№ 05The Faculty
Niall Brennan.
Chief Executive, Retired, Formerly Brennan Hughes Insurance.
On the memo, the letter, and the senior craft of plain prose.
The senior craft of a chief executive is not the speech. It is the letter the speech is based on.
The work
Niall takes about ten conversations a month with chief executives and chairs across the British and Irish mid-market on a single subject: how to write the things they have to write. He calls it correspondence rather than communication and he charges for the day rather than the hour. He runs the Boardroom Letters masterclass with Hannah Sieghart and writes a slim annual book, eighty pages, self-published, sold by post, which has been quoted in two Harvard Business Review pieces neither of which paid him a fee.
Background
He was chief executive of Brennan Hughes Insurance, a mid-cap Irish insurance group, for thirteen years until he stood down in 2021. The group did not merge, did not list, and did not fire him. He came up through underwriting, spent four years in the actuarial office, and learnt to write in the compulsory monthly memos that the founding chairman insisted on through the 1990s. He still has a folder of those memos in a filing cabinet in his study.
Before insurance he was a journalist on a Limerick weekly. The journalism is the part he is least keen to discuss and the part that explains most of what he does now.
Signature contribution
Niall is known, in the small set of people who run companies and write their own letters, for an unfashionable conviction. The senior craft of an executive, he will say, is the ability to write a one-page letter that the board can read in five minutes and respond to in fifteen. Everything else, the slides, the off-sites, the all-staff videos, is downstream of that. He has been making this argument in print and in private since about 2014.
He is also known for the working pattern. He drafts, longhand, in a leatherbound notebook he replaces every three years. He types the second draft. He prints the third draft and reads it aloud. He has not changed this routine in twenty years and he tells the chief executives he advises that they will need a similar one. About a quarter of them try it. About half of those keep it.
In practice
On any given week Niall is reading three drafts of a chief executive’s shareholder letter, normally six weeks before the AGM. The drafts arrive by post, in a stamped A4 envelope, with the executive’s pencil corrections in the margin. He returns them, by post, with his own corrections in red. The whole exchange takes a fortnight. About one chief executive in three finds it intolerable; about one in three finds it the single most useful thing they have ever paid for.
If your shareholder letter takes longer than a Sunday afternoon to read, the fault is yours, not the shareholder’s.
Outside the work
He lives in west Cork on a stretch of coast that he does not name to journalists, sails a fifteen-foot boat that he built himself in his fifties, and keeps a quiet correspondence with a small network of retired executives across three countries. He reads, at the desk, mostly economic history and the letters of nineteenth-century shipowners.
Write the thing by hand first. The second draft will be better because the first draft was honest.