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How to bring your investment case to the surface
Strategy Director, Sean Bride shares storytelling tips in Informed’s Summer 2025 issue
Our Strategy Director, Sean Bride, has been featured in the latest issue of Informed, the IR Society’s magazine for investor relations professionals, sharing his advice on how companies can bring their investment case to life in their annual reports.
Sean’s piece tackles something we see all too often: annual reports filled with facts and figures, but missing the story and context that makes investors sit up and take notice. The best reports, he says, do three things, they give numbers meaning, they make the story memorable, and they inspire belief in what’s ahead.
Read Sean's article below, and download the Summer 2025 edition of Informed here.
How to bring your investment case to the surface
Companies often present a list of strengths on a single page in their annual report. Sean Bride explains how to avoid missed opportunities by making your investment case persuasive, memorable and believable.
The annual report can play a vital role within an investor relations programme. It provides a shop window for investors thinking of taking a position in a company. They’ll look for information on the strategy and direction of the company and if they like the story, they’ll look more closely at the financials.
It’s therefore surprising that companies taking the trouble to dedicate a page or two of their annual report to an investment case are in the minority. In a report that is crammed with facts, complex data, and regulatory disclosures designed to meet policy agendas – the ability to surface a compelling investment story is essential.
Investors scour reports looking for ideas of what the future might bring. When they’re trying to figure out where a company is going next, they need to understand more than technical possibilities. They need to understand the stories about those possibilities because it’s such a big part of the forecasting equation.
The following quote chimed with me because while we obsess over numbers and assumptions for valuation forecasts, it’s the story behind them that hooks investors.
The valuation of every company is simply a number from today multiplied by a story about tomorrow.”
The Psychology of Money
Moreover, an ongoing narrative that shows how the company is delivering on its investment case plays a role in building belief and forms a key part of its relationship with its investors. Here are three recommendations for presenting your investment case and putting the annual report at the centre of your investor relations programme.
Make it persuasive
Thinking about the importance of context is the key to making an investment case persuasive. An investment case can often appear as a collection of statements and statistics. Not only do these appear elsewhere in the report, creating repetition, but it’s also a lost opportunity to make a more persuasive argument.
A page of statistics and strengths lacks context, which is essential to making potential investors care about your business and helping them understand the opportunity. Something matters because of its relation to other events, people or knowledge. Unless you explain the context, you cannot assume your readers will understand your investment case. Making an investment case persuasive works hand-in-hand with making it memorable.
Make it memorable
The power of three is a clever rhetorical device that shows how content organised into three parts will make it easier to remember. The attraction of a three-part list is that it creates an impression of completeness. Lists with only two items in them sound inadequate and don’t seem to constitute a proper list.
Research into conversation has shown that when a speaker gets as far as a second item in a list but struggles to find a third one, the listeners are prepared to wait for a second or so to allow them to find time to search for a word. This shows that, until the arrival of the third item, we don’t consider the previous person’s turn to have come to an end. In cases where speakers produce lists of four items, they tend to be interrupted by another speaker immediately after the third one and the fourth one is drowned out.
Bringing these ideas together, a three-part structure for an investment case could look like this:
• the opportunity;
• why you will seize this opportunity and win; and
• how investors should judge you.
‘The opportunity’ will often be external, such as a growth opportunity in the marketplace, but it could also be a new strategy or a reset of the business. ‘Why you will seize this opportunity’ will relate to the strengths in the business
and ‘How the company should be judged’ will relate to strategy, and in particular the KPIs or financial guidance.
Making an investment case persuasive works hand-in-hand with making it memorable”
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Make it believable
Think of your annual report as a continuing never-ending story of value creation, driven by a clear strategic focus and a commitment to perform. Its role is ultimately to inspire confidence in a continued investment relationship.
Establishing a narrative structure is therefore central to building belief. The strategy section within your annual report should set out clear objectives; describe what the business did during the year towards meeting those objectives; and then briefly highlight areas of focus for the coming year.
Setting out a couple of priority areas for next year is crucial to building confidence. When you report on their completion in the following year, the reader will start to build up a picture of a company that does what it says it will do.
To help ensure the strategic objectives are measurable, they should have clearly aligned financial and non-financial KPIs. They provide the spine of your report, providing a crucial link with the strategy at the front and how executive directors are remunerated, which appears towards the back of the governance report. In this way, they connect strategy to performance and provide a clear map with coherent signposting and proof points. The more confident you are or wish to be perceived about the long-term journey, the more important it is to provide these milestones and maps.
Case studies provide another form of proof point. They are stories within an overarching corporate narrative. And like all good stories, they have a clear beginning, middle and end. These are another vital proof point and help bring your investment case to life and propel the investment story.
The annual report takes so much time and effort to produce that we sometimes miss opportunities to maximise its value. Putting the investment case at the centre of your report is a good place to start.