You know the scenario - just when you thought you had all the answers, they changed all the questions! Nowhere is this truer than with accounting and finance leaders playing a partnership or advisor role.
As a member of a finance team, it’s no longer good enough to simply present a heap of historical data and leave the rest to your business or client to resolve. Because here’s the harsh reality: there is no value in information alone. Unless, of course, your explanation helps the decision makers create real value by increasing the performance of the company and its operating parts, or improving the efficiency of its capital structure.
Modern financial
Lance Rubin is a financial
Lance works as part of The Outperformer team with individuals and teams around:
Recently, Lance ran a webinar on The Outperformer, about how visual influence is changing the face of financial
It’s a webinar you really need to watch to get the full benefit, as visual influence is, of course, better explained with visual examples! It’s available here on our website. In the meantime, here is a brief summary of some of the more important take-outs:
Lance believes we’ve seen a shift away from traditionally historical, compliance-based reporting to more forward-thinking, commercial reporting. This aligns with the way business leaders need to run their business and decision making.
“The key to being commercial is to look forward, and to dynamically change,” he says. “Being able to build a robust, 3-way model that looks at the impact on the balance sheet in terms of cash, the impact on the P&L in terms of profitability, and the overall cash flow is hugely valuable. It’s also valuable from a process perspective. We spend a lot of time in spreadsheets, and there’s a lot of data. In order to move to a more value-add scenario, we need there to be value in the
“In finance, we can spend hours preparing a management pack, but it takes just five minutes in a board meeting to discuss. This is not (where the value lies), and it’s not the best use of our time. Increasingly, we’re being asked by recruiting companies and hiring managers to look for financial
To help explain the concept, Lance uses a relatable analogy: Formula 1 racing.
“Finance professionals and accountants are technical, so we’re the mechanics,” he says. “We understand what’s under the hood. The race car driver needs to drive the car and win the race, and it’s our job as mechanics to help them. We want to help them make relevant, informed and purposeful decisions by giving them a dashboard to play with. Visual influence helps us do this. It gives them not only the dashboard but also the steering wheel so they can drive better decisions. It helps us build a car that is quick but is seen from the viewpoint of the driver, not from that of the mechanic.
“We need to deliver something useful. A whole lot of numbers on a page is very distracting, and it’s hard to glean from a table of numbers what’s actually going on. So we use visual influence to educate and help leaders understand what’s happening so that they can make better decisions. It’s about using our expertise, but transforming it into a story. “
Lance has a wonderful example of a model he used to do just this as a case study on the webinar, so please visit our website to watch the whole webinar.