About Those One-Pagers

One of these days, there will be a new course at the Investment Ecosystem Academy, probably called “Communication Skills for the Investment Professional.”

The core principle:  “Don’t tell them everything you know.”

By and large, investment people are knowledgeable and detail-oriented — and too ready to regurgitate the whole story that’s in their heads, be it in conversations, presentations, or reports.

That makes effective editing a powerful lever for success, in any specific situation and over the course of a career.

There is an ever-present tension between what you know and the interests of those with whom you are communicating.

A particular area where this comes into play is in “one-pagers” of different kinds.

Evolution in résumés

Let’s start with a famous one-pager across industries, as covered in an article by Callum Borchers in the Wall Street Journal (“It’s Time to Rethink the One-Page Résumé”), which begins:

The job seeker’s gospel commands that a résumé fit on a single page.  It’s time to rethink that tenet as artificial intelligence screens more job applications.

If a machine is doing the reviewing, it doesn’t care if it’s more than one page.  That limitation was born of the human desire for the ease of review of a pile of résumés and served as a forced limit for those applicants who otherwise would go on and on and on.

But that requirement also led to a lot of bad résumés because people met the one-page standard by crowding more and more information into that page, ignoring the need for good design, reasonable-sized text, and sufficient white space, all of which lead to a positive experience for readers, subconsciously rubbing them the right way.

The bottom line in the WSJ piece is that the “rule” about résumés is fading away.  A well-crafted, concise effort is still to be desired, but helpful material need not be sacrificed (or crammed into a page) because of an arbitrary limit.

Investment one-pagers

So much of the discussion about résumés can apply to the range of investment one-pagers.  Take those produced by asset managers as an example.

Emerging managers, especially hedge funds, often include monthly returns in a table.  If they survive and you watch the one-pagers over time, that table grows and grows (and other information is added too), so the text gets smaller and smaller.

When asked why they even include monthly numbers, managers say “that’s the standard” or “that’s what people want.”  (It’s tempting to respond with the famous Steve Jobs quote about people not knowing what they want until you show it to them.  Or to suggest that those potential clients who feel like they need monthly numbers in a fact sheet are not likely to be allocating patient capital — they won’t be there when you need them.)

Most asset managers fail the test of communicating the essence of who they are in their one-pagers — theirs looks the same as all the others, so the reader naturally gravitates to the performance information, resulting in a wasted opportunity to tell their unique story.

ChatGPT offers suggestions about “a good investment one-pager . . . that lets a busy allocator grasp the essentials in 90 seconds.”  Then it recites a whole list of things that ought to be included in it, while also offering “design cues” including “readable fonts (11-point body), plenty of white space,” etc.  It is extremely hard to accomplish all of that in one page.  (We’re ignoring the one or more pages of disclosures that usually follow.)

As with résumés, those quick scans by allocators are increasingly being replaced by machine analysis (which likely will do a better job than that a human who only budgets ninety seconds for the task), so the need to get it all on one page goes away.

That provides the freedom to craft a short yet effective tool for communication, one not limited by some outmoded standard of length, but that can tell the story of who the manager is in a way that prizes brevity but not at the cost of quality in content and design.

Who knows, maybe some curious human will actually read it then, instead of just giving it a quick glance.

If this is an area of interest to you, the Investment Ecosystem has helped a variety of organizations improve a range of communication materials.