Company Can Relax Now That the Annual Report Season Has Ended
At the Mailing House on Western Avenue in Los Angeles, David A. Willock and his crew are settling back into a normal pace. Annual report season is over.
Just as mail carriers must handle a pre-Christmas onslaught of deliveries and tax preparers face the crush before April 15, financial mailing companies get caught up in a frenzy of demands and a flood of paper work at the end of the first quarter, when most publicly held companies send out their annual reports, proxy materials and the like.
The Mailing House, one of a handful of Los Angeles area companies that do bulk financial mailings, has more than 180 corporate customers. “And 90% of those,” said Willock, “have a Dec. 31st year-end, and have to get their reports in the mail within 90 days of the close of the fiscal year.” Willock is president of the Mailing House and the husband of majority company owner Kathleen Willock.
During the month of March, the Mailing House’s payroll can swell by a dozen or so to nearly 100 employees--and most of those are kept on stand-by alert during the closing days. The company’s job is to put together the printed materials, fresh from printing shops or binderies, with envelopes and a mailing list, stamp on the postage and get them out on time.
“Nothing is ever penned in on our production schedule,” he said. “It’s all pencil.” Often, minor irritants at printers or binders mount to put pressure on the Mailing House to make up “a three-day delay” in a job that might have taken only two days to begin with.
This annual report season, though, was relatively calm, Willock said. Last year, the Mailing House did the mailings for long-time customers Carter Hawley Hale and Unocal--each of which was involved in a takeover battle that meant extensive mailings of proxies and other materials.
“Then, we were on standby 24 hours a day and on weekends. It would be boom--somebody would walk in the door with a mailing and it would have to go out.”
Things don’t always run smoothly. Willock remembers when one company’s annual report was published inside the cover of another one and sent out. Or when the process of mailing thousands of annual reports was brought to a dead stop, the annual reports tossed in the trash and the whole process begun again because a company chairman belatedly saw and didn’t like the picture of him used in the report. The worst incident, he said, was when two companies’ mailing lists were mixed up and shareholders got the wrong annual reports.
For now, the Mailing House is back to the basics of its business, mailings for commercial and nonprofit companies that do large direct-mail marketing or other communications. The financial mailings will remain tame for another nine months or so--a period that lasts almost as long as it takes clerks in business libraries and brokerages to file away this year’s overwhelming crop of annual reports.
