Presenting for accountants (and other number-crunchers! :) )

I like my accountant.  Apart from the fact that he smokes, he’s pretty cool.  If I say to him “How much money do we have?” he gives me a very specific, detailed answer to the nearest penny, as at “close of play yesterday” – by which he means when the banks shut.  Great.  It’s precise and detailed and accurate… which is exactly what I want from my accountant.

I know quite a few accountants – particularly those who are starting out – who have to make a lot of presentations (particularly pitches for work) – and here’s the rub… the very things which make me like you as an accountant are likely to make you a bad presenter.  (Okay, that’s a generalisation, but hang on in there… :) )

If I’m listening to your presentation (or pitch), I don’t want to know how you do X, Y and Z.  I just want to know that X, Y and Z will be done, on time and how much it’ll cost me.  If I wanted to know how to do X, Y and Z, I’d be an accountant myself, right? Rather like Geeks, the sad thing is that no one cares about your work like you do.

On the other hand, that’s good: because if they did, you’d be out of a job!  :D

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard (probably) great accountants crash out in a presentation because they wanted to tell people too much.  Listeners are interested in story-lines, not facts. Unlike accountants, ‘real people’ get turned off by the site of a row or column of numbers.  They don’t think checking and reconciliation is sexy.

Like I said, if they did, they’d be accountants!

But – I hear from accountants all the time – we’ve got to present details and facts, not stories and summaries…

Well yes, fine.  Like  said, I want accurate facts and figures from my accountant, but not in presentations – and besides, facts and figures are stories.  What’s an average if it’s not a story?  There are a whole range of numbers encapsulated in that single summary figure.  You don’t give them the full list of numbers do you? No, of course not.

An average is a story.

A trend is a story.

A prediction is a story.

Almost everything you do with numbers is a story.

And once you’ve got the idea, it’s not so hard to take it further and make decent presentations using those stories.