A few years back, I was working on a massive, multi-year project for our agency’s most important clients. We had just finished the planning phase and received verbal agreement to move forward with the build. We were high fiving each other in the hallways.

Then, the week before Christmas, a massive snowstorm hit the eastern half of the United States. It snowed, and snowed, and then it snowed some more. Logistics networks collapsed. Deliveries failed. Thousands of children didn’t get their Christmas presents on time. For the next week, the nightly news was filled with angry parents calling our client the devil.

Their board of directors immediately convened and decided that this was an existential threat. They issued a new directive: Any project that did not ensure this specific disaster never happened again was on hold. Overnight, we went from "best contract ever" to "OMG, we just staffed up for this." Our funding vanished, not because our ROI was bad, but because another priority became more urgent.

I learned a hard lesson that day: You can have your numbers buttoned up and still lose. A winning business case isn't just a spreadsheet; it is an emotionally resonant story built on a foundation of financial facts.

Learning to Speak Executive

In 2025, interest rates were higher than they had been in 15 years, and executive confidence was shaky. Uncertainty about global trade policies, global conflict, and the disruptive potential of AI made the future seem even less predictable than usual^[i].

In that kind of environment, executives practice extreme capital discipline. If you want funds for your project, you cannot just show up with a slide deck about "customer journeys" or "composable architecture". You must present an airtight case that your project is the most responsible use of the company’s funds. And you have to do that in the language of the person holding the checkbook.

Different levels of leadership (direct leadership, senior leadership, and strategic leadership) speak different languages. We aren’t talking about the difference between Turkish and Greek, but it is at least the difference between American, British, and Australian English. If you say "headless CMS" or "content factory"  to a CFO, all he hears is gibberish. You need to translate your message as you move up the hierarchy.

Your goal is to translate the first row into the third row. You might ultimately end up with a statement like this:

"If marketing can launch campaigns in two weeks or less without IT involvement, we will be able to reduce our customer acquisition costs by 20% and drive faster revenue growth from new segments without growing IT headcount."

That’s the kind of sentence that gets a CFO out of bed in the morning.

The Physics of Business

To communicate effectively, you must understand the fundamental mechanism of a corporation. Companies spend money for one reason: Companies buy assets that drive business processes that create cash flows.

If you work in marketing or IT, you have likely sat in a meeting and thought, "The CFO just says no to everything". That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what is going on. Your CFO wants to spend money. If money piles up in the treasury, it sits in short-term cash substitutes earning low interest rates. That invites angry calls from investors or even hostile takeovers. When you show your CFO how to invest money that will return more than your cost of capital, you’re solving a problem.

There are two traps you must avoid here:

1. Don't just say it "helps" a business process. If you say it "helps," the funding committee hears, "We can do this process without spending money. This is an annoyance, not a real problem."

2. Improving efficiency when you could eliminate. If a process doesn't drive cash flow (revenue or savings), you shouldn't invest in making it easier. You should eliminate it.

The Four Metrics of Funding

You do not need to be a finance wizard to build a business case, but you do need to understand the four metrics that finance uses to grade your homework:

1. ‍Return on Investment (ROI)
   This is the total financial benefit. You add up all the increased revenue and decreased costs, subtract the cost of the project, and express it as a percentage. It is easy to calculate, but it has a fatal flaw: it is blind to time. It doesn’t tell you when the value arrives‍
2. Payback Period
   This answers the question: "When do I get my money back?" In the current economic climate, if your payback period is over two years, you are likely dead in the water. Preferably, it should be a year or less‍
3. Net Present Value (NPV) This is where the "investor" mindset is critical. NPV accounts for the time value of money. A dollar today is worth more than a dollar five years from now because of inflation and opportunity cost. Think of it as the "bird in the hand" principle. If I give you money for five years, I am losing the ability to invest that money elsewhere. NPV calculates exactly what your future cash flows are worth in today’s dollars. If your project represents a bird in the bush, the CFO needs to know exactly how big that bird is before they let go of the one in their hand‍
4. Internal Rate of Return (IRR) This tells us how fast we are creating value. It allows the CFO to compare your project against putting that money into a bond, a different project, or paying down debt. It is usually measured against a hurdle rate—the company's cost of capital plus a risk adjustment

Practical Tip: You do not need to do this math yourself. In fact, you shouldn't. Find the Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) person assigned to your department. Buy them a coffee. Ask them for the hurdle rate. If you involve finance early, they become a partner in the model, and your numbers gain instant credibility

Stop Complaining, Start Translating

We need to stop the "nobody gets marketing" rant. It is your job to persuade the business of the value of your work. If you cannot explain the value you bring in terms of cash flow and risk, that is not their failure—it’s yours. Here's your path forward if all of this feels new to you:

1. Read Financial Intelligence by Karen Berman and Joe Knight. It will give you the essential finance knowledge that you get in most MBA programs for a tiny fraction of the time and money.‍
2. Meet your finance business partner. Introduce yourself. Tell them you want to understand how your team impacts the P&L. If you are in a smaller company, you may not have dedicated FP&A people or dedicated finance business partners. If that's the case, finance is probably such a small team that you can reach out to the head of finance and ask them who you should work with.‍
3. Read your company’s last annual report. Also, listen to the most recent earnings call. You’ll learn how your CEO and CFO talk about the business to the investors who hold them accountable. When you can explain how solving your problem solves the C-suite’s problem, you aren’t asking for charity. You’re offering an investment.

^[i] I would argue that the future is never more or less predictable. It’s a foolish conceit to believe that it is. Ironically, the environment is probably less dangerous when the masses are scared than when the masses are complacent.

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