How to Present the Boring Finance Stuff with John Polk

E#13: John Polk with John Polk and Associates discusses “How to Present the Boring Finance Stuff.”

Join me, host Scott Geller, on the Budget Your Business podcast to listen. 

In this episode of "Budget Your Business," John Polk shifts the focus from traditional budgeting to effective communication strategies for presenting financial information to Boards, Investors, and Advisory Boards. John deep dives into the PROD framework that explores how to tailor presentations to various audiences by understanding who is in the room and their decision-making power. He emphasizes the importance of setting, whether in-person or virtual, and provides practical tips for maintaining eye contact and trust during virtual presentations. The episode also covers the level of detail needed in presentations and cautions against overloading the audience. Wrapping up with great ideas on how to use AI for brainstorming, content summarization, and creating visuals. 

Book Recommendation: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Book Recommendation: Presentation Pitfalls: 10 Traps on Business Presentations, co-authored by John Polk and expected out in April 2025 on Amazon by Riley 

Find out more about John Polk:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnwpolk/
Website: https://johnpolkandassociates.com/

Transcript

Scott 0:00

Hello, and welcome to Budget Your Business, the podcast for small business owners who want to learn how to financially plan for every aspect of their business. I'm your host, Scott Geller. Today I'm joined by John Polk of John Polk and Associates to talk about something a little bit different today about communicating to boards, investors, and really any other interested parties. Hello, John.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

Hey Scott, how's it going?

Scott 0:30

Good, good. Thanks for joining.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Thanks for having me.

Scott 0:34

For folks who are just meeting you for the first time, could you share a little bit about who you are and specifically what you do?

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Sure. So in my first career, I was at Capital One leading strategy and analysis teams. And in that role, I did a ton of presentations. And I was tired of fixing other people's bad slides. So I created a lunch and learn off the side of my desk. I figured if I taught people how to create better presentations, it would save me time in the long run. That got good feedback. It grew into a full-day workshop. I ended up making an official class through Capital One University. I had to teach other people how to teach it to keep up with demand. When I left, we had taught over 10,000 associates on a skill that's pretty valuable. Wow. Yes. Yeah. And so when I left Capital One eight years ago, I started doing that kind of work on my own. So teaching, coaching around presentation design, delivery, and effective communication more broadly.

Scott 1:37

Okay. And do you Cap One is obviously not a small business, but it's similar to myself, where it was several years in the corporate life before I found my calling, at least with small businesses. But do you work with more than just corporations and people that work for corporations?

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Yeah, so uh corporations are my big billpayers, but I also do work with um startups. So I mentor here in Richmond at Startup Virginia, helping startups in particular in their pitch decks, but also customer sales decks.

Scott 2:15

Okay. Yeah, and small businesses don't put nearly as much time putting together presentations as the corporate world. However, I truly believe that small businesses can benefit from thinking about their communication. And in particular, their small businesses are still reporting out to say boards, board of directors, sometimes investors, um, sometimes an advisory board. Have you come across any other examples in your line and work with even startups?

SPEAKER_00 2:52

Yeah, I think of boards, investors, and clients as the key stakeholder groups. And I guess you can you can divide boards into more of a governance board versus an advisory board, depending on how big you are.

Scott 3:06

Okay. And do you do you approach those different types, those three different areas any differ differently? Or do you kind of approach them, do you recommend approaching or communicating with them the same way?

SPEAKER_00 3:20

Well, it's the approach is standard, but you're actually hitting on the key place that I always start, which is assessing your audience, your purpose, and your setting, and using that to make some design decisions. Right? So if you're thinking about your investor group, you're going to assess them differently than as you think about presenting to your board.

Scott 3:44

Can you tell us a little bit more about the audience versus the purpose of the setting?

SPEAKER_00 3:49

Yeah, so one of the frameworks that we use when we're having people assess their audience is an acronym that goes PROD, P-R-O-D. And so as you're looking at who is in your audience, the first thing we do is say figure out who the decision maker is. One of the things that causes writer's block is we're swirling as we think about all the different stakeholders we have to plan for in the presentation. And so if you can figure out who's going to write the check or be the ultimate decision maker, you can design for that person first and then go back and think about the other stakeholders. And so with where the prod model comes in says, okay, I've identified my stakeholder and I want to think about that person in terms of how much they care about four things. So one is what I call the people people, so that's the P in prod. And they're the ones who are gonna worry about customer impact or associate impact of the decisions that you're making or the recommendations or where you're looking to get approval for investments. Then the R stands for results, they're the ones who care about the bottom line. And you know, when am I gonna get my return as an investor? The O stands for options. So those are the people who love to brainstorm with you. They're great people to put on your advisory board because they'll just bring new ideas and help you think broader than you're thinking today. And then the D stands for detail. Those are the detailed people. So, you know, you probably want a detailed person on your board who's going to be the person who takes a tighter look at your spreadsheets, right? Where the results people might only look at the very last line of your PL.

Scott 5:34

And so you what you're saying is kind of think about who your audience is and how they've fallen in one of those four categories.

SPEAKER_00 5:40

Yeah, and typically most people have, you know, a primary and a secondary one. And you can make this assessment by talking to people, right? Who's who's already presented to or pitched to this investor, for example. Or sometimes you can you can see from a person's history, right? So I mentioned I've got a strategy and analysis background. Well, that's a classic details person, right? It's hard to do strategy and analytics if you don't have a passion for that detail. I also find that the more senior folks get in an organization, the more they're naturally going to care about the results.

Scott 6:21

That that's a really good point, uh, John. And when I think about most small business owners, typically it's not often, I guess, that they're presenting to anybody as often within the business, but probably more so to those board or those investors, and they're probably higher level. So that so to your point, there they are probably more results-oriented individuals. How should somebody let's let's say somebody is they have a company stand-up, right? Or or an annual comp annual or periodic company meeting. How should they think about that a little differently than you know presenting out to a board or investors?

SPEAKER_00 7:04

Yeah. So first is in that model, you likely have all four types of people in the room. And so in the framework, we've got what's typical content you might include for somebody who's a people person, right? You might include the a customer impact statement or a change management plan to make sure that when you make a big change, it you do it in a way that doesn't impact customers or associates. The other way we can think about that is to make sure that I've got content that will hit on the needs of each of those four types. The other thing that that, well, it comes into play in all these, but I'll talk about the purpose part of that first equation I gave you, right? Where we think about our audience, our purpose, and our setting. When we're working with clients who are planning for a presentation, we ask them to think about three F's. So it's facts, feelings, and follow-ups. So if you think about a town hall, the facts might be the state of the business, right? Here's where we are, or here's the strategy that we're rolling out that we need everybody to be aware of and connect to. The feelings are how do we want people to feel about that? Right? Or is this intended to motivate them so that they're excited about the strategy? And then the follow-ups are what do you want them to do about that? So, in that strategy example, a key thing you need them to do is translate the high-level strategy into their world, right? What actions do they need to take in their world to ensure that as an organization we deliver on that strategy?

Scott 8:42

I like those those three F's. And the reason is a lot of times I see people thinking about the facts and and the follow-ups, right? Like, what do you want to tell them and what do you want them to do? But in my experience, and correct me if I'm wrong, John, but it seems like people kind of forget about the feeling piece of it.

SPEAKER_00 9:02

I've literally had one client lead with the feelings. So you're dead on, right? People think about the facts or or the follow-ups. And in my analyst career, working with other analysts, they believe that facts and logic should win all arguments. But as humans, humans are emotional creatures. And so if you ignore that emotion, you're you're gonna miss, right? If we weren't emotional creatures, TV commercials wouldn't exist.

Scott 9:30

Correct. Yes, I I have early teen son, so yes, so it's all feelings right now, just about. So uh around that that feeling side, uh, how how can I how can I kind of bake that into my presentation if I am reporting out to or or communicating to like a board or an or a potential investor?

SPEAKER_00 9:57

Yeah, there's a couple ways. One is using emotional stories. You know, thinking back to the commercial example, if you see any kind of pitch for a charity, they're going to use an emotional pitch. And we do that through stories, we do that through imagery. Then there's uh another trick in the delivery that I'll use, especially when I've got somebody who's very even keeled or monotone. Just say, here's the thing I'm most excited about. And what you'll find is thanks to the magic of cognitive dissonance, you when you say you are excited, you will naturally increase the volume and pitch of your voice. You'll you're more likely to use hand gestures when you do that. And so you it's a little trick you your brain can play on your body to show up with more emotion.

Scott 10:47

Hmm, I like that. The podcast is focused around, as I as I mentioned, you know, planning for a business. And for this is a little bit nuanced to let's say I'm I'm presenting to a board or investors or sharing something with an advisory board. Now, I would be the first to admit sharing financial performance and financial plans is not the most um exciting topic or emotional topic for people to talk about. What would you recommend to bring that feeling in if you have a topic such as this is our financial performance, and this is this is what our financial plan is over the next couple years?

SPEAKER_00 11:28

Yeah, you're right. It it is about the most naturally dry topic we could we can talk about.

Scott 11:34

Now don't be too hard on me, John.

SPEAKER_00 11:36

So I I think a big part of it comes into distilling what's important. I'm writing a book, and we've got a section around how can how can you use visuals to help you tell the story. And and I even have a PL example in there. And I describe the PL as the numeric version of the wall of text that people hate in a in a presentation, right? A slide that's all bullets, all all content, all words. The PL is kind of the numeric equivalent of that. And so, yeah, maybe your detailed person is excited to dive into that, but no one else is.

Scott 12:14

Right.

SPEAKER_00 12:15

And so some of the tricks are let's use color coding. Theoretically, we had a budget or a plan, and so when we show the PL, we can highlight in green the things that exceeded the plan, and we can highlight in red the things that are behind plan. And then off to the side, we can annotate and point people to the things we want them to look at and explain why, right? And not just why things are wrong, but what are we going to do about the things that are off track, and then also talk about the things that have gone well and how are we going to continue to leverage those.

Scott 12:53

I think that that can definitely be rolled into most presentations when you have that financial story. And and I agree, I like it when you think about it as more of a story because that I think pulls people in a little bit more than the traditional, this is this is how much, you know, this is revenue, this is earnings, but we're kind of getting into the whys and then what's important there.

SPEAKER_00 13:16

Well, and and you use the word story, that's another way we can bring this to life. So let's take the you know, the revenue, the revenue line was 20% over our plan. Let me tell you the story about the client that is behind that revenue. And it's because we did XYZ so well that they ended up bringing in more business than we originally planned. And so now you've put a face to the numbers.

Scott 13:46

Hmm. I like that. So so basically using using uh uh an actual example to really drive it home.

SPEAKER_00 13:56

Exactly.

Scott 13:57

Okay. Going back, you mentioned the like the key places to start, and and and we touched a little bit on the audience and and on the purpose. Could you share something around the setting? How should we think about that as well?

SPEAKER_00 14:11

Yeah, the the biggest challenge today is are you going to be in person or in virtual? And people still kind of suck at the virtual world. There's technology challenges that people are either oblivious to or don't spend the time to solve for. There's simple things we can do like how you set your camera. I kick off my workshop with a picture of the Saturday Night Live newscasters, and I talk about the newscaster framing. So when you're on a video, you should set your camera so your eyes are two-thirds up from the bottom of the screen. And you know, next time you're on a Zoom, check that out and notice the difference. When somebody's eyes are really low, they don't look confident. If their head is cut off, they don't look competent. But when their eyes are at that two-thirds, they will look more confident. And the other trick with virtual is you've got to have a process so that you're looking at the camera. And it is very odd as a human to present to an inanimate object. So the trick is to, whatever your video platform is to make sure that the video of the person you're talking to is underneath your camera. I'm on so many Zooms where the person is looking at their second screen and it's like they're ignoring you. So I love I love the detailed questions. When I I present, I have a two-monitor set up, and I put my presentation in presentation mode on the second monitor. But I have the presenter view on my first monitor and the video of the folks I'm presenting to on the first monitor, typically my laptop. And so I've got my laptop. On my laptop is the view of the person I'm presenting to with my slides right behind it. And I know my slides well enough that I'm not reading them for content. I just need to know which one I'm talking to at that point. And then there'll be times, you know, say I'm actually teaching somebody how to do something in PowerPoint where it's natural to turn my head to my second monitor to walk people through that. I think people understand that. It's when you never make virtual eye contact that it becomes a distraction. Or frankly, it can hurt your trust.

Scott 17:23

And that's really important. If you're presenting a budget or financial performance, uh trust is is incredibly important.

SPEAKER_00 17:34

Trust is huge. I have a a framework that I like to use. I didn't invent this framework, but it's the ABCD model. So A is about ability. So when you're presenting numbers, if there's a typo in your PL, right, that's going to hurt your audience's assessment of your ability. B is for believability. And so think about if you're hiding the negative, that's a form of, you know, we could we could call it lying, right? But it hurts hurts your audience's assessment of believability. The C is for connection. And this is one of the other things that we've lost in a Zoom world, right? We don't naturally spend as much time in the pre-meeting, how was your weekend? Part of the conversation that helps remind everybody that we're all just humans trying to make the world a better place. And then the D stands for dependability. And so that's things like if you commit to follow up on a question in a meeting and you don't, that's going to hurt your dependability.

Scott 18:38

Right. Very good. The question I ask myself quite often and work through is with these presentations as you're communicating to these types of level, these higher level of groups, typically, how detailed should I be with these presentations?

SPEAKER_00 18:55

Yeah, the answer is almost always less detailed than you think. So I mentioned the book earlier. So the working title for the book is Presentation Pitfalls. And we describe 10 traps that presenters fall into all the time. And one of those we call the expert trap. And if you think about when you're expert, you do a bunch of things poorly when presenting without even thinking about it, right? So you don't translate your knowledge in a way that non-experts can understand. Forget what it was like to not know all the things you know about that topic. You use jargon, you use acronyms, you take shortcuts, right, that people can't follow because they don't know that's a shortcut. We don't always talk about the why behind our recommendations because as experts, we just know that's the right answer. And then we spend way too much time sharing the cool facts, even when they're not material to the decision at hand. So the solution, well, there's a bunch of solutions, you'll have to read the book. My favorite solutions are to use stories that we've already talked about, but also analogies. So analogies can help somebody understand a complex concept because you're comparing it to something they already know. Sounds simple, and it is simple, but people don't always think about it. So I'll give you an example. I was working with a client, first time we had ever met, and after asking what people's goals are, I always say, What's a real world use case that we can work on? And he says, I'm presenting to 80 people as soon as our meeting is over. So I had a little bit of a freak out. I resisted the er, you know, I resisted the urge to say it is never a low-stakes conversation to be talking to 80 people. You should have planned for this, and we should have met, you know, a week ago. Right. But I said, okay, there's there's one thing we can do that will improve improve your talk. And it was so he works in an IT shop, and the talk was, you know, I get why he says low stakes. It was a thank you for a year of hard work. Please, you know, take the year-end break to rest and recharge and come, you know, and come back fresh. And as he talked through the talking points, we came up with two analogies. So the first is around building a house. Have you ever built a house from scratch? You know, not by hand, but you know, paid people to build the house.

Scott 21:35

And it was quite an experience.

SPEAKER_00 21:38

So I'm gonna assume it was similar to my experience the one time we did this, where you'd go out at least once a week to check on the progress. And for the first one to two months, depending on your total time frame, it looked like nothing was happening. And then, well, go ahead.

Scott 22:00

Very accurate, yes.

SPEAKER_00 22:01

Okay. Then you see a hole in the ground, and then okay, maybe that's some progress. And then another, you know, three or four weeks pass, and you go out, and it's still just a hole in the ground. And then one day they start framing, and the framing goes up in like a week. And so the that once you have the foundation, all of the other progress is frankly faster than you'd expect it to be. And so we use this analogy to make the point for this IT team that they had spent a really hard year building the foundation for this system. And it could seem frustrating that there wasn't like real-world business value coming out of it yet, but it was necessary to get that real world value, and that we're at that inflection point where the framing is up and this is going to go fast, and next year we're going to see a lot of that business value. The second analogy we used was to make the point that no kidding, don't check your email for two weeks, spend time with your family, go home and recharge. And this is the concept of winning Monday. Are you familiar with the winning Monday term in the NFL?

Scott 23:13

Uh yes.

SPEAKER_00 23:15

Right. So if a team wins on Sunday, then they either take Monday off or it's a much lighter practice than they'd have if they won. And the point is, you know, relax, take a bit of a reward and reinforcement for all of the hard work and recharge for the next week. And so rather than just saying to the team, thanks for all the hard work, you know, enjoy your time off, he was able to use that analogy of winning Monday to remind them that this was a winning year and you've earned that time off.

Scott 23:51

I like how you used your own example of giving examples and analogies. I like that, John. Nicely done.

SPEAKER_00 23:57

Well, and I'm glad you point that out, right? Because that that's a way to make your stories authentic. We talk about authentic leadership, it's really about how do you bring a piece of yourself into the business world, and that resonates with people.

Scott 24:13

It does. Yeah, it really does. I I try to do that myself as as well sometimes.

SPEAKER_00 24:18

Probably not a very good very well, but my workshops get very meta as I say, as I do something, and then I say, Do you see what I just did? This is a best practice we should real life in the moment. Exactly.

Scott 24:34

So uh maybe a little more tactical question here, uh as we start wrapping up on our time here. I I I started with corporate world, I was all PowerPoint for a long time and Excel for a long time. And now I I try to push myself into a little bit of some of the Google tools. But if I'm putting together a communication, I want some sort of platform to help me share my message. What tools should I consider?

SPEAKER_00 25:03

Yeah, I'm gonna answer that slightly differently. And I can talk about you know, PowerPoint versus Canva if you want, but let's talk about probably the hottest topic in every business, which is AI. And so there's three ways that I've been able to use AI to either make the work better or get the work done faster as I'm designing communications. Let me give you three examples. So, first is as a brainstorming partner. We talked about making analogies to make your complex ideas easier to understand. You can feed your complex business thing into a chat GPT and say, give me five analogies that would help me illustrate this situation. And three of them will be stupid, one of them will be good, one of them will trigger a different idea that might end up being the winner. And frankly, if you don't like any of the five, you can say, give me five more. And I've I've always had that payoff in some way. In fact, I frankly, the problem is I don't train myself to think to do that every time I'm trying to come up with a good analogy. The second is like a writing partner. I had written an article for online publication, and when I went to submit it, they said, please write a 300-word summary. That's actually really hard to do if you've already written the thousand, you know, or 3,000-word article. And so I fed the article in and said, write me a 300-word summary. And it's really good at highlighting thing things that are more important and fitting it within your 300-word constraint. Now, in that specific example, I am sure I literally changed every word it gave me because it's still kind of wonky or artificial, or the tone will be wrong. But the fact that I had that starting point got my summary done and easily half the time. Yeah. And then the third one's my, I think, the most fun, which is using it to create images. One of the things I want to do in my workshops is make the slides visual. When we talk about stories and analogies, I'll pick images to illustrate those. One of the analogies I use is the canary in the coal mine, you know, the analogy of an early warning system. Well, there is literally picture on the internet of a coal miner holding a canary in a cage. But with Dali or Bing's image creator, which I think actually uses Dali as the engine, you can tell it I need a coal miner holding a canary in a cage, and it won't be perfect the first time. The fingers will look terrible. Like the number of six-fingered images I've gotten out of Dali, you'd think they'd trained it on six-fingered people. Especially for people, right?

Scott 28:11

I mean, it only comes in five. Well, typically it only comes in with five.

SPEAKER_00 28:15

Exactly. Um, but so for the for that kind of analogy illustration, I can always get to something that's useful. And because it's an analogy, I'm less worried about the image looking lifelike.

Scott 28:27

Thanks for sharing those those three AI tools. I've I've used it a little bit with my writing, and I'll play with it to say, write it, you know, and it with as a CFO with a sense of humor or no sense of humor to and to see what some of the differences are. Um so that's yeah, that's an interesting, interesting approach with that. Thank you. Well, John, as as we wrap up um the shows, I I ask all of our guests to share two to three practical um budgeting takeaways for small business owners. Now, this this might be something you've already mentioned, might be something completely new. Sure.

SPEAKER_00 29:10

So let me let me take the second route around communicating your budget. And frankly, I probably should have led with this. As we're working with clients around their purpose, one of the things we ask them to do is to decide what are the three most important things they want their audience to remember. I like to say humans are lazy, they are distracted, and they are forgetful. So if you're not clear on the important things, they won't remember them, right? Or they'll remember something that's much less important. And when I ask clients this, it's almost always the hardest question to answer, especially in the early planning stages. And so I've come up with a couple of default structures that we can use. So let me share what's probably the most useful for your audience. If we think about pitching to an investor or sharing how you're going to solve a problem to your board, I have this three three-item framework. So first is there's a real problem in the world, or we can think about that as there's an opportunity in the world we want to take advantage of. The second is we have a brilliant solution to that problem. And the third is if you invest in us solving this problem, we'll make a bunch of money and we'll make the world a better place. And that works for 80% of the pitches that that I've worked with. And we can summarize that as issue, action, and impact.

Scott 30:44

Okay. Great. And and um one more question here as we wrap up. Um, what's a favorite book or podcast that you'd like to share with our listeners?

SPEAKER_00 30:56

Yeah, so in this space, we talked a ton about storytelling. The book Made to Stick has a really great framework for how to make your stories memorable. So I'll share one of the elements in their framework. Um their acronym is Success, and the U in success stands for Unexpected. So have you seen the movie The Sixth Sense?

Scott 31:20

Yes, it's been a while, but yes.

SPEAKER_00 31:22

Okay, so let's we'll we'll put in the spoiler alert for your audience. Do you remember the big plot twist from The Sixth Sense?

Scott 31:29

I do remember the big plot twist. I did I remember that it got me at the end of the movie.

SPEAKER_00 31:34

Okay, so we're we're actually going to reveal the plot twist. So turn off the podcast if you want to see still see the sixth sense and be surprised. So what was the big twist?

Scott 31:43

Right. So the the flip was the person thought he was helping him was actually dead the whole time.

SPEAKER_00 31:51

Yes. Yeah. Alright. So the the main plot of the movie is that there's a young boy and he is able to see dead people, and Bruce Willis plays the character who is helping him throughout the movie, and at the big plot we reveal, we learn that Bruce Willis was dead all along. That movie is now over 20 years old. You and I probably saw it. Yes, back then, and we remember those elements of the movie because that unexpected twist just sears that part of the story into your memory.

Scott 32:28

Hmm. Yes, it does. Yeah. Very neat, very nice. Alright, so made to stick. I like that.

SPEAKER_00 32:36

Yeah. It's a good book to listen to on audiobook because they are using stories to illustrate their main points and it's memorable. Normally, when I'm reading a business book, I've got the highlighter out and I'm taking notes, but you can't do that in the car. But with this book, you can because the stories will stick with you.

Scott 32:54

Okay. Great. Well, this has been um very helpful. I've enjoyed it, John. What where can people find out more about you online?

SPEAKER_00 33:03

Yeah, the the two classic places, connect with me on LinkedIn, and then our website is Johnpolk and Associates.com. You can sign up for my inconsistently published newsletter. You are a much more consistent newsletter publisher than I am. Once the book gets done, we'll be publishing, we'll be doing the newsletter more frequently.

Scott 33:26

You mentioned the book a few times. Tell us a little bit a little bit more about that before you before we're done here.

SPEAKER_00 33:32

Yeah, so the working title is Presentation Pitfalls, and it's 10 Trap. 10 Traps. I should have this should roll off the tongue better. It's 10 Traps, and it's focused on business presentations. A lot of the books that are out there are focused on either hardcore data visualization or I want to do a TED talk. And this is much more about all of the communications that happen in a business setting to make decisions and get investments.

Scott 34:01

And is there an estimated uh release or publish date?

SPEAKER_00 34:06

Yeah, don't hold me to this, but we're currently targeting April of next year.

Scott 34:11

Okay. All right. And if I want to look at this, if I want to try to find it somewhere, where would be the best place to find it?

SPEAKER_00 34:18

Well, it'll be on Amazon. We um Wiley is going to publish it, so we're getting published through a traditional publishing house.

Scott 34:27

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 34:28

Well, that's exciting. So if you sign up for the newsletter, you'll hear lots about the book.

Scott 34:32

All right. Well, go out there, uh, find John Polk on LinkedIn or his website, get his newsletter so it can roll right into his book. Perfect. Well, thanks for joining me today, John.

SPEAKER_00 34:44

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Scott 34:46

All right, folks, that's it for today. I'm Scott Keller, and I hope you join me next time for budget your business.