A former boss once told me that I shouldn’t sweat blood and tears over producing a resounding quote for the annual results announcement: it should always end with the words, “I look forward with confidence to the future”.
This might sound lazy, but is in fact genius. Just won a pile of new contracts? Try: “We grew our business significantly in 2012, earning major contracts and improving profitability. I look forward with confidence to the future”. Ta-dah! Cue applause.
Alternatively, your sales and profits have sky-dived and you’ve had to fire half your staff: “Following a year marked by difficult conditions in our principal markets, we have put in place a restructuring plan designed to improve profitability. As such, I look forward with confidence to the future”. In other words, things can only get better.
It doesn’t end there. A spot survey of 2012 results announcements from the FTSE shows you could conceivably write a results announcement from a pre-defined list of words and phrases, simply swapping in the words “bank” or “mining company” depending on who you’re writing for.
2012 wasn’t a great year for most companies, so there was a lot about “foundations” (Barclays, BP) and “building” (the latter featuring particularly heavily at Rio Tinto, which was building on strengths as well as building focus – that’s quite a lot of building work for a company whose underlying earnings were down 40%). “Solid” was probably the most overused adjective: Aviva made “solid progress”, despite losing £3 billion, and BP even managed to lay a “solid foundation for growth in the long-term” (unlike the short-term, which is about “delivering operational milestones”). There were lots of “difficult economic backdrops” and “challenging economic conditions”, although most companies were “well-positioned to deliver future growth”.
No-one’s seen an “outstanding” progress since the heady days of 2007, although Unilever, which seemed almost embarrassed at producing some decent results amid a sea of FTSE red, ventured a “good”. “Substantial progress”, by contrast, seems to be reserved for companies that were doing particularly badly before, or who are hated by the general public because they pay their employees too much (i.e. banks).
What to take out of this? I can’t really criticise: not only have I written endless announcements where my company is looking forward with confidence to the future, but when I’ve tried to write anything else, it’s generally been changed by the chairman or one of his myriad advisors. In fact, originality is perhaps best left out of results announcements, if Barclays’ attempt this year is anything to go by. Its Chief Executive ended his statement by explaining the bank had a common purpose, which would be delivered by embedding five core values, and that by building this culture (bear with me) he is confident that Barclays “will become the ‘Go-To’ bank for all our stakeholders”. I sincerely hope that next year, it will have made substantial progress.
