Call me crazy, but you can tell that a management team doesn't have their shit together just by looking at their board deck. I’m not even talking about reading the materials…. Just by quickly flipping through.

The colors are all mismatched, the headers jump, and there's clearly one slide repurposed from the company's recent All Hands and another ripped from the Chief Product Officer's Q2 Roadmap update.

I'm obsessed with formatting. I think a clean work product says a lot about the pride you take in your job and your ability to make something complicated simple.

Insert silly quote: How you do anything is how you do everything, or whatever.

But the point I'm trying to make here is less about formatting and more about building your data diet. If you are "playing the greatest hits" in your board slide deck… a pinch of this, a splash of that... oh that slide looks good too!… you clearly have not built a consistent data diet for your board.

I was recently speaking to Paul Stansik, an operating partner at private equity firm ParkerGale, and he tied this phenomenon to one my favorite TV series.

Imagine it's Q4. You pull the board decks from Q1, Q2, and Q3. You spread all the slides out on the floor of some barren studio apartment, like McConaughey in True Detective, and you just stare at them.

If they're all different slides in a different order, that's a problem. It means you've been doing… The Greatest Hits.

Paul sees this all the time. And it reveals you haven't figured out what actually matters… You're not in command of the narrative…. You're collecting evidence that work happened.

And I hate to break it to ya… but everybody can tell.

I learned this the hard way. My second ever board meeting, I brought a CAC payback slide. I actually took it from the deck we used to walk the sales team through GTM efficiency two weeks earlier.

Might as well get some extra mileage out of it, right!

So I went in wanting to have a real “strategic” conversation about whether our unit economics supported sending people to physically walk into stores and onboard them as customers. Big decision. I was ready.

Then one of our newer board members said,

Record scratch…

Next 30 minutes. Not fun. Just debating how to calculate CAC payback for a marketplace business with a SaaS component. We never got to the actual question. We ended up saying,

I was embarrassed. Not because the question was unfair… it wasn't. But because I hadn't done the work to get to definitional agreement upfront, and it cost me the conversation I actually wanted to have. I couldn't go back to the CRO and CMO and say, "We got the green light." We never got to it.

After that, I footnoted the shit out of how everything was calculated and standardized it and sent it to people beforehand. But the real lesson was bigger than footnotes. The lesson was that if you haven't built agreement on how you talk about the business, you will spend your precious board time debating definitions instead of making decisions.

And that's exactly what Paul told me he sees over and over. Everybody knows what the questions are. There's no argument about the questions.

The problem is that everyone sits on a spectrum of how quantitative and how honest they are in the answers. If you're answering those questions with feel or anecdotes or slides that were actually used for something else, but kinda sorta support the point you’re trying to make, you saved time on the front end but are about to open yourself up to an avalanche of follow-ups.

But if you answer those same questions with metrics you've already agreed on (how you calculate them, what the edge cases are, where the gray areas live) you've skipped the entire definitional debate.

Even better if you’ve agreed to the format you’re going to show your board the metrics in (it’s the same line chart every quarter!)

You're not arguing about what "pipeline" means anymore. The “how you’re doing” is a drive by and the “what needs to get fixed next” is the drive in movie. And that’s where you want the bulk of the time to sit.

Paul's advice is directed at CFOs but it applies to every function. It’s to build your data diet with your CEO and with your investors. Ahead of time. Not in the meeting. Not reactively. Don’t do the Bill O’Reilly and try to “do it live!”

And crucially: don’t go about it by asking "what do you guys want to see?" Because that question, well-intentioned as it might be, is a signal that you don't have a strong opinion about how to track the business. That's not a great look. Lead them to water. Have an opinion. (PSA: They pay you to have an opinion.)

A better approach is to show up with a one-page menu.

A few awesome things happen when you do this.

Now when the board deck comes out, nobody's squinting at a metric trying to figure out if they trust it. That debate already happened. In private. Like adults.

Let’s make that more real: say you've agreed on how you define win rate, and you've looked at it consistently for eight quarters. Now it's obvious - win rate is getting way worse in the middle market and way better in enterprise. You draw a red box around middle market and talk about the plan. That's the whole conversation. But you only get there if the definitions are settled and the data is clean, and you've been looking at it the same way long enough to actually see the trend.

If you're pulling your best slides from across the org, you're not synthesizing. You're decorating. You’re decorating the house with what you think is “interesting” and what will serve as “evidence” of you doing your job.

So before your next board meeting, do the McConaughey exercise. Lay your slides out and ask yourself one question: So what?

And have you built the foundation and agreement to discuss said “thing”?

And if you really want to stand out - this is a real life hack - when your section comes up, propose how you want to spend the time. Something like:

Think about how rarely you see that. An executive walking into their section with a proposed allocation of time and a direct ask. Instead, most people just click through slides. Show-and-tell mode.

So next time you are tempted to play the Greatest Hits, think about what album the board actually wants to hear. Because it’s probably something more recent.

Apple | Spotify | YouTube

In this episode of Run the Numbers, CJ sits down with Paul Stansik, Operating Partner at ParkerGale Capital and author of Hello Operator, to break down what separates Simplifiers from Complicators. They explore why most board meetings miss the point, how to “stick the landing” by answering the actual question, and why naming the real problem earns trust. A sharp conversation on clarity, accountability, and doing the work.

Also check out Paul and Parker Gale’s YT channel - they’re dropping some awesome podcasts there soon. Subscribe here.

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