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Back in March we brought together three experts to talk about the combined impact and value of design, brand, and digital experience in the investment space, Nick Webb, Paul Brereton and Nnenna Hemeson.
A big thank you to them! As a way of introduction, Nick Webb is a partner of Accellency in London, a strategic consultancy dedicated to investor relations and capital markets. A big part of his work with portfolio companies is on their equity stories for exit readiness. Paul Brereton is Head of Digital Channels at Aggreko. He’s been at Aggreko leading on their new website transformation, and has been in the digital comms and collaboration space for over 25 years. Finally, Nnenna Hemeson is a global brand marketing and impact strategy leader whose work tends to cross brand building and driving impact, especially in the area of sustainability. Tom Clayton, a partner at Made by Many, sat with the panel to understand from their experience, how investment backed organisations leave money on the table by undervaluing their digital presence and its powerful effect on their reputation and growth potential.
Thinking about the credibility gap, so when your digital presence doesn't reflect the reality of the business, is that a real challenge and how important is a company's digital presence for investors?
Nick: It's really important. Although a lot of bespoke documentation gets produced for investors in a transaction process, companies need to be aware that potential investors will always go to the website early on. And if there's a consistency gap between the materials being presented to investors and the digital narrative you're presenting to the rest of the world, that's an inconsistency that becomes a real red flag. One that could cause serious issues mid-process.
Nnenna: It's a credibility issue. Your digital presence is the signal of a company's strategy. Think of it like traffic lights: red, green, amber. It's supposed to signal where you are at any given time as a business. The first thing most people do is Google you, and your website is usually the first thing that tells. So when there's a gap between the story you're telling in conversation and what they find digitally, you've immediately weakened that lead. It's not just a red flag for credibility; it's missed opportunity, full stop.
Paul: We've seen this recently at Aggreko. About four years ago we were taken into private equity, and since then we've seen a period of significant growth and change. We started to notice the digital experience was starting to fall behind. It wasn't wrong yet, but there were definitely inconsistencies between the Aggreko of today and the website. And there were also inconsistencies between regions. There was an opportunity, and an obligation, to do something about it.
Nick, from an equity perspective, when is that misalignment most acutely felt?
The misalignment could always be there as it's a function of how much a company has changed multiplied by how long it's been since you last addressed your digital identity. But the obvious trigger point in private equity is when you're preparing to launch a transaction. If you've done a lot of M&A, a buy-and-build, you might have made the company significantly better. But by definition, you've moved further and further away from how you previously described yourself.
Buyout-owned companies are a bit like a submarine. You see them once, they disappear for a while under the sea, then they come back up. If it looks completely different when it surfaces, it can be very hard to shift people's perception. And you need to start shifting that narrative well in advance, because it takes time. That's the most important trigger point from our perspective.
What gets these projects off the ground internally? How do you secure the budget and alignment to make it happen?
Paul: Sometimes it takes a moment of visibility. In the early stages we put together screenshots of 52 regional homepages and presented them to the executive team. When leadership was actually sitting there looking at how different some of the regions were, it became very apparent very quickly. The other thing we were deliberate about: we didn't frame this as a standalone digital project. We were four years on. So let's look at the brand, the narrative, and all the elements together. That reframe mattered.
Nnenna: You need to lay out the full work ahead of you and tie it to the company's strategic direction. When you can show the board: if we do this, we move this target forward in this way; that's how you get the budget approved. But then you also have to be honest about scope. Imagine investing in an amazing new website, but colleagues are still presenting with the old deck, the old colours. It immediately signals a gap. This isn't just an outward-facing project. It's an internal redesign too. Everyone has to come with you.
What causes these projects to fail before they even get going?
Nick: From our perspective, if you don't have a clear sense of your business narrative, from how you explain your strategy, to how that translates into your equity story, and what the main reasons are that someone would want to buy into your business, you'll lack the North Star that enables you to deliver the identity you're actually looking for. That absence shows.
Nnenna: If there's an argument between a business strategy and your website, your digital presence wins because that's what people see first. They're not working inside your business, hearing the conversations you're having every day. They check your website. So the biggest things that cause these projects to fail are lack of internal alignment and lack of stakeholder definition. You need to define who's in charge of what goes out publicly, who signs off on everything, and who your external stakeholders are and in what order you're prioritising them. Is it investors? Regulators? Customers? That order determines what you say and how you say it. If you don't define it upfront, a global project with multiple stakeholders can quickly become a project from hell.
Paul: I'd add: approach the brand with a digital-first mindset from day one. What we didn't want was a beautiful brand designed for print that couldn't be translated to digital, because then you've already created another gap before you've even launched. We had daily stand-ups with design and dev running in parallel throughout the build. When you hit something that doesn't translate cleanly to the technology, having that conversation the same day it surfaces saves you.
There's often an assumption that strong numbers will do the convincing. Is that true?
Nick: One phrase that's always a warning sign for us is "the numbers speak for themselves." If the numbers are speaking for themselves rather than you telling the story you want people to hear from those numbers, you're almost certainly leaving money on the table in a transaction or capital raise. You can't tell a story with numbers alone. Financial performance matters enormously but what the figures tell you and how you tell the story are two different things, and both have to be working.
What does success actually look like? How do you measure it?
Nick: A successful transaction is the most tangible measure for us. But what we hope for is that a strong equity story, rolled out consistently, produces lots of buyers and good prices. The word that kept coming up throughout this conversation is alignment. It can even be exposed mid-transaction: if the shareholder and the management team are saying different things to different people, that's a problem. So success, for us, is alignment producing outcomes.
Nnenna: I'd add two things: optimisation for AI, and the attention economy. Whatever you put out there has to be able to tell your story within seconds, because people are short on time and the scroll-past is real. And if what you've published isn't optimised for AI to pick up the narrative and tag you as a source, you're missing a significant opportunity. That's how people research now. Both of those, AI and the attention economy, are signals of success I look at.
Finally — how do you avoid having to redo this again in two years?
Nick: It's tempting when you're telling the story of your company to tell its history, because you've lived it. But from a customer's point of view, and just as much from an investor's, what happened before doesn't really matter except as proof that you can deliver. What an investor is actually buying is solely the future of that company. So future-proofing means not just describing what you were, or even what you are today, it means thinking ahead to what you're trying to create, and making sure that's already reflected in how you present yourselves. Because change will be constant and accelerating. The question is whether your digital presence is built to keep up.
Nnenna: Governance is the answer. Companies that work in silos are always at the point where their strategy and their digital presence are out of step. There has to be a process. Someone accountable, marketing looped in early, and a content strategy that accounts for where the business is going in the next two to five years. Not just where it is now.
This conversation started in our studio, and it's one we're having with a lot of investment backed businesses right now. Watch the full session here, or get in touch to continue the conversation with us.
