Guest blogger Simon O’Hara of Airtel Africa: ‘Care enough and you’ll get it right’ – delivering a newly listed FTSE250’s first annual report

Post #39

Sep 2, 2020

Simon O’Hara

FW client Simon O’Hara, Group Company Secretary of Airtel Africa, reflects on his experience of creating the first annual report for a newly listed FTSE250 telecoms company

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I’ve been an in-house lawyer most of my career, always in the FTSE environment. Before I came to Airtel Africa, I thought I’d done ‘first annual reports’ – Cookson, for example, when we divested the electronics division into what became Alent and had to do theirs. So I wasn’t too worried! But once we started I soon realised that doing an entire annual report from scratch, not just a divested entity – with me in the driving seat for the front half – would be a totally different ‘first AR’ experience… 

The biggest challenge? The lack of experience in the wider company team in terms of what an annual report requires. We had a new Board, a new management team, a new internal team – and everyone was new to the AR process except me. A recipe for disaster, you might think.

With the wrong attitude, it might have been. But – and this was our biggest benefit and ultimately made our report something to be proud of – everyone, and I mean everyone, from the Board throughout the business, was committed, believed in the report’s importance and wanted it to work. You can do a lot with that.

Marking our separation from the parent company

We are a unique company – a UK-listed subsidiary of a foreign-listed entity, with a dual listing in Nigeria. We all recognised right at the outset that the annual report was the opportunity for Airtel Africa plc to show it was standing on its own two feet, and we seized with both hands the chance to properly articulate this separation from the parent company.

One team – including our partners

So how did we do it? Well, I am writing a guest blog for Falcon Windsor! Aside from the commitment from our internal team, we had equally great commitment from our partners – Friend Studio, whom we knew from the IPO process, on the design side; and FW, who came in later to write the strategic report and review the governance report, and supported our internal project management. We truly felt like one team committed to the same goal, and this carried us through a whole lot of challenges, both expected and unexpected.

Because, like everyone else this year, we were derailed by Covid-19 – including our photographer arriving in Nairobi to do the three-week-long AR photoshoot and being sent back to London 24 hours later! The AR had been everyone’s top priority, but just as we were coming to the crunch time, Covid-19 caused a lot of our management time to be focused elsewhere and, crucially, we couldn’t go and spend a couple of weeks with the operational team in Nairobi.

That really made things tough. There’s nothing that beats sitting in a room and working together in person, particularly when you’ve not done a project as a team before. But what carried us through was our collective belief in the project. Plus sheer hard work, especially from my internal project manager, Anna, who was a godsend, and didn’t let anything slip!

‘Proud to be associated with Airtel Africa’

The process may sound painful – and in many ways it was – but we also really enjoyed it. It was intellectually stimulating, a big learning curve, and a huge milestone for a listed company – and we were all really proud of the result. It was a personal and professional challenge for me that’s been immensely rewarding. Even our most hawkish broker said he was proud to be associated with a company that produces this level of disclosure in their first annual report!  

Tips for embarking on a first report

I’m sure anyone reading this who’s about to embark on a similar journey is keen to hear what we’ve learnt – so here are the highlights:

·       Start early – and knock off anything you can do quickly.

·       Prepare thoroughly – and get engagement from the business and senior management as early as you can.

·       Get the voice from the top, the messaging, sorted with the CEO/CFO early, and have that approved by Exco and your advisors well in advance.

·       Choose the right partners! Be frank about what you can and can’t do and budget for bringing in the support you need. We did – and the cost was well worth it.

·       Make sure you have the right relationships internally with the seniority and experience to get it done – and involve the right people if you haven’t.

·       Attention to detail is absolutely critical – so make sure you have someone on the PM side who can take care of that for you.

·       And, remember that you will have to anticipate, lead, explain, push, motivate, inspire, make decisions in all sorts of ways you won’t expect. But if you get and keep people’s goodwill, anything is possible.