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“Ughhh… that was brutal.”

I’d just come out of our seventh disastrous lender diligence meeting in two days.

The CEO, my VP of Treasury & IR (we’ll call him Paul), and I were on the road trying to raise a credit package of nearly $200m. We needed a bank to anchor the whole thing, and so far, there was far too much hair on this for any “regular-way” lender.

We knew the problem. We were bringing an equity story to a credit fight.

Credit investors don’t care how good things might get. They only want to know: how bad does bad look?

And that was a big issue. There was no hope of an equity check in our current state. We needed this credit to create runway to execute the turnaround.

Unfortunately, our bottom-up financial model just wasn’t robust enough. The CEO and I were both new - only a few months in - brought in to fix the roof. Everything was a mess. The FP&A function was abysmal. Even the historical reporting was weak.

All things I knew how to fix… but not in the middle of a live fundraise. This would take time. So, we were stumbling through with what we had, and what we had was never going to survive proper diligence.

The CEO finally lost his sh*t:

“These f*cking banks are idiots. They don’t understand the business. They’re missing the big picture. Just checking boxes they don’t even understand.”

(That’s the PG-13 translation. The director’s cut was… richer.)

I let the rant breathe. Sometimes you’ve got to give a brother space to cool off.

Paul didn’t share my tact.

He went straight in: “Well… if they don’t get the picture, it’s because you two haven’t given it to them.”

He’d been working harder than anyone to get this deal done, and he was p*ssed that the credit story he was being asked to sell was so sh*t.

Brave. Maybe a little (politically) stupid. But… he was absolutely correct.

We were crammed into the back of a car and, for a second, I wondered if Paul might be leaving through a window. If the CEO hadn’t been belted in, he might have tried.

Instead, there was a pause. Then the CEO said:

“You’ve got some f*cking nerve speaking to us like that…” Then another dramatic pause - was I going to have to stop the CEO from punching a member of my team? Did I love Paul enough yet to care? So many questions…

He continued: “…I respect it though. You’re right. We need a different way.”

That was the turning point. We needed a different story.

That evening we whiteboarded every objection we’d heard across the seven meetings. It was a long, ugly list. But after a few hours, we found the nugget: there was one fundamental thing every bank had misunderstood about our industry.

The market was tough - flat, competitive, ugly macro backdrop, and we were an underperforming turnaround inside it. All true.

But if you segmented the market in two, about 70% looked exactly like that dogfight. The other 30% was different - less competitive, real white space, growing, with better unit economics.

And we were uniquely positioned to win in that 30%, and we could prove it.

It had been in the deck all along, buried among seven “key credit highlights.” But the message wasn’t landing. And if we could land it, most of that ugly list of diligence concerns would evaporate with it.

So we flipped the whole pitch. We ditched six of the seven points. And created five new highlights, all serving that single idea.

We tested it with our investment bank (and gave them some well-deserved sh*t for not spotting it sooner - after all, that’s what we were paying them for).

The next morning, we had our most important meeting: the global head of leveraged finance at one of the world’s biggest banks. He knew our sector well, so had taken direct interest in our request.

Usual set-up - he was flanked by five or six people, all with business cards that said Managing Director - without it being clear who, or what, they managed/directed. And one of whom, I swear, looked like he hadn’t even yet started shaving.

But this time it was different. They leaned in. You could feel it.

Big banks give off a sort of scent when they’re ready to lend you money (and feed their bonuses.) When you’ve sat in enough rooms without that scent, you learn to recognize it when it fills the room.

Within 24 hours, we had a credit-approved term sheet to lead the debt package.

They accepted that, with a reframed understanding of our market (and our plan for it) the deal could be underwritten on top-down, directional financials, not a spreadsheet cosplay of certainty. They knew we were early in the turnaround and cared more about the logic of the repositioning, and the people executing it, than the tenth decimal place.

Once that anchor lender was in, the rest lined up fast. And our lifesaving credit package had gone from being wishful thinking to crossing Ts and dotting Is.

All on a tweak in the story.

Welcome to a new series of The Secret CFO’s Playbook. This month is a four-part series on Storytelling for CFOs.

I’m obsessed with stories.

During the COVID lockdowns, I got curious about why some people can command a room with a story, while others put you to sleep reciting the same facts. I went down a rabbit hole and devoured every storytelling book I could find.

Then I started to practice.

As I shared in the opening, I saw immediate leverage in my words. I used these techniques everywhere. Some situations called for direct storytelling; all-hands meetings, presentations, one-on-ones. Others required subtlety; earnings calls, board meetings. More on that distinction later.

I was stunned by the impact.

Eventually, I got the urge to test this on a larger scale, and the Secret CFO was born. Without pulling on that storytelling thread, this newsletter wouldn’t exist. Now I get to tell stories to 250,000 finance professionals across my platforms. It’s a privilege, and I love it.

Storytelling in finance (especially for CFOs) has become fashionable.

But it’s not enough to tell stories. You need to tell good stories. Ideally, you need to tell great stories.

And I hate to say this, but the average CFO is woeful at it.

There’s plenty of advice out there for finance professionals, and it almost always starts the same way: “Begin with the data.”  The numbers, we’re told, are the heart of the story.

This is terrible advice. It reveals the same catastrophic lack of empathy that has had finance people typecast since the dawn of time.

Data at the heart of the story? DATA?! Come on … let’s be serious.

Oh yes, The Lion King would have been sooo much better, if only it included a demographic study of the Serengeti food chain, complete with color-coded visualization.

The ultimate test of a CFO is the impact they have on the business. Not directly, but through the organization as a whole.

And stories move people. Not in some fluffy, emotional way. They move people to do something:

And here’s the thing: you are always leaving people with a story. Intentionally or not.

The critical questions are:

So no, stories are not about data and numbers. They are about journeys.

Legendary technology exec and investor John Doerr said “great leadership is to get people to want to do what must be done.”

I love that line. It goes straight to the heart of influence. Influence is about changing desire.

And stories are the best technology humans have ever invented for shaping desire.

At the heart of every great story, from ancient myth to Hollywood blockbuster, is a transformation journey built on desire.

There are two types of people in life: those who cry during the first 10 minutes of the Pixar film 'Up', and liars. (Same rule for the last ten minutes of Coco).

'Up' isn't a movie about a flying house. It's about an old man going on one last adventure to honor his wife.

Just like 'Interstellar' isn't a movie about space. It's about a father trying to reunite with his daughter. Space is just the backdrop. It also has the greatest soundtrack of all time, but that’s not so relevant…

Game of Thrones, despite its complexity, is about the transformation of a handful of characters.

Yes, I'm a TERRIBLE person to watch TV with.

I’ve shared this before… the five devices of a finance story:

We’ll return to that model throughout the series, but for now I want to focus on one piece: the hero.

The problem with most finance stories is that they make the data the hero.

The hero should always be the person you’re telling the story to (or someone they care deeply about, like the customer.)

Don’t misunderstand me. Data still has a crucial role, of course. It can inform the journey, or support the argument.

But it is ALWAYS in service of the story, never the star of it.

It stuns me how often a CFO will stand in front of an all-hands meeting and march through ten slides of tables and numbers. You leave people snowblind, and the only story they take away is that you are boring and should be avoided at all costs.

Even beautifully formatted slides - clean, elegant, easy to digest, fantastic visualizations. They are not, themselves, a story. They’re just formatting.

We’ll come back later in the series to a better way.

A single business problem can show up in half a dozen different rooms, and in each room it needs a different story.

Take something simple and ugly: a major gross margin problem. If you are in a manufacturing business and survived the tariff chaos of the last year, you don’t need to imagine very hard.

What employees need to hear is not what lenders need to hear. What the board needs is not what customers need. If you tell the same story to every surface, you’ll be right once and wrong six times.

Here’s what that could look like in practice:

This is predicated by defining your audience for the story, and two brutally simple questions sit at the center of every good story in business:

Most leaders jump straight to the second question. We’re great at knowing what we want from people. We’re far worse at meeting them where they actually are.

But the first question is the real work. If you don’t start there, you’re not telling a story, just barking instructions.

Answer those two questions, and you’ve drawn the map of the journey. The rest of this series is about how to walk them along it.

Here’s what we have in store…

Impact comes from influence. And influence is built on stories, not data. Effective leaders have to be great storytellers, and CFOs are no exception.

In this series, we’ll steal inspiration from anywhere except finance. And next week we’re heading as far from a spreadsheet as it gets: the WWE. We’ll dive into narratives, arcs, and what a billion-dollar soap opera (with extra baby oil) can teach CFOs about moving real organizations.

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Disclaimer: I am not your accountant, tax advisor, lawyer, CFO, director, or friend. Well, maybe I’m your friend, but I am not any of those other things. Everything I publish represents my opinions only, not advice. Running the finances for a company is serious business, and you should take the proper advice you need.