Ask a PE-backed CFO what their calendar looks like the week before a board meeting, and you’ll hear some version of the same story. Three systems that don’t talk to each other. A pipeline number nobody fully trusts. A deck that looked almost right last month and needs rebuilding anyway. The job title says finance leader. The actual job, that week, is report producer.
Two CFOs, posting anonymously on industry forums, put the same frustration into words. One called it “a second full-time job.” Another, running a lean team at a smaller portco, said so much time went to “chasing our reporting calendar” there was no time left to experiment with a fix. That’s the job every month, on a recurring deadline nobody gets to push, and it doesn’t ease up once the board gets comfortable with the numbers. It just becomes the baseline.
The Reporting Tax
Small, founder-led companies rarely get around to strategic thinking, and it’s not for lack of ambition. David Acharya, Managing Partner at Acharya Capital Partners, watches why up close, evaluating companies before anyone backs them: “A lot of small founders, they probably spend most of their Fridays working with the CEO to make sure all the revenue gets recognized.” (Investors & Operators podcast, 2025) That’s a full day every week, and spending it that way, by his account, “is a time suck.”
A full day a week, gone to manual reconciliation, is a bandwidth problem, and it lands on the growth plan first. The founder who supposedly doesn’t have time to think strategically usually has the time; it’s just spoken for every Friday by debits and credits that should reconcile themselves.
Acharya sees the earlier version of this when he’s deciding whether to back a company at all: ask a seller for a routine report, he says, and you learn everything. “You ask them for a pipeline report, they start sweating a little bit because it’s a manual process.” He’s describing diligence on a target, the moment before anyone has written a check.
The manual process he’s describing survives the closing. The new board inherits the same spreadsheet, the same four-week close, the same Friday ritual, now on a monthly deadline with a PE firm waiting on the other end.
That’s the part diligence rarely prices in. The operator inherits a business and its reporting debt, due immediately, for the life of the hold. Nobody negotiates that line item, because nobody wrote it down as one.
When Pressure Gets Mistaken for Help
A lot of what gets asked for doesn’t even help.
Keeping financials out of the room entirely is one way to break the habit. John Fruehwirth, Managing Partner at Rotunda Capital Partners, runs it that way: “I do not want to spend a board meeting talking about financials. That is a waste of time.” (Investors & Operators podcast, 2025) His firm runs weekly standups and monthly calls so the board meeting itself can stay focused on strategy.
Most operators don’t get that discipline from their board. They get a board meeting built around the deck, and a CFO who spent the preceding two weeks building it.
Part of this comes from habit. A board that doesn’t trust the numbers defaults to asking for more of them, on the theory that volume surfaces truth. It rarely does. It just moves the burden of proof from the business to the person building the deck, every single month.
A management system holds up only when the company actually runs it for itself, the one it would keep even without a board watching.
I’ve written about the other side of this exact breakdown: the PE firm getting inconsistent, unusable data because the infrastructure to produce anything better was never built. This is the portco’s side of that same gap: the firm wants visibility, and the only tool handed down to get it is the operator’s own calendar.
The Metric Proliferation Trap
Part of the tax is self-inflicted. Companies track hundreds of metrics because tracking feels like rigor, and a board that doesn’t know what to ask for asks for everything. Nobody decides, on day one, to build a two-hundred-metric dashboard. It accretes, one well-intentioned addition at a time, until the appendix is longer than the business plan.
The correction is blunt. Scott Phillips, then managing director of portfolio operations at ORIX Capital Partners (BluWave podcast, 2023): “No more than 20, period.” The rule forces a harder conversation than a longer dashboard ever would, because once you can’t track two hundred things, someone has to decide which twenty actually matter.
Phillips reports all twenty in an appendix with a simple red, yellow, or green flag next to each. Only a metric flagged yellow or red earns its own page in the board deck. Discipline is what makes a board package readable.
More pages rarely add up to more visibility. A twenty-page spreadsheet and a four-hundred-slide quarterly deck fail the same way: both prove the company can produce data. Whether anyone can use that data is a separate question, and most board packages never answer it.
What Good Reporting Actually Looks Like
What good reporting looks like comes down to three words, not forty slides. Jeanne Hecht, then CEO and executive chairwoman of Lexitas, who has sat on multiple PE- and VC-backed boards, put it plainly: “…what people should be taking to a board, it’s patterns, insights, and actions.” (Investors & Operators podcast, 2024) A read on what’s changing, what it means, and what happens next, decided before the meeting starts.
Her case starts with what a board can actually absorb. Board members spend maybe 30 to 40 hours a year on the business, she says, so a CEO who hands them the kind of operational detail you’d give a chief operating officer gets exactly that in response: “…they’re going to look at you and they’re going to probably recommend, make recommendations or send you down rabbit holes that are completely unnecessary.” The deeper the board digs into minutiae it isn’t equipped to triage, the less time the CEO has to actually run the business.
Patterns, insights, actions is a short list, and a rare one in most board packages. Producing it means someone already did the work of deciding what the numbers mean before the meeting started.
Take gross margin, illustratively. A twenty-slide package might show 41% for the quarter, down from 43%. A patterns-insights-actions package explains that margin slipped two points because the largest customer renewed at a volume discount the sales team approved without flagging it, that two other accounts have already asked for the same discount, and that the action on the table is a pricing floor set for the board’s decision this meeting.
The patterns-insights-actions version turns that same fact into something the board can act on immediately.
The Infrastructure Fix
None of this gets solved by asking harder or caring more. The operators drowning in reporting are doing their jobs well; they’re running a monthly, manual process that was never built to scale past the spreadsheet it started as.
Nobody signs a letter of intent that says “and also, you’ll rebuild this deck from scratch every month.” Do the arithmetic on a typical four-year hold and that’s something like forty-eight rebuilds nobody priced into the deal. This is the messy middle at its most literal: the business is bigger than the system built to describe it, and nobody has stopped long enough to rebuild the system.
The fix is infrastructure: a system that produces the report on its own, without depending on someone’s Friday. Three pieces, in the order they tend to get skipped:
A fixed metric set, decided once. Pick the twenty, or however many survive Phillips’s test, before the next board cycle starts. Write down what each one means, who owns it, and where it comes from. Revisit it twice a year, not every time someone on the board asks. That definition work is what makes a metric set cascade cleanly to the people producing the number. Without it, every department reports its own version of “revenue,” and nobody notices until the board does.
Automated data flows that replace the Friday ritual. The CFO reconciling revenue by hand every week is doing a job a connected system should do continuously. Every manual step in a monthly close breaks the same way next month, until someone builds a pipe that carries the data on its own. This is the unglamorous part of the fix, and the one that actually buys back hours: it eliminates the manual step for good.
A board package that assembles itself. Once the metric set is fixed and the data flows without a human in the loop, assembling the package becomes a five-minute review. What used to take two weeks of manual building now takes minutes. The patterns, insights, and actions Hecht describes become something a CFO has time to actually think about before the meeting. A person still reviews it before it goes out, but nobody builds it from scratch every month.
Built once, the infrastructure keeps producing. Skipped, the tax renews every month for the life of the hold.
The Cost of Not Fixing It
Every hour spent rebuilding a deck by hand is an hour the business doesn’t get back. The CFO who should be building a finance function is instead running a monthly fire drill. The CEO who should be chasing growth is managing the reporting calendar instead.
A CEO buried in reporting has no bandwidth left to evaluate the add-on sitting in the inbox, run the overdue pricing review, or call the customer who’s gone quiet. The add-on doesn’t wait for a better quarter. It goes to whichever buyer already had the time to look at it.
That’s the stakes most board decks never mention: the reporting built to create visibility is the same reporting consuming the time needed to act on what it shows. A company can hit every reporting deadline for two years straight and still lose ground on what it was supposed to protect.
If your reporting still runs on a Friday ritual and a rebuild-from-scratch every month, that’s the project worth starting before the next board cycle. Send me what your board package looks like today.
Alex Escoriaza helps PE-backed companies build the metric set, the data flows, and the board package that produce themselves, so operators spend their weeks running the business.
