: you get opinions from everyone, and they're going to conflict with each other always. You take those into account. If you hear something that's consistent from everyone, then maybe you should think about doing it. But if you're hearing it from one or two people, don't rush to satisfy them, even if they're a giant investor. If it's not true to you, you shouldn't be doing it. You should do what's true to you, true to the culture of your company, and true to the team you represent. That will drive value in the long term. There are a lot of people who are short-term focused, next quarter focused. A lot of IR professionals are very good at communicating in that manner, and that's just not the way we operate. If you want a job for the long term, that's not the way you should operate either.
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Ryan23:44
It's powerful thinking. When it comes specifically to the storytelling side of things, not just the company culture but the employees, the patients, the impact, we're of the opinion that those things are harder or almost impossible to tell in an inauthentic way. It's best to hear from the people what they think, what their experience is, for better or worse, and dive into what their experience was to really get a better understanding. Maybe that helps your company grow and helps beat that drum of your message out to the public and to those investors. A lot of our focus in our work with you is how can we tell that story in an authentic way that investors can understand, laymen can understand, but is still true and authentic to your story.
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Dewey Steadman24:38
Through video, we're able to put people in front of the camera who normally wouldn't be put in front of investors for various reasons. We can craft a controlled story that's from the heart from them. They're the most passionate people in the company, the ones running the research or the commercial operations. I can go talk to them and I'm very good at taking notes and regurgitating those notes to the investment community or the media, but it doesn't have the same impact coming from me, an ex-Wall Street or corporate schmuck, versus the scientist who's discovering new pathways of cloning or genetic engineering. The video format allows us to get those folks in front of hundreds of people without taking up too much of their time, because it's a controlled situation where they're being interviewed instead of traveling around the world with me. We can also craft the message very carefully using you.
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Ryan25:40
One of the things you talked a lot about during this interview is sharing the message and talking about the culture of UT and being authentic to that culture. From the lens of a marketer, it's a brand image and a brand story that you're really talking about more deeply. I'm curious because you're not a marketing person, you're not measuring it in a marketing way, but you're still valuing it in the same way. Most marketers would probably think of this as brand recognition, more eyeballs, top-of-funnel content to help further people along on the buyer journey. But for you, it's a little bit different. It's about the culture, sharing that story, people understanding what it is that you all do. While you're looking at two sides of the same coin, you're still trying to tackle the same problems. Do you ever communicate directly with the marketing teams to talk about brand image and work those things into these projects? How do your teams collaborate? Are they leveraging this stuff in their own ways?
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Dewey Steadman26:53
I have a very close relationship with the commercial team. They're some of my best work friends, but also close collaborators. They see value in what we're producing here for content. They're even going to use some of our recently produced videos at the national sales meeting in January to really motivate the sales force. They also want to be able to use some of this content to talk to doctors about our culture. We use our status as a public benefit corporation, some of our philosophies around inventory management and patient-first philosophy, to market to doctors. Using some of these videos is invaluable for that because we can get folks from deep inside the company in front of physicians who would not normally be able to attend those kinds of events. In terms of brand image, the brand is maintained actually with the general counsel, again run by lawyers. We've always kind of operated corporate things like the brand image separately from marketing of commercial products, partly because that's just the way we grew up and partly because of the regulatory aspects the commercial team has to operate under. But I think some of the work we've been doing lately has bridged that gap, so we're able to do some brand work that helps the commercial team and raises all boats, both the corporate side and the commercial side.
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Ryan28:23
What fascinates me about that is I think a lot of folks or a lot of marketers that I've interacted with see that as a big barrier. Maybe there's too much regulatory, maybe there's too much red tape. But you're kind of seeing it glass half full, in that you're able to champion everybody behind this and grow in all aspects. It's nice to see the whole team see things in that way too, where I think others would see a fence to climb.
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Dewey Steadman28:51
It is a fence to climb, but I've chosen to let other people climb the fence for me. As we were talking about before we started, with a compliance review for a video, I'll let the commercial team or the product teams deal with the compliance review. We'll produce something that we think is honest and true, and then let the compliance team make some suggestions post-talk. I don't have to go through the ins and outs of doing that for some of these, which allows me to be creative working with you to produce the best product we can. So I'm not worried about the compliance on the other end.
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Ryan29:34
That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on today. Is there anything else that I didn't ask that you want to talk about or bring up?
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Dewey Steadman29:42
Oh, there's so much. No, thank you for having me. It's been a real pleasure to work with you and Will and the rest of the team. Just to have creative folks aligned with us, we treasure that in the relationships we have outside of the company.
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Ryan29:58
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Dewey. I appreciate your time.