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What’s The Point Of A Corporate Annual Report?

More and more companies are either getting rid of their annual reports entirely or are scaling them way back.

It’s for a lot of the same reasons that we’ve seen so many changes in publishing and it comes down to one word: the Internet. OK, that’s two, but you certainly get it. And you’ve surely run into the same astounding changes in society wrought by technology.

Printing an annual report is expensive. That’s why some companies have gone to much briefer letters or brochures of a few pages to review the past year.

And yet, there still is great value in stopping to look back at the year just passed to review where you’ve been and what you accomplished over 12 months.

That’s part of why National Life continues to publish an annual report. It gives us an opportunity to grade our own work and then share our self-evaluation with the family, if you will, the customers, neighbors, teammates and others who have an interest in what we do.

And, as we like to say, we Do good. Be good. Make good. Those corporate values are central to our business as a financial services company, to our goal of being an employer of choice, and to our commitment to be a good neighbor.

Those are not mere words. We really do want to make sure that we’re living up to the values, the mission and the vision that we’ve set for ourselves.

Our annual report was one of the ways we made sure we were on track during 2016, another record-setting year for our 168-year-old company. CEO Mehran Assadi explains it in his annual letter.

“Our success is not an accident,” he wrote this year. “It can be traced to the fact that we know our why. We are a mission-driven organization.

“What we do is critical: Our products keep alive the dreams of families, the hopes of small business owners and the dignity and financial independence of seniors,” he wrote. “As critical, however, is the why that drives us. My teammates at National Life believe deeply in our noble cause. So do our agents: They are grounded on America’s Main Streets and share our commitment to community.”

We’d like to think that our annual report is written and illustrated in an engaging way that helps to continue to tell the story of National Life.

And even though we trace our roots back to 1848, we’re hip to this technology thing. Our annual report is both printed and electronic. This whole Internet thing seems to be here to stay.

National Life Insurance Company was founded in 1848, Life Insurance Company of the Southwest was chartered in 1955.

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