By Sabine Saadeh Author of Trading Love

Investment Pitch

It was around August 2018 when a friend of mine approached me with an investment scheme that was remarkably enticing.  At first I hesitated because going into business with close friends is never a good idea for me, let alone have your money pooled into an investment fund. The business model was exceptionally thought through and I knew for a fact that it will generate value. Nonetheless, I declined the investment offer. A year later, the fund was generating income long before it had planned to, and I thought I had missed out. The return on investment from that fund in relation to the cost of the investment was outstanding.

A year later, I watched from afar as my friends began to squeeze each other out given their greedy excitement after the success of their fund. As more time went by, I watched them make the biggest mistake of their lives, and that was letting go of the creative element in that fund. Return on investment is the value created by the said investment that is closely tied to economic, financial, psychological and societal factors. However, creativity is their cornerstone.

Covid-19

Come 2020 and Covid-19 reshuffled the classic value mantras. The whole world experienced complete disruption. The path of the virus and the length of time the global economy will remain shuttered is still very much unknown. So what does this mean? This means that investment value will change. The risk of the investment does not have to do anymore with the amount of capital available for resiliency but with the amount of creativity available in the business.

Sabine Saadeh

The viral return on investment should change people’s economic narrative. Businesses should focus on liquidity, contingency plans, multiple supply chains and CREATIVITY. After all a business’ local resilience will be highly priced in the value of the investment rather than what the market views as efficient. Taking my friends’ fund as an example, if they had retained their creative element, their business would have proved to be resilient, despite the high debt incurred by the fund to continue operating during lockdown. This high debt increased the risk of their business collapsing and in turn weighed in on their capacity for growth.

The Investor

After all, an investor is looking for an investment that will preserve his/her purchasing power without undermining their wealth. If I had invested in that fund, I would have lost the capital invested and spent the income generated during the lockdown period. So what was the point of the capital without the talent in that fund? Covid-19 is not the only threat; climate change is even a bigger threat. It is therefore imperative for us to respect and nourish interdependence, and especially in business environments.

We cannot act like the virus anymore, latch on to a person with creativity and sup them dry just because we invested in them. We need the creative more than the creative needs us, it is their talent that is going to generate income for us. Our capital opens the path for the creative to generate income for us. The smart people of the world already set their bets on that, through ESG investment schemes, which is the most sustainable form of investing. ESG which means environmental, social and governance investing; seeks positive return on investment while taking into consideration the long-term impact of the said investment on society, environment and the performance of the business.

ESG

The year 2020, is when the world went up in flames and ESG established itself as the mainstream way for investors to make profits. Although the investment preference had already began to change over the last five years, the inflow was still very mediocre in ESG.

It was after the wildfires and the social issues erupting everywhere in the world and the corruption stories of the businesses that are too big to fail, that it became a no brainer that the inflow in ESG would increase massively. Then The DWS Group’s ESG funds according to CNBC began to outpace the S&P 500 this year, and Blackrock highlighted ESG as the most sustainable form of investing.

Businesses that are taking into consideration empathy and creativity while operating are better equipped for future sustainability, even though they are sacrificing return on investment in this present time.

What are we waiting for then? If Covid-19 didn’t help us see clearly that we all intertwined in nature for our future’s sustainability, then what will?