This article originally appeared in the Financial Post.

It is pretty hard to pick a good stock: You need to find competent management, a good business, a competitive advantage, a good balance sheet, a low valuation, a good growth profile and solid cash flow, among dozens and dozens of other subjective and quantitative factors.

What’s more, even when you find a good company, you need other investors to like it and push the price up, or you still won’t make any money.

Some companies are great at attracting interest, others not so much. Some companies are even their own worst enemies and do all sorts of things that really don’t need to be done. Rather than attract investors, some corporate moves only serve to send investors the other way.

With that in mind, here are five things companies, especially small ones, do far too often and really don’t help their cause much.

1. Issue too many press releases

Companies seem to think that press releases attract attention. That’s true, but only if the press releases are meaningful.

We have seen press release telling us things such as “equipment has been delivered to the plant,” which sounds like regular operations and not anything worthy of announcing to the world.

Any investor doing any sort of due diligence needs to sift through hundreds of press releases daily. If a company starts issuing frivolous press releases (and many do), we tend to stop reading them.

Press releases also cost money, so a company should save them for when it actually has something important to say.

2. Hire investor relations firms

We have seen tiny companies with a $20-million market cap hire expensive investor relations firms in order to try to boost their stock price.

But these firms are not cheap. Some can cost upwards of $10,000 per month, so now we have a small public company with yet another mouth to feed.

IR firms promise attention and a higher stock price. Many firms will also get stock or options in the company that hires them.

As a result, a small company is spending money it may not be able to afford to spend, and is setting up future selling in its stock (when the IR firm decides to sell).

The best way to get attention is to report strong revenue and earnings growth.

Like press releases, we get dozens of calls from IR firms asking us to cover/investigate their client companies. We know, though, that these are just sales pitches: everything about a company sounds good to an IR firm earning revenue from its client.

3. Listening to slick investment bankers

Small companies have a tendency to worry, which is natural. However, investment bankers take advantage of this by often convincing companies to do financings, to strike when the iron is hot or feed the ducks when they are quacking, as they say.

Bankers tell small and big companies alike that it is far better to have cash in the bank to prepare for the tough times.

There is no issue here with a company having a strong balance sheet, but many companies simply do too many deals and end up diluting shareholders.

Financings are necessary for a small company to grow, but executives should follow their own business plan to raise capital, and not get swayed at a fancy dinner hosted by a bunch of slick investment bankers.

4. Grant too many options to executives

Many companies think that giving options to executives mean that they will stay committed to a company.

We can’t speak to the motivation of every executive, but we can certainly say that actually spending your own cash for shares of your company means you are moremotivated.

If shares in a company plummet, an options holder doesn’t lose any real money, but an equity owner suffers a lot.

Too many companies treat options like candy to be given out like at Halloween.

5. Halt stock unnecessarily

Some companies believe that halting a stock gets them extra attention. Certainly, there are rules around halts, but often it comes down to whether a company has material news.

Plenty of halts are completely unnecessary. For example, Imperus Technologies Corp. (LAB/TSX-V) last week halted its stock, causing some investor apprehension. What was the big news? The company made the second payment on a previously announced acquisition of Vast Studios Inc.

Now, we don’t follow the company, but the total second payment, including a share transfer, was $100,000. With a market cap of $26.5-million, the payment represented 0.4% of the company’s market cap.

Material? Not in our opinion. Save any halts for really important news or those required by exchange regulations.

Consider the above points the next time you are investigating a company. If a company is doing some of the basic things wrong, maybe it is doing some of the more important things wrong as well.