Thursday, May 3, 2012

Do you read annual reports?





I was listening to this episode of Marketing Over Coffee today and realized that I should probably write a post about how I often read annual reports for companies I am interested in or firms that operate in industries closely related to those of my employer into order to gather macro-level insight into where things are going and why.

In this week's MOC, Christopher Penn references a recent episode of Kitchen Table Companies where at the 50 min mark he talks about combing SEC S-1 filings for public companies and gleaming all kinds of great information from them.  They are often long and dry but there's gold in them if you take the time to look.  Here's an S-1 filing from Salesforce.  Specifically, check out the section about their business

Chris also mentions quarterly analyst phone calls and I often read transcripts of those as well, here's one for Motorola.  

These sources of information are invaluable to anyone looking for insight about the competition, your industry or a company you could be interviewing for.  I highly recommend you listen to MOC and the episode of KTC with Chris to learn more.