I stared at him over the Zoom call.
Forty thousand?!
Or fourteen?
He smiled and said,
Forty. Ty.
And this was before I retired, in 2008.
I heard there were banks that were offering eighty thousand just for agencies to do their annual report.
I slumped against my chair. It was definitely cold in the room in Kyoto, but his words chilled me to the bone. For months, I had been happy at what our agency was charging. I could hear the kaching! of the tills ringing, but I never knew how severely we were undercharging the market.
We had charged a preschool run by a charity $4300 for 30 pages. Another medical association was hoping to get theirs done at $3000. Yet another charity was paying us $5597 for design and printing of their annual report.
If you want to design an annual report, we know just how difficult it is to try and estimate three things.
- How much it costs
- How long it will take
- How good it will be
Let’s start with the costs.
The TLDR (Too long didn’t read)
| Type of work | Scope of work | Cost breakdown (in Singapore Dollars) | Total cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Annual report for a listed company | About 100 pages, with about 80 pages mostly comprising financial reports and information Design of around 20 pages comprising the company’s highlights |
| $40,000 |
| Annual report for a charity | About 40 to 50 pages with about 35 pages of design covering the highlights of the charity |
| $9,700 for an agency who knows what they are worth But print (not design) agencies focusing on printing will do it happily for $6000 because they make money from the printing, not the design. |
| School yearbook, comprising the students pictures and a brief writeup of the different highlights of the school’s year | Often around 120 pages, with 60 pages devoted to the students’ pictures |
| $17,100 |
What are you paying for?
You might look at the figures above and balk at how much it looks. Especially if you’re a charity with a limited budget.
Why spend for an annual report?
You might think that with a digital world like today, does it really matter that you have an annual report?
Yes, it does.
It gives a value exponential to your market capitalisation
Here’s a question if you’re a listed company.
Would you spend $40,000 for an added $1 million in market capitalisation?
If your answer is yes, then why wouldn’t you spend that amount on an annual report?
Let me give you some clearer examples of how banks, have used that to great effect. For the past two years, OCBC and DBS have been awarded for their Annual Reports. In 2022, DBS was awarded the Silver Award in the large-cap category.
We can clearly see from the bottom that their clarity in communications, through the annual report, has resulted in a consequent rise in their stock price. Whilst the annual report is not the only reason, it is still primarily one of the main collaterals that investors use to make their decisions.
Just compare their stock price gain with another bank like Hong Leong Finance, which has not done as well.
The annual report is combined with other key collaterals such as the half-yearly earnings call and slide deck, which present a strong investment case.
It presents a reason to continue investing
With listed companies, there’s even more of a reason to make a fancy annual report, especially when you consider that the stock market may not be that kind to you if you present a poor set of numbers. If investors start shunning your stock like a smelly sock like they found in their living room, you would find your cost of capital being increasingly expensive.
That’s why you see that amongst the annual reports, listed companies continue to dedicate many resources towards ensuring that the best face of their company is presented.
Look at the example of Frasers Logistics and Commercial Trust, which presented its annual report a few weeks ago.
Part of the narrative of ‘Evolving Stronger’ also hid the uncomfortable fact that their net property income, as you can see below, had fallen 9%.
But if you can see from the narrative throughout the annual report, they reiterated their ability to create value.
It’s a nice way to gloss over the fact that their revenue had dropped.
The annual report is an exercise in marketing and selling more of what you do
That’s why the annual report is one of the most crucial elements in garnering support for your brand.
One of the most classy, understated annual reports we love looking at are those of Alphabet, the parent company of Google. If you look at their annual report, as presented above, you would see over and over again a simplicity that belies their ability to simplify the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
This is what an annual report can do for you, if you do it well.
It gives stakeholders something to remember your time together
With one of our first clients, MINDS, a school serving the needs of those with special needs, they allocated a budget to do the annual yearbook because they wanted something that both parents and students could remember the year with.
You would probably have the same experience. Where 12 years on, you suddenly stumble onto an old yearbook, flip through the yearbook, and think,
Gosh, I’ve grown so much!
An annual report serves to celebrate the achievements of the year, and give stakeholders something to remember you with.
The elements of making an annual report
There are 4 crucial elements of each annual report:
- Conceptualisation
- Writing
- Graphic design
- Collation
Looking at the MINDS annual report above, you would see that there was a clear concept of ‘Coming Together, Emerging Stronger’, throughout the entire report.
Conceptualising comes first
This is where the writing expertise comes in.
When you want to write an annual report, you might not be clear what the theme is.
From our experience, many clients often focus on how nice the designs are, without focusing on how good the writer is.
This is doing things the inverted way.
The design is the skin.
The writing is the flesh.
One cannot coexist without the other, but the writing is the fundamental portion of what stitches everything together.
With a strong and coherent concept, it becomes far easier to put together the report, compared to coming up with a design first, without a coherent theme.
Then the writer structures the ideas
Often, what design agencies miss is a strong writer that can interview you and help you to understand what the main theme you’re trying to bring through is.
As Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar, the animation studio, once said this of writers,
Not only is writing time-consuming but writers also bring structural thinking to the development process—input that most directors really need.
They bring structure to the mass of ideas you have.
When we work with clients on their annual reports, we find that useful questions include:
- What do you want this annual report to do?
- Who are the main readers?
- If this annual report did everything you wanted it to do, what would look different? What would feel different? What would happen for your company?
These questions help us determine what eventually becomes the main logline of the annual report – or the main theme that the annual report will encompass.
Only then does design come in
It is then, and only then that the design comes in.
Often the design comprises of 3 main elements.
Worry more about the reliability of the agency
But ultimately what you want in an annual report design agency is its reliability. Some things you need to take note of are:
- How fast does it respond to your messages (often a 12-hour window is reasonable)
- Does it regularly communicate to you, especially when things go wrong?
- For example, when we first started with MINDS, our first ever annual report client, we messed up a few times. One instance was when we didn’t manage to include the picture of the administrative manager due to the time constraints of the project. But what salvaged the relationship was that we managed to communicate this to them.
Reliability for us means,
Do what you say,
Say what you do.
There aren’t many agencies who can do this reliably and push projects from idea to completion.
That’s why you can trust us with your annual report. Contact us today.