👋 Hi, it’s CJ Gustafson and welcome to Mostly Metrics, my weekly newsletter where I unpack how the world’s best CFOs and business experts use metrics to make better decisions.

This post kicks off a three-part series on perfecting your Board Materials - whether you’re the one presenting or the “person behind the curtain” building the deck.

Here’s the roadmap:

By the end, you’ll have a toolkit for crafting reports that pair compelling visuals with sharp narratives for your Board.

Now, let’s death wrestle some ogres. I mean, write some documents.

Contrary to popular belief, most of a board meeting actually happens before the actual meeting. Today we’ll answer the following key questions:

Somewhere between 48 hours and 72 hours before. If you send it more than 72 hours before, you give people too much time to dissect and pick apart the numbers. It invites over analysis. Yes, you want them informed, but you don’t want them rebuilding Il Duomo and requesting an accrual schedule from seven quarters ago.

And anything less than 48 hours doesn’t account for the busy lives, and hectic travel schedules, your board members have. Unfortunately, most teams drop a fat deck on the board the night before. As a result, bleary eyed and rushing, board members review whatever they can over breakfast in the Marriott lobby the morning of.

While you may think this is advantageous to you, as an operator, since it maximizes the amount of time you have to make changes, while minimizing the time they have to really “sink their teeth in”, you aren’t doing yourself any favors.

Why?

What I’ve found is that any work done on a board deck in the last 24 hours usually ends up as an appendix slide anyway. If you’re doing your job half right, there’s no way you’ve left the meat and potatoes of the presentation to literally right before show time.

Plus, it feels good to hit send and actually relax before the meeting. If you’re mired in creating slideware, you probably aren’t thinking strategically about the higher level conversations that need to happen. This isn’t a book report that you can pass in at the 11th hour and sign off. You still need to be mentally prepared to show up and discuss (potentially even defend?) what’s in the deck.

Don’t mistake the deck with the actual show.

And by sitting on the deck you put your board members in a bad spot. You don’t want them leaving the meeting saying “that was a death march through slides I hadn’t had a chance to absorb.” While you may mistakenly celebrate over beers with your CEO afterwards that you made it through another quarter without any tough questions or divisive discussions, it was merely a Pyrrhic victory where you survived the battle but made no progress in the war to become a better company. In fact, if you’re just trying to dribble out the clock, and sending the deck late is a way to chew up some seconds, you probably have bigger issues on your hands when it comes to board dynamics.

This is one of the more controversial topics when it comes to board prep.

There are two schools of thought - send EVERYTHING or send select highlights.

The pros of sending everything:

The cons of sending everything:

Regardless of whichever path you go, I think 100% of the CFOs section should be sent beforehand. Why? Most CFOs have two sub sections: backwards looking financials and forward looking forecasts. And anything financial related takes longer to absorb. Plus, board members may want to compare to what was presented at prior meetings to see what changed or dive into the underly excel sheets (more to come on that). And models are easier to inspect on your own computer screen in a quiet moment.

Reminder: You should include last period’s financial slides in the appendix for ease of reference. And you should also include the operating plan you are tracking against. It’s common for board members to want to compare the changes period over period and remind themselves what the overall guardrails are.

I prefer to send everything beforehand, but what you usually run into is a nervous VP working on their materials down to the wire. While the CEO and CFO have largely templatized their materials from period to period, and are used to the airtime, your VP of Marketing or Head of People is an infrequent participant. They’re usually carrying a different level of stress, and they probably need to build their slides from scratch.

I’ve spent so many hours of my career reformatting board slides for functional leaders at the last moment. No shade to CTOs, but they are usually the ones who pass in their materials the night before and it looks like the Charly from It’s Always Sunny Meme.

So in a perfect world, I believe you should send all the materials ahead of time. But in reality, it doesn’t always work out that way. At a minimum you should include:

Yes.

You should update the annual operating plan for the actuals and send as an excel package so participants can go deeper than just the slides.

While everyone may not actually open it, and it creates a lot more work to tick and tie, the owners of your company deserve a P&L they can play around with and trace through.

Ideally you provide:

Now, you may ask: Don’t my VCs collect this info via email or some janky ass portal on a quarterly basis anyway?

Yes! But believe it or not, those fucking annoying Ivalua templates don’t always work their way up to the investment front office. Most of the time it’s an internal valuation team or accounting professional collecting the evidence. I used to work in the valuation and analysis group at a PE shop and there wasn’t always consistent delivery of results to the front vs the back of the house. Kind of like a FedEx delivery to a three family condominium. You never know who gets the package.

Plus, partners at big investment firms don’t like to waste their time asking their internal teams for shit, or messing around on share drives (“Oh no, Marc’s in the sharedrive again!!!). For better or worse, most use their emails as file repositories, so just send them the excel workbook along with the pre read.

No.

But if you disobey my sage guidance and decide to throw away your week, you MUST do it for everyone.

It’s not fair to disadvantage one board member over another and give them the meeting beforehand. I’ve seen this happen and you can tell who got a one hour call in with the CEO and CFO ahead of time and who didn’t. It creates information asymmetry and can create an environment where those who didn’t get their own call think you are playing “hide the ball” (whether you are or aren’t).

Plus, it’s very awkward turtle when someone realizes they are not as important.

You shouldn’t do this for three reasons:

Now, the caveat to all of this is I do think you should call board members ahead of time if there’s a potentially contentious issue that’s on the docket to be discussed (e.g., ousting a founder, selling the company, doing a layoff). You don’t want to get blindsided by anyone’s opinion, and you also don’t want to blindside anyone with news.

Plus, you may want to lightly “encourage” specific board members to share certain opinions that help bolster your case. This is all VERY different than literally walking through the entire deck.

Socializing key topics is a great use of your time. But covering all the slides to gauge reactions and eliminate surprises is not.

Remember: the deck isn’t the show—it’s the trailer. Use it to prepare your audience for the main event.

Next week, we’ll dig into Part II: The Metrics That Matter, where we’ll explore the KPIs that command attention in the boardroom. Don’t miss it—these metrics could make or break your presentation.