Ever since I first encountered Stewart Marshall, the “financial storyteller,” I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the concept of financial storytelling. It has been difficult for me to grasp because I am not a quantitative thinker.
Now Stewart has developed a lively, attractive, nicely illustrated white paper, Financial Storytelling: Making the Most of the Numbers, which is available for free download.
First, Stewart defines financial storytelling:
Financial Storytelling strengthens the understanding, appeal and value to a business of established and evolving financial tools and methods. For example it takes numerically intensive approaches such as competitive analytics and business intelligence as well as techniques such as ratio analysis, discounted cash flow, pro-forma financial statements etc. and translates them into an easy to master and familiar language.
Financial Storytelling helps you to discover and communicate the underlying business narrative. It is a very human answer to the question: “What is going on?”
Then, he discusses several kinds of financial storytelling — entrepreneurial, the mid-sized company’s story, and the big-business story.
Stewart closes with a kind of FAQ on how financial storytelling is done.