I sat in the back of my first board meeting at my new company and kept my mouth shut. It was the smartest thing I could have done.
The CEO had hired me a few weeks earlier. He’d been running the board package himself since the company’s founding, which is normal at a growth-stage company. The deck was clean, well-organized, built in PowerPoint with financials done in Excel. He clearly knew his way around a spreadsheet, and for a non-finance person, it was impressive work.
But something was off, and I couldn’t have told you what it was from reading the slides alone. I had to watch it happen in real time.
The disconnect
About 20 minutes into the meeting, one of the investors started asking about runway under different growth scenarios. The CEO had a slide showing current burn rate and months of cash remaining, which was fine as far as it went. But the investor wasn’t asking about the current burn rate. She wanted to know what happens if the sales cycle takes 6 months longer than projected, what happens if the next hire costs more than budgeted, what happens if the big pilot they’re banking on doesn’t convert.
The CEO handled it well enough, talking through some rough numbers from memory and giving reasonable estimates. But you could see him shift in his chair. This wasn’t his territory. He was a product guy, a visionary, someone who could explain the technology in a way that made you want to write a check. The financial what-ifs were a different kind of conversation, and he didn’t have the tools to have it properly.
Meanwhile, another board member, an engineer by background who’d built and sold two companies, barely looked at the financial slide. He spent the whole meeting drilling into the product roadmap and competitive positioning. When the CEO showed the P&L, this board member nodded politely and moved on. He didn’t care about the income statement; he cared about whether the product could win.
I watched all of this and made mental notes, not about the numbers, but about the people.
The post-meeting conversation
After the board meeting, I sat down with the CEO. I didn’t walk in with a plan to overhaul the deck or a list of metrics he should be tracking. I asked him a simple question: what did he think the board wanted that they weren’t getting?
He thought about it for a minute and said he wasn’t sure. He knew the investor had been pushing on runway scenarios for the last couple of meetings, and he’d been meaning to build something more detailed. But between fundraising, managing the team, and dealing with a product launch, the board deck got done the night before and the scenario analysis never happened.
That’s when I told him: I think I can help with this, but I need you to let me sit in on the next couple of board meetings before I change anything. I want to understand what each board member is looking for before I start building slides.
He agreed immediately. In fact, I think he was relieved. CEOs at growth-stage companies carry an enormous amount of weight, and the board package is one of those tasks that never quite gets the attention it deserves because there’s always something more urgent. Having someone offer to take it seriously, without trying to take it over, is exactly what most CEOs are hoping for when they make their first finance hire.
What I was actually listening for
Most finance people, if you hand them a board package and tell them to improve it, will do one of two things. They’ll either add more financial detail (because that’s what they know), or they’ll redesign the slides to look more polished (because that feels productive). Both of those instincts are wrong.
The board package isn’t a finance deliverable. It’s a communication tool between the CEO and the investors who funded the company, and your job as a finance person is to make that communication better, not to make yourself the star of it.
So over the next two board meetings, I listened. I paid attention to which slides each board member engaged with, which questions they asked, which topics made the CEO uncomfortable, and where the conversation stalled because the data to support it didn’t exist. Sometimes I’d ask a clarifying question during the meeting itself, something brief and targeted, just to tease out what a board member was really after. Other times I’d stay quiet and save my observations for the debrief with the CEO afterward. Knowing when to speak up and when to hold back is part of reading the room, and reading the room is the whole job.
Patterns emerged fast. The lead investor cared about risk. She wanted to see scenario analysis, sensitivity tables, and a clear picture of what decisions the company would need to make under different outcomes. She wasn’t trying to catch anyone off guard; she was managing a portfolio, and she needed to know where this company sat in terms of risk relative to her other investments.
The engineer on the board cared about execution. He wanted to see whether the product milestones were being hit, whether the sales pipeline was real or aspirational, and whether the company was spending money on the right things. He didn’t want more financial slides. What he wanted was the existing financial information connected to operational reality.
A third board member, who came from a finance background himself, wanted clean numbers he could trust. He didn’t need analysis so much as accuracy. Was the balance sheet right? Were the projections grounded in actual data? Could he look at the numbers and know they’d been prepared by someone who understood what they were doing?
Three board members, three completely different needs, and the CEO had been trying to serve all of them with one generic deck.
Building it the right way
I didn’t add fifteen new slides. I added two.
The first was a scenario analysis page with 3 columns: base case, upside, and downside. Each one showed revenue, expenses, cash position, and runway under different assumptions about sales cycle length, customer conversion rates, and hiring pace. The assumptions were visible on the slide, not buried in a footnote. This gave the lead investor exactly what she’d been asking for, and it gave the CEO a framework for the conversation instead of having to improvise from memory.
The second slide connected financial performance to operational metrics: marketing spend tied to pipeline, pipeline tied to conversion rates, conversion rates tied to revenue, headcount tied to burn rate. The engineer on the board could now see how the money connected to the product and sales effort, which is what he’d been trying to piece together on his own from scattered data points across different slides.
For the finance-minded board member, I didn’t add anything. I cleaned up the existing financial slides, made sure the numbers were precise, and reformatted the condensed P&L and balance sheet so they were easier to read at a glance. When he saw the next board package, he told the CEO it was the cleanest set of financials the company had ever presented, and that was the whole point.
The CEO’s slide count went from about 12 to 14, but the conversation in the boardroom changed completely. The lead investor stopped asking probing questions about scenarios because the answers were already in front of her. The engineer stopped trying to connect dots between slides because the connections were explicit. And the finance board member stopped squinting at the numbers because they were right.
The part nobody talks about
Here’s what I want the first-time finance hire to understand, because this is the thing that took me years to figure out: your job is to make the CEO look great.
The board package is the CEO’s presentation. The CEO is the one who has the relationship with the board, who set the vision, who raised the money, who’s accountable for results. You are there to arm that person with the right information, the right analysis, and the right framing so they can walk into a board meeting feeling prepared and confident.
If you walk in and overhaul the deck to show off your financial modeling skills, you’ve missed the point. If you add so much detail that the CEO can’t explain their own slides, you’ve made things worse. And if a board member asks a question and you jump in to answer it before the CEO can, you’ve damaged the CEO’s credibility in front of their own investors.
The right move is almost always the same: listen in the meeting, take notes, debrief with the CEO afterward, and then quietly reshape the package so the next meeting goes better. Over time, the CEO will start pulling you into the conversation. They’ll say, “Michael can walk us through the financials,” and that’s your cue. But you have to earn that invitation, and it comes from trust. Trust comes from making the CEO look good, not from making yourself visible.
Beyond the finance slides
One more thing that most finance people miss: you’re not limited to the financial section of the board package.
At a growth-stage company, the finance person is often one of the most analytically capable people in the building. Marketing might be two people running campaigns. Sales might be a VP and 3 reps. Engineering is heads-down building product, not building dashboards. Nobody has time to pull together the kind of metrics that a board expects, and frankly, most of them don’t have the analytical training to do it well even if they had the time.
I’ve routinely owned the sales and marketing metrics in board packages because I could build them faster and more accurately than anyone else at the company: customer acquisition cost, pipeline velocity, conversion rates by stage, revenue retention, churn analysis. These aren’t finance metrics in the traditional sense, but they’re built on the same analytical skills. And when the finance person owns them, they’re consistent with the financial data because they’re coming from the same framework.
The VP of Sales didn’t resent this. He appreciated it, because it meant he could spend his time selling instead of building slides for the board. The CEO appreciated it because it meant the entire board package told a coherent story, with the financial and operational metrics reinforcing each other rather than living in separate silos.
That’s where you become genuinely valuable: not as the person who makes sure the P&L is right (though you’d better), but as the person who connects the financial picture to everything else the company is doing. When the board can see how marketing spend connects to pipeline, how pipeline connects to revenue, and how revenue connects to runway, they’re not asking anxious questions. They’re having a strategic conversation, and that’s what every CEO wants from a board meeting.
What to do on day one
If you’re a finance person who just inherited a board package, or you’re about to, here’s what I’d tell you.
Don’t change anything yet. Sit in on the next board meeting and watch. Pay attention to who asks what, where the CEO gets uncomfortable, and where the conversation stalls. After the meeting, talk to the CEO. Ask what they think is working and what isn’t. Share what you noticed. Then build exactly what’s needed, and nothing more.
You’re going from one or two CEO-built finance slides to maybe 3 or 4 that you’ve built. Over time, you might grow it to 5, and you’ll prune things that aren’t landing and add things the board asks for. It’s an ongoing conversation, not a one-time redesign.
And keep this in mind: the CEO has been managing this board relationship since before you got there. Respect that. Your role is to make a good relationship better, not to insert yourself into the middle of it. Be an asset and an ally. The CEO will notice, the board will notice, and you’ll have earned your seat at the table.