CEO Requests ‘Quick’ Board Deck Model With Only 14 Scenarios and Three Currencies

SATIRE: At 4:43 p.m. on Thursday, the chief executive of Latticewheel Dynamics made a small, highly reasonable request of the finance team: a “quick board-deck model.” It would require only 14 scenarios, three currencies, a monthly view through the end of time, and enough flexibility to answer any question a director might ask after seeing page 37 of a 42-page presentation for the first time.

The request arrived in Slack with a helpful qualifier: “Nothing fancy.” The attached voice note ran 18 minutes. By 5:12 p.m., the original request had expanded to include base, upside, downside, downside-but-sales-hiring-remains-intact, upside-with-conservative-language, upside-with-aggressive-language, and a scenario labeled “what if Europe works faster somehow?”

The Model Is Simple Because It Has a Cover Sheet

The finance lead, who had been hired to “build strategic capability” after three years of being told not to overcomplicate the annual plan, opened a fresh workbook named Board_Model_FINAL_v1.xlsx. This was the first of 63 final versions.

The model’s structure was straightforward. There was an assumptions tab, a scenario-control tab, a currency tab, a currency override tab, an assumptions-override-by-currency tab, a bridge tab, an executive-summary tab, a hidden checks tab, and a tab called DO NOT TOUCH that was touched by the CEO before dinner.

The CEO had one strong preference: no hard-coded numbers. The chief revenue officer had another: all headcount targets should be editable directly from the board slide. The chief operating officer requested that international expansion be modeled in local currency “so it feels real.” The controller asked, quietly and correctly, what exchange-rate convention the company intended to use. The room became briefly unavailable.

Fourteen Scenarios, One Truth

In ordinary companies, scenario planning is meant to clarify decisions. At Latticewheel, it served a more advanced function: allowing every executive to locate a version of the future in which their current plan was fully funded, every other department had accepted a 12% reduction, and revenue improved through disciplined optimism.

• Scenario 1: Management plan, before everyone remembered their commitments.
• Scenario 2: Management plan, after the sales forecast was “pressure-tested.”
• Scenario 3: Management plan, before the pressure test, but translated into euros.
• Scenario 4: The board’s preferred case, defined as “less spend, more growth.”
• Scenario 5: The CFO’s case, in which payroll taxes continue to exist.
• Scenario 6: The CEO’s case, in which the new product reaches scale after an unspecified marketing moment.
• Scenarios 7–14: Variations on whether foreign exchange is a macroeconomic force, a planning assumption, or a formatting issue.

The scenario switch was elegant in the way a municipal water system is elegant: invisible when functioning, catastrophic when a single valve is turned. A dropdown on the control tab drove revenue, headcount, bookings, operating expense, cash runway, working capital, gross margin, hiring dates, office lease obligations, and the color of the arrows in the board deck. No one could explain why the arrows were linked to the same lookup table as foreign exchange rates, but by then the workbook had become an ecosystem.

Three Currencies, None of Them Convenient

The company operated primarily in U.S. dollars, employed people in the United Kingdom, invoiced a handful of customers in euros, and had once received a payment in Canadian dollars because a customer’s procurement portal had a dropdown. This was sufficient to justify a multi-currency architecture normally reserved for a mid-sized industrial conglomerate with a treasury department and a view on hedging.

The finance team asked whether the board needed reported results translated at monthly average rates, balance-sheet items at period-end rates, or planning assumptions based on a fixed budget rate. The CEO answered: “Can we see all three?”

At 9:06 p.m., an analyst discovered that changing the EUR/USD assumption altered both international revenue and the number of enterprise account executives in Denver. The resulting discussion was productive. It established that Denver was not in Europe, that the formula had been copied from a prior headcount case, and that the company’s long-term strategy should not depend on a misplaced dollar sign.

The Board Deck Review

On Monday morning, the executive team reviewed the finished deck. It had 41 slides, 17 appendix pages, two waterfall charts, one sensitivity table, and a cash-flow bridge with enough supporting schedules to qualify for a minor archival designation.

The CEO opened with the model’s central conclusion: if the company hired precisely 26.4 people, converted 118% of qualified pipeline, held foreign exchange stable within a narrow band, accelerated collections without affecting customer relationships, and reduced discretionary spend in categories not yet identified, it could deliver the plan while preserving strategic flexibility.

A director asked whether the company could instead show a simpler view: revenue, cash, hiring, and the two or three decisions the board actually needed to make. The room went silent. This proposal had not appeared in any scenario.

What This Means When You Are the Finance Person in the Room

If you are interviewing for FP&A, strategic finance, or a senior finance-business-partner role, listen closely when a hiring manager describes a “lightweight” board model. Ask what decisions it must support, who owns the underlying operating assumptions, what level of currency treatment the company uses for planning, and whether the output is a board recommendation or an endlessly editable executive sandbox. Those answers tell you more about the job than the title will.

And when the request arrives after you are hired, define the deliverable before you build it: decision questions, forecast horizon, scenario count, currency convention, source systems, owners, and a cutoff for new assumptions. The true observation beneath the joke is that good finance work is not making every possible answer available; it is making the decision, and its tradeoffs, visible.