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At a glance
- The Decision Slide is a single one-page artifact: one material decision rendered as Keep, Kill, Restructure with dollars under each path and a named recommendation.
- It runs at the top of the board deck. Every material decision the company has to make this quarter gets one.
- Adoption is resisted inside the finance function and loved by the board the moment it shows up. Most CFOs relax after the second meeting.
What goes on the Decision Slide?
Exactly five lines. Any more and it has softened into narrative.
- The decision, in one sentence. Do we keep, kill, or restructure the mid-market GTM motion by end of Q3? Specific. Time-bound. A single subject.
- The three paths, each in one phrase. Keep: run the current motion through Q4. Kill: wind down by September 1, redeploy to enterprise. Restructure: consolidate to an inside-sales-only motion by August 15. No explanations in this line. Just the paths.
- The numbers under each path, in the same units. Incremental ARR, incremental burn, 12-month net cash impact. Three numbers, three paths, nine cells. That is the whole economic picture the board needs to weigh the decision.
- The recommendation, in one sentence, with the finance function’s stance. We recommend Restructure. It is the lowest-burn path with any probability of hitting the FY exit target. This is where most finance teams lock up. They are not used to recommending. They are used to reporting.
- Decision date and owner. Decision due: July 31. Owner: CEO with board ratification.
Why five lines and not fifteen?
Because the board already has fifteen-line documents. They have the monthly report, the close deck, the KPI dashboard. What they do not have, and what every walking dead portco lacks, is an artifact that forces the company to state the decision it has been avoiding and take a stance on the paths out.
Five lines is exactly enough to carry the decision. Every additional line softens the stance. If the recommendation is legitimately conditional on information that does not exist, the slide says so in the fourth line: We recommend Restructure, conditional on the enterprise pipeline clearing $4M by July 15. That is still one sentence and still a stance.
Why does finance resist writing this?
Three reasons, always some combination.
- Career risk. Recommending is a public act. If the board votes against the recommendation, the CFO is on the record. Most CFOs have built a career avoiding exactly this kind of exposure.
- Information ambiguity. Recommending on a decision where the numbers are uncertain feels dishonest. It is not. The Decision Slide is not a prediction; it is a stance. The stance includes the uncertainty.
- Habituation to retrospective finance. The finance function has been rewarded for a decade for explaining what happened. Writing a Decision Slide asks it to recommend what should happen next. The muscle is not trained.
All three reasons are legitimate. None of them is a reason not to ship the slide. The CFO’s job in a growth-stage company is precisely to take a stance on the next material decision with dollars under it.
How does the board actually receive it?
The first time a Decision Slide shows up at a board meeting, the room quiets. Most boards have not seen a specific Keep/Kill/Restructure rendered in cells before. The meeting gets sharper immediately. Operating questions return. The softer orientation questions stop.
After the first meeting, the CFO who was nervous about shipping the slide usually reports back that the board was more supportive, not less. The lead investor in particular tends to warmly receive the stance, because the slide gives them something to vote on rather than something to react to.
By the second meeting the Decision Slide is expected. By the fourth it is the anchor of the deck.
What about decisions that are not binary?
Keep, Kill, Restructure is not a taxonomy. It is a discipline. Kill can mean wind down; Kill can also mean divest. Restructure can mean a dozen different reshapes. The point is that three paths are articulated, even if the real universe of options is larger. Three makes the numbers comparable. Three makes the board decision clean.
A Decision Slide with four paths is not more honest. It is less decisive. The additional path is usually a hybrid of the other three that protects the finance team from having to recommend one. Resist.
How many Decision Slides should a board see?
One to three per quarter. A growth-stage company has one or two material decisions alive at any given moment. Three is the upper bound before the board starts skimming.
Where to go from here
The Decision Slide is a deliverable of every Diagnostic and is the central artifact of the Financial Rhythm System thereafter.
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