How to Create a Finance Presentation Storyline

A storyline is the argument written as a list of sentences before any slide exists. Build it in seven steps: write the message as one sentence, name the question it answers, find three supports, attach the evidence to each, write the strongest objection, state the ask, then read the sentences aloud in order and check they follow.

One assignment runs through all seven steps below. The Kavery research desk, inside the invented Kavery Capital Services Private Limited, had finished a review of a borrower it already lends to, Meenakshi Tubes Private Limited. Sharada Iyer produced the work, Prakash Nadar reviewed it, and Latha Menon chaired the twenty minute item on 12 March at which it was settled. The subject is incidental: a bond, a fund or a single machine in place of the tube maker leaves all seven steps reading exactly the same.

The pre-read, what belongs on a slide and what never does, and how a deck is spoken to are set out under the finance presentation; choosing a chart is set out under data visualisation; and the memo underneath all of it is set out under the finance memo. All three are taken as known here. The seven steps below add the order they run in, what each one hands to the next, and the point at which the sequence stops and building begins.

What is a storyline, and why is it built before any slide?

A storylineThe argument written out as an ordered list of sentences, before any slide exists. is the argument written out as an ordered list of sentences. Not notes, not bullets, not a plan of the deck. Sentences, numbered, in the order they are to be said, each one a complete claim that somebody in the room could disagree with. On this assignment there were seven of them, and writing them took 25 minutes. Seven sentences in 25 minutes is 3 minutes 34 seconds a sentence.

Slides are expensive to change and sentences are free, so every decision that can be taken in sentences should be taken there. Moving the third thing said ahead of the second, in a list of seven, is one cut and one paste. Making that same move after nine slides had been built took two hours on this assignment. The numbering moves, the titles move, the two exhibits have to be pointed at again, and the timing has to be worked out from scratch. A storyline is not planning ahead for its own sake; it is doing the argument in the medium where being wrong costs nothing.

Most people already do this without using the word for it. A household deciding whether to move a child to a school across town does not begin by booking visits. Somebody says the one thing over dinner: the commute is eating two hours a day and it has to change. Then the reasons come out, one at a time. Then somebody names the objection the grandmother will raise, and somebody else names the actual request: one Saturday to go and look. Six sentences at a kitchen table, and the visits get booked afterwards. Booking the visits first and working out the reasoning in the car goes badly.

Here are the seven steps as one picture. The last step reaches back into the middle of the sequence, so read the drawing top to bottom and watch the arrow on the right.

Step one: what is the one sentence at the top?

Write the messageThe single sentence the whole presentation exists to deliver. as one sentence. One, not two, and a sentence rather than a topic. Margin is a topic and nothing can be done with a topic. On this assignment the sentence read: the operating margin has fallen below the internal floor and the line should be reduced. Twenty words, one claim, and everything written after it exists to hold it up.

The test for it is the corridor. A sentence that could not be said to somebody stopping between two meetings with forty seconds to spare is not the sentence yet. The cutting continues until it survives that. One message with three reasons beneath it is a pyramid, and the pyramid is Barbara Minto's, set out in The Pyramid Principle in 1978. A presentation with two messages is two presentations sharing a slot, and the room will carry one of them out of the door and leave the other one on the table.

Hands to step two: one written sentence at the top of an otherwise empty sheet.

Step two: which question does that sentence answer?

Write down the question the message answers, in the words somebody actually used when they asked it. Here that was whether the margin had stayed above 11 per cent in the year just reported. Somebody on the committee had asked exactly that, in those words, three weeks earlier, and being able to point at who asked it is the entire content of this step.

Then check. If nobody in the room asked the question the sentence answers, there is no presentation. There is a finding, and a finding travels as a note rather than as a meeting. Step two is the only step in the sequence that can end the whole exercise, and it is a check rather than a written line. The check takes about ninety seconds, and it is the step people skip. By the time the work is finished the question feels too obvious to write down.

Hands to step three: the message with a question written above it, and a name against the question.

Step three: how many supports, and where does the list stop?

Now write the reasons the message holds. Each one is a supportOne reason the message holds, stated so it can be checked on its own.: one sentence, one reason, written so that somebody could check it without reading the other two. On this assignment there were three of them. The margin is 10.8 per cent against 12.0 per cent last year. Revenue rose 15.2 per cent while operating profit rose 4.1 per cent, from Rs 2,21,00,000 to Rs 2,30,00,000, so the fall is in realisation rather than in how much was sold. And one order of Rs 2,96,80,000 carries 14 per cent of the revenue for the year.

Then stop. Three is a limit rather than a target. Where five good ones have been found, three stay and the other two move into the pre-read, where a reader who wants them can find them at their own speed. A fourth support does not add weight to an argument, it divides the weight already there. Three reasons leave a twenty minute item whichever number goes on the screen, and with five up there it is the room that picks which three rather than the analyst.

The limit is a decision rather than a preference. The choice is not between three reasons and five. The choice is between the analyst choosing the three and the room choosing them instead.

Hands to step four: three sentences under the message, with nothing under them yet.

Step four: what gets attached to each support?

The item number of the evidence goes beside each of the three supports. Not a description of the evidence, the number. A number is what somebody can go and look at while the analyst is still talking. On this assignment the source log ran to fourteen items and the three supports took four attachments between them: item 3 under the first, items 3 and 7 under the second, item 5 under the third. Three distinct items out of fourteen, and all three sit inside the four the log records as carrying the conclusion.

Then read down the column just made. Any support with nothing in that column is not a support yet. A support with no item number beside it is a belief, and it either gets sourced before the meeting or it comes out of the storyline. There is no third option. The one left in is reliably the one somebody asks a second question about, and a second question is the one moment in twenty minutes when pointing at nothing cannot be afforded.

Hands to step five: three supports, each with a number beside it, and a shorter list than the one it started with if any of them failed.

Step five: how is the objection written before the room says it?

The strongest objection to the message gets written out, in the words the person holding it would use. Writing it down is the objection passWriting the strongest counter-argument in the words its holder would use, before the meeting., and the words matter as much as the point. On this assignment the line read: the fall is 1.2 points and the floor is arbitrary anyway. The sentence sounds like somebody who does not want a line reduced, and two softer versions are worth setting beside it. The objection is not that there are limitations to the analysis in this area. The objection is not that the movement may warrant further monitoring. Both softened versions are the same objection written by the person it is aimed at, and both prepare the analyst for nothing at all.

Then write one sentence back and put it underneath. Here that sentence was that the 1.2 point fall takes the margin 0.2 points below the internal floor rather than merely towards it, and that the floor can be moved by the committee that set it but not by the work. The pass is finished when the objection written down beforehand is sharper than anything the room says out loud. If what the room says in the meeting is harder than what was written, the pass did not happen; what got written was a note, called preparation.

Hands to step six: the objection written in somebody else's voice, with one sentence of reply under it.

Step six: what is the room actually being asked to do?

State the askWhat the room is being asked to do, stated as its own sentence.. One sentence, naming what is wanted, from whom, and by when. Here it read: approve the reduction of the line from Rs 40,00,000 to Rs 25,00,000, with a review in 90 days. Three specifics in nineteen words, and each one of them is a thing that could be written into a minute by somebody who was only half listening.

The ask stays a separate sentence from the message and never gets folded back into it. The message says what is true. The ask says what should happen about it. Agreeing with the message and knowing what is being asked for are two different events, and only one of them shows up in the minutes. Meetings end all the time with a room entirely persuaded and nothing decided, and the reason is almost never disagreement. The reason is that the sentence naming the decision was never said.

Hands to step seven: seven sentences, in the order they were written, none of them yet tested against each other.

Step seven: what does reading it aloud change?

Read the seven sentences aloud, in order, from the top. Out loud, standing up, not silently down a screen. Reading aloud is the ordering testReading the sentences aloud in sequence to check that each one follows from the last., and it is a test rather than an edit. One thing only is being checked: whether each sentence follows from the one before it.

On this assignment the order did not survive. Read as written, the second support, the one about realisation, arrived before anybody had a reason to care about it. The third support, the single order carrying 14 per cent of the year, is what gives the realisation point somewhere to land, so it moved up. The final order ran message, question, the margin, the concentration, the realisation, the objection, the ask. The reorder was one cut and one paste, and it happened before a single slide existed.

There is a second thing the read-aloud catches, and it catches it almost every time. The order the work ran in is not the order the argument lands in. The Meenakshi work ran source the numbers, compute the margins, run the scenario without the December order, conclude. Every instinct says present it in that order. The work happened that way, and reporting it so feels like honesty. Read aloud, the sequence dies at sentence one. Sentence one is that the desk gathered the filed accounts, and there is nothing a room can do with that. The storyline runs the other way round: the conclusion first, then the two things that make the conclusion land. Answer-first ordering is Minto's again, and it is the reason slide 1 ended up carrying both the answer and the request.

Now the price of leaving that rearrangement until later. Twenty five minutes bought the entire storyline: seven sentences, written, argued with and rearranged as often as it needed. Two hours is what one rearrangement cost once nine slides existed. Two hours is 13 minutes 20 seconds a slide, and 4.8 times what the whole storyline had cost. The comparison is not two hours against twenty five minutes for the same job; it is two hours for one change against twenty five minutes for every change that was wanted.

Hands to nothing. The sequence ends here, with seven sentences in the order they will be said, and the building of the deck is set out under the finance presentation.

What did the finished storyline look like, sentence by sentence?

Here is the whole of it, as it stood when the seventh step finished. The last column is where each sentence ended up after the read-aloud.

Seven sentences are the entire artefact. None of them runs longer than a line and a half, all seven sit on half a sheet of a notebook, and the only two that changed places are the ones shaded in the table. Everything that was going to be argued about in that room was already written down, in order, before anybody opened a presentation file.

How did seven sentences turn into nine slides?

The storyline is not a deck and it does not become one on its own. The storyline decides what a deck is allowed to contain, and the arithmetic of that decision is worth following once. Seven sentences produced a first cut of fourteen slides. The test that reduced fourteen to nine is set out under the finance presentation. The count worth doing is which of the fourteen had a sentence behind it and which did not.

Three of the five that went had no sentence behind them at all: the title slide, the agenda, and a slide describing how the work had been done. None of those three is a claim in the argument, so nothing in the storyline produced them. The three came from the habit of building a deck rather than from the argument itself. A slide with no storyline sentence behind it is the cheapest thing in any deck to cut, and it is very nearly always the first three. The other two that went did have sentences behind them, and they went for a different reason, set out under the finance presentation.

Of the nine that were shown, every one traces back to a sentence, and the count is worth doing slowly. Seven sentences made ten attachments onto nine slides. Three sentences produced two slides each. One sentence, the question, produced none. The question was drafted as a slide and then cut. And slide 1 is the only slide carrying two sentences, the message and the ask. Carrying both is the reason the meeting could settle anything after never reaching slide 9 at all.

What does a storyline hand the presenter when the meeting goes off script?

Twelve of the twenty minutes went on slide 6, and slides 7, 8 and 9 were never shown. A meeting that spends twelve minutes on one slide has left the plan, and that is the moment the seven sentences stop being preparation and start being equipment.

Once the room jumps, the deck is no help. Its order has already been broken and the slides that are wanted sit behind the current one, so paging back through them spends the little time that is left. The storyline is help, for two reasons that have nothing to do with slides. The storyline is short enough to hold in the head, and the storyline is in argument order rather than in slide order. So at any moment the presenter knows the sentence being stood on, the ones that have already landed, and the one still owed. The deck is a route and the storyline is a map, and when the room leaves the route only one of the two still shows where the argument is.

On this assignment two sentences were still owed when the discussion swallowed slide 6: the objection and the ask. The ask had already been said at minute one, so what was genuinely outstanding was the objection sentence, and it got said inside the argument about the scenario rather than off slide 7. Nothing was lost. The person who could not have said so was the one who had built nine slides and no seven sentences.

What goes wrong when the storyline is written after the slides?

How does a lender, an analyst or somebody working alone use this?

A credit committee paper runs on a storyline whether or not anybody in the building uses the word. Somebody writes the message into the first line of the paper, three reasons follow it, each with a file reference, and the last paragraph is the ask with a date on it. The papers that get decided in one sitting are the ones where those four things exist as sentences. The papers that come back for more information are usually the ones where a reader can find the analysis and cannot find the request.

An analyst putting finished work in front of a portfolio manager has the same seven sentences and about four minutes. With four minutes there is no room to arrive at the conclusion slowly, so the compression makes the sequence more useful rather than less. The corridor test in step one is doing almost all the work, and the objection pass in step five is what stops the four minutes turning into an argument nobody has rehearsed.

Somebody working alone, with no committee, no reviewer and nobody to present to, still gets the twenty five minutes back from the seven sentences. The seven sentences get written the evening before and read aloud in an empty room. The read-aloud does not need an audience to work. The test is whether one sentence follows from another, and that is a property of the sentences rather than of the listener. A household version exists too. Before a large purchase somebody says the one thing, gives three reasons, names what the person who will disagree is going to say, and then says what they are actually asking for. Household conversations go well or badly for exactly the reasons a committee meeting does.

One last thing on where the craft stops. No regulator anywhere sets the order of an argument, and a storyline is as universal as a sentence: the seven steps work in any jurisdiction, in any language and for any subject. The record around the argument is not craft. In a regulated firm there is a duty to be able to show afterwards what a decision maker was told and on what basis. The item numbers written in step four are what eventually feed that record. The Securities and Exchange Board of India at sebi.gov.in sets conduct, disclosure and record-keeping duties for registered intermediaries, and the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India at icai.org sets documentation and review expectations for work that is issued.

The Kavery research desk, Kavery Capital Services Private Limited, Meenakshi Tubes Private Limited, Sharada Iyer, Prakash Nadar and Latha Menon are invented.
Educational material. Not advice on any investment, tax, budget or market position.