E-BOOK
The Numbers a Board Actually Wants
Eight chapters on what to report, what to leave out, and how to write the commentary that goes round the numbers. The failure mode of board reporting is theatre: forty slides, read aloud, to people who got them the night before. The alternative is six pages, sent three days early, built so the meeting starts where the pack stops.
- Eight chapters and a six-page pack you can adopt this month
- The three-line commentary shape: what happened, why, what next
- The variance bridge, the KPI rules and running the meeting itself
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Who this e-book is for
Founders and finance leads who assemble a board pack every month, and anyone whose current version has quietly grown past the point where the board reads it.
Your pack is forty slides and you present all of them
Presenting a pack teaches directors not to read it, and every month the lesson compounds. The book’s shape is six pages, five headline numbers first, because every director walks in with the same question, are we OK, and page one answers it in ten seconds. The other thirty-five slides were answers to questions nobody asked.
Your commentary restates the number in words
“Revenue was £12,000 under budget” is not commentary, it is the number again. The shape that works is three lines in order: what happened, a fact; why, a cause, not a restatement; what we are doing, an action with an owner and a date. Written the night the numbers close it reads like management; written the night before the board it reads like a defence.
Your board meetings produce no decisions
The last chapters are the fix: a risk page where the only column that matters is what changed since last time, an asks page written as decisions with last meeting’s decisions above it, and a meeting that opens on page one for ten minutes then lives on pages five and six. A board’s only real value is the question what should happen next, and the pack’s job is to clear everything else out of the way.
FACTS
Five numbers open every pack
Revenue, EBITDA, the gap to budget, cash, and the cash build: are we selling, does selling pay, did we mean it, can we breathe, which way is it going. Five, not fifteen. The other ten live on the KPI page with targets and directions, governed by the book’s rule of twelve in, twelve out: a new KPI on means an old one off.
8 chapters
And the six-page pack template, free alongside
3 days
Between the pack going out and the meeting
FACTS
A bridge, not a variance column
The worked month misses budget by £3,980, and the column stops there. The bridge keeps going: volume brought £7,370, pricing gave £4,620 back, delivery drifted £2,730, the cost base took £4,000, summing to the gap exactly. Now every line has an owner, and the conversation is about the pricing rather than the miss.