Thar’s a lynchin’ party heading fo’ the AeeGeeM sheriff!

There will be a bit of fun and games at company AGMs this year. Many chairmen, chairwomen, CEOs and directors are not exactly the flavour of the month with shareholders. It’s bad enough for shareholders just watching their life savings slip quietly away and those eagerly anticipated retirement plans evaporate. It’s worse when the company bosses don’t seem to be communicating too well their plan of action, their admission of slow responses and their personal grief at what has been lost. It’s worse still when no half yearly report arrives in the mail, not even a shareholder newsletter, not even on the company’s website. And when the annual report finally arrives stuffed in the mailbox, it’s just a plain old bit of print looking remarkably similar to last year’s report, with its partner in crime a dumb old PDF of the printed report posted on the company website. The carefully posed photos of the Chairman and CEO feature less of a smile this year to match the rather predictable intro to the Chairman’s Report, along the lines of “The 2008/2009 year has been a tough one for your company. The global recession has bitten hard and taken its toll on our earnings. Consequently the payment of dividends...”

These scary times are dividing company boards and senior management into three distinct categories.

1/. “Things are looking really bad out there, we’re all suffering, so I guess we’d better do as little as possible, say nothing to our shareholders until asked... perhaps they won’t call us and it will go away soon”.

2/. “We’re sort of getting through these trying times okay, but our performance has definitely been hit. We’ll just do the same as last year, no more. We’ll play it safe, make ourselves available when asked and conserve our money”.

3/. “This is a great opportunity to get shareholders on our side and influence new investors while our competitors are distracted. Time to communicate to them in a compelling manner that we are ready to tackle the market challenges and have invested in powerful strategies that will accelerate our recovery when markets recover”.

Which one is most likely to get shot up by the rampaging mob?

Shareholders will scrutinise those digitally captured frozen smiles. In this youtube-friendly age however they are really anticipating more than a static image. A bit of video with movement so they can check out the body language, with spoken words ‘direct from the horse’s mouth’ they can play over and over again to make a judgement on their sincerity. “But many of our shareholders are old and don’t have internet access and we don’t have all of their email addresses” you say. Horse shit. 80 to 90 percent of Australian shareholders have opted to receive their annual report online. They won’t settle for any excuses this year. They want the facts. They want the truth. And they want it in plain simple language, not some cleverly written PR masterpiece that bears little resemblance to reality. Companies need to remember that there is much anger out there. And that anger is unlikely to go away this side of the October/November AGM season. Colts and Winchesters are being polished in anticipation of some possum hunting.

And don’t listen to those online purveyors of snake oil – an interactive PDF just won’t do it. It’s got to be HTML unless you want some buckshot in your breeches.

And if some shareholders really, really want to see the full financials in print – how are you going to supply them? Typeset or printed straight from the MSW Word file? Colour or black & white? Laser printed in-house not even with a stiff cover, in the hope that shareholders will be so disappointed they won’t ask for one again?

So are all of your plans this year dependent on working within a lower budget? So how are you going to achieve this? Pressure the poor designer? Pressure the printer? Have you investigated, for example, how to reduce those expensive mailing and processing costs incurred by your share registry – NOM, proxy, Chairman’s letter, fly sheet, shrink wrapping etc? Are you aware of how to tackle this? Perhaps now is a good time for us to talk.

Time to hit the saddle. When it comes to the day of your AGM take my advice and keep a careful eye out for some mean looking strangers in town calling themselves the Tilburn gang. The legend lives on.

Tony Heywood is a Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia, founder of Heywood Innovation in Sydney Australia and joint founder of BrandSynergy in Singapore.

View some of Heywood’s work on www.heywood.com.au

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