If You Want a Seat at the C-Suite Table, Stop Saying You're Bad at Math

I have a confession: I'm a math nerd posing as a PR professional.

I calculate restaurant tips in my head as I'm finishing up dessert. I actually enjoyed figuring out the cost per person for my wedding reception. I even once used an insurance analogy to reassure my wife that I love her. (It worked.)

This kind of stuff got me bullied as a kid. But as a PR professional, it gives me an advantage. Instead of running away from numbers, I embrace them — and the people who decide whether I get paid notice.

Don't worry.  You don't have to force yourself to love math. You just need to recognize the opportunity you’ve been given to get paid to learn. 

Ask for help

Many communications professionals openly tout financial ignorance. But leadership meetings are not the place to do so. “It’s better to be silent and thought a fool,” the old saying goes, “than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.” 

The first step to knowledge is to write down the financial foreign language you’re hearing in those meetings. The C-Suite isn’t asking for the number of media placements; they're asking whether those activities helped the business grow. How will they reach buyers? Strengthen investor confidence? Support recruiting? Improve customer retention? Move prospects further down the sales funnel?

Once you’ve recorded what they want, it’s time to take advice from The Aspen Group’s Jennifer George, who recently advised senior leaders to go to the CFO to understand how comms ties into his or her financial strategy. Ask all the questions you wrote down. Seek to understand what metrics matter most and what keeps the leadership team awake at night.

If you’re lower in the hierarchy, don’t worry — tech communications veteran Neil Ripley has your solution. “When I was at Comscore,” Ripley told me, “I had six weeks to master the financial nuances of five business units — and then connect their quarterly performance to a unified, positive market narrative. The only way I survived was to ask two mid-level finance team members to help me understand how to connect comms to their goals, strategy, and pain points.”

But Ripley also said he didn’t just knock on random finance team doors. He went in prepared.

"Asking other people to sacrifice their time means you have to come prepared," he told me. "Take stock of who’s approachable and who likes to talk shop. Check schedules and do your initial research. And always record the conversation so you don't have to scramble on the spot."

If you want to prove your value, you’ll have to answer those questions in terms the execs understand. Which brings us to our next step…

Ask Questions in Executive Meetings

"How do you see media coverage impacting Q4 financial goals? What’s your main worry there?"

This is the kind of question you’ll have heard come up in the executive meetings. Now you need to be the one asking it instead of letting it live forever on the notepad. 

You might say, “Okay, but the bosses want answers.” Well, consider what happened when I spent most of a recent prospect meeting not giving communications strategy, but asking lots (and lots) of financial questions.

The C-team wanted an executive rollout campaign. It would have been easy to gab about messaging or reputation management. Instead, I asked how those leadership changes had affected customer acquisition. The CEO murmured, "That's a really good question," and he looked at the taciturn CFO for the answer. When the meeting was almost over, the CFO stunned everyone by cracking a joke. 

That's when I knew we had the contract, because asking the right questions is actually better than having the answers. They show you are paying attention, engaging with leadership’s pain points, and are invested in finding solutions. And the best part? You can take down leadership’s answers, take them to your next coffee with finance, and come back next week armed with strategic and tactical recommendations the boss will love.

That’s Comms 101, with an elective in math.

Read Those Painful Reports

When you ask questions, the answers you get will draw heavily from all kinds of financial tools — annual reports, quarterly earnings, investor presentations, budget documents. You’ve heard enough about them. Now it’s time to go read them. 

You don’t have to be a CPA to make sense of it all. Instead, combine your comms smarts with what you’ve learned from the finance guys, and suddenly those reports are the Rosetta Stone showing how leadership thinks. You'll see where growth is coming from, where pressure exists, and what success looks like.

"I've always tried to show finance teams what I see from customers and industry signals while asking finance what investors and other stakeholders are saying," Dan Ring, Head of Communications at SEON, told me. He could never understand the oft-seen lack of communication  between comms and finance. "Working closely on earnings scripts and quarterly announcements has given me the numbers context that has improved how I think about messaging."

And that’s where Jennifer, who inspired about half of this piece, hit the grand slam with her advice. Every organization has a bottom line. If we’re not helping to meet it, our job hits the chopping block next quarter. 

Conclusion

Speaking C-suite has become a core communications competency, and the CFO is one of those Cs. You don’t have to look forward to “whiteboard day” with your spouse for next year’s budget (my poor wife) or spend two hours poring over your mortgage signing documents (my poor wife Part II).

But if you want PR to go from being the "nice to have" in the budget to a "must have," you have to be able to talk to the CFO.

In other words: math. The bottom line. Gross revenue and net profit. All those scary things your colleagues are running away from while you — who read reports and ask finance what they mean — are making comms the company’s most important department.