New Best Practice: Presenting FY Results

It isn't reporting season for all of you, but for many, this morning brings a welcome reprieve. A sleep in until 7:30, and the relaxed feeling of not needing to worry about "who am I meeting with today?"

At least until Monday.

This has been reporting week, where a large portion of the ASX release their numbers and reset the narrative with investors. For many, this is an expectations game and for others - like Reece CEO, Peter Wilson - it's confession time.

Rather than what is reported, I wanted to focus on how things are reported. 

With some great ideas coming to surface, I specifically wanted to cover two founder led tech stocks in Kogan and Xref - the online retailer you've probably heard of, and the employer intelligence platform that Seek tried to takeover. 

What did these two companies do when it came to reporting?

AI voice avatars with Kogan.

Kogan used AI to read through their FY25 presentation. 

By tuning in for the first 25 minutes of the call, you'd have heard a pre-recorded AI voice avatar of Ruslan and CFO/COO Shafer. It sounded great, and was used extremely well by the Kogan team to cover their use of AI in the business.

Would it have saved them time? I doubt it. But that wasn't the point here - it was to remind the market they're a growth story utilising AI to drive better margins. 

To be clear - I think the last place you should use AI is to replace yourself when engaging with other people.

Kogan probably went as far as you should go - with Ruslan and David joining the call post recording to answer questions directly, so they were still there. Adding scale and saving time are great, but never stop investing time into shareholders.

If you do, they'll stop investing their time into you, and you lose their share of wallet.

The founder's take with Xref.

We have a very different approach at Xref.

Lee Seymour had a big year with a takeover from SEEK that didn't go through. Nobody would blame him for stepping back from market engagement for a while.

But instead, he's leant right back in and added more time. 

For this year's result, he put out a (very sexy looking) 27 slide presentation which contained individual links to short 3-4 minute videos that talked to each slide.

Want to know more about their new platform in slide 7? Watch the 3:30 founder's take. What about their 3:52 video on growing profitably?

All in all, there were 13 individual short videos that talk to different slides on the deck, all linked and connecting investors from everywhere on the internet, back to hear directly from the CEO and founder. 

This wouldn't have taken too long to create but the impact is huge. 

Any individual investor - from insto, through HNW, to retail - who follows those links will be so "on the bus" by the time they finish, that they'll be a high-conviction holder for a long time.

Is this a one off or a new best practice? I'm tending to think it's the latter.

Which of these two tactics did you like best? Between Kogan and Xref, I think they both have their place. But gee, I think Lee's approach was super cool.

Cheers,

Ben.