NEXT Wednesday we will be holding our 94th Annual General Meeting at the club.
Before I joined Tranmere and when I was a corporate lawyer and an investment banker, I attended many similar annual general meetings of corporate clients in a variety of sectors.
They were similar meetings in that the same formal business of approving the report and accounts and appointment of directors was put to the shareholders for approval but in every other sense they were worlds apart.
Football is perhaps the only sector in which shareholders are often challenging the board to spend more money (on the team) - regardless of the financial results that they are approving.
Most shareholders of football clubs are fans and so the emphasis is on the team and team performances.
In many cases it is the only company the fan/shareholder owns shares in, the only report and accounts they read and the only annual general meeting they attend so they have little to compare it with.
Football clubs are different to most companies because, at most clubs, the person with the most day-to-day influence is not on the board - it's the manager.
The shareholders would often prefer to praise or grill the manager than hear about the profit and loss account and the balance sheet from directors.
At Tranmere's level, football is a hand-to-mouth business. Finances are tight and a club's financial fortune can vary dramatically from year to year by a good cup run or a player sale.
At our Annual General Meeting on Wednesday shareholders will see that only 1.2% of our turnover in the last financial year was from cup income. However, due to the continued success of our policy of investing in youth football, we managed to make an overall profit after tax of £391,207.
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