ShareSoc Director Spotlight – Mike Dennis

What inspired you to join ShareSoc’s board and what motivates you to represent retail investors?

I joined ShareSoc as a member in 2013 after retiring from a corporate career. I had built up an investment portfolio over 20 years but wanted to deepen my understanding and learn from other investors. Attending ShareSoc events and talking with fellow members and company leaders showed me the value of the community.

When the board invited me to join, whilst I didn’t have significant investing experience to offer I felt I could offer my business experience ShareSoc whilst continuing to learn about the world of investing. Over time, I’ve come to appreciate the impact of ShareSoc’s lobbying and campaigning, protecting individual shareholders and holding companies to account. I stay involved because I want to help ShareSoc grow in influence and expand the services it offers to investors.

ShareSoc is led by volunteer directors, how do you think this shapes the organisation’s values and campaigns?

Because the directors are all individual investors and receive no financial benefit for their roles their only motivation is to ensure fair and equal treatment for individual investors, it guides our values and campaigns. I spend several hours per week on ShareSoc business, and many of my fellow directors do the same. We approach things from the perspective of individual investors, which gives us more influence with government and regulators than our size might suggest.

Corporates spend far more on lobbying, so we have to stay vigilant to make sure changes benefit individuals as well as the markets.

How have you seen ShareSoc evolve and what’s one insight you’d pass on to newer investors?

Since I joined as a member in 2013, ShareSoc has grown from around 1,000 members to over 10,000, with several thousand social media followers. In the early years the directors did virtually all the work but now we are supported by a small, enthusiastic team of staff and contractors, without whom we would not be nearly as effective. Continuing to grow our membership is extremely important because the more members we have, the stronger our voice becomes in making the markets work better for individuals. We estimate there are at least 500,000 self-directed individual investors active in the UK market, many of whom would likely be happy to join ShareSoc.

A few years ago we merged with SIGnet, which has become a growing network of investor groups around the UK that meet regularly to share ideas and learn from each other. It’s so popular that we are struggling to keep up with demand.

To those who are new to investing I would simply say, take a bit of time to learn the basics, to understand your own risk tolerance and your timelines, and after that, investing is mainly common sense and patience. I would also say, sign up for the SIGnet course for beginner investors!

Managing membership growth and operations, what practical steps are we taking to build our community and member benefits?

We want to spread the word about the benefits of investing and encourage more people to dip their toe in the investing water whilst helping them to become better informed. Our SIGnet beginners’ course is one vehicle to do this, and we have also introduced a weekly newsletter which keeps our members better informed about developments in the investing world.

We have also added a monthly magazine for SIGnet members to our services and upgraded our ShareSoc magazine. As we grow member subscriptions, we shall grow our services – in particular, we intend to put more focus on investing education. Our series of SHARESOC! Investing Basics videos was well received when we launched it a couple of years ago, but it is still not very widely known so we will promote this and our other educational tools more widely as we increase our marketing budget which is probably the biggest constraint on our growth!

Post Date: January 10, 2026