The CFO skill nobody admits they're bad at

Hey {{first_name|there}},

Have you ever thought about one thing you'd like to improve?

Even if it's only a small part of your job as a CFO.

I have.

A few years ago, a VP asked me that exact question in a job interview.

I answered right away: building presentations.

Why? Because I suck at it.

Not giving them. I'm comfortable in front of a room. Building them.

Sometimes I feel colorblind when I look at my slides. The message is clear in my head. Then I open PowerPoint, and nothing matches.

I've always been good at math. I was not born to be a designer.

It's not that I didn't try

I took the courses. I read the books. I spent hours on it.

Every time, same result. I had the ideas, the story, the numbers. My brain froze in front of a blank slide.

Maybe you know the feeling.

The analysis is done. You know exactly what's going on in the business. And you still lose hours trying to make it look right.

Some people say the deck doesn't matter. That delivery is everything.

I don’t agree with that. A deck is the last mile of your analysis. If it doesn't carry the message, part of the room gets lost, and the message gets diluted.

Then I tried AI. It sucked too.

My first decks with Claude were bad.

So bad I started wondering if I was the problem. Maybe I just didn't know what a good presentation looks like.

I wasn't. I was asking AI to build slides without ever showing it what good looks like.

So I wrote Claude a playbook: best practices for how my presentations should look and read.

It covers three things. Our brand. What great presentations have in common. And examples of decks that were far better than mine.

Every time I saw a great presentation, I added what made it work.

It took many rounds. Some of them frustrating.

Then one day I had the deck I'd always wanted. Clean design. A message you couldn't miss.

Three decks, three questions

Every month I build three.

For my CEO, the question is: what happened, and what do we need to talk about? He used to get a long email. Now he gets a short one, plus a deck with clear charts, clear insights and next steps. He loves it.

For my executive team: who owns what? My energy goes into how the company is performing and how we bring accountability to the team. Not into colors. A couple of hours, total.

For the board: which decisions do we need? I recycle some of the work. But I spend my time on one thing: the message we want the board to hear, and what we're asking them to decide.

Here's what it taught me.

The presentation was never the hard part of the job. The analysis is.

Anyone can build a deck with the right skills and the right message.

Finding the message is the real work: knowing where the business is going, and where to focus.

That's what you were hired for. Now it's where I spend my time.

I've never met a CFO who complains about having too much time.

So imagine finishing your review, explaining what matters, and getting back a deck you'd be proud to send.

The weakness I admitted in that interview is still there. I still can't design a slide.

I just don't need to anymore.

On November 11, I'll show you live what AI can build for a CFO. Registration opens Saturday.

Saturday, email 4 of 6: the dashboard.

One question:

Which presentation do you dread building every month?

Hit reply. I read every answer.