Last week I borrowed Paul Harvey’s tagline and walked through the first two moves for telling a facilities story that lands in a boardroom: know what your audience wants before you walk in, and then make your portfolio the means to getting them there. 

Today, the back half. The first two moves get a board interested. The next two get a board to vote. 

3. Weaving in Your Data

Two posts on storytelling, and I have barely talked about data — the thing that most of us love and are drawn to. That is on purpose. But I do not want to leave anyone with the wrong impression. 

The data matters enormously. It is the foundation under every one of the four moves. You cannot paint a desired future you can actually deliver unless your portfolio data tells you what it can deliver. The idea is that once you have engaged the emotional heart, you use your data — sparingly — to engage the logical brain in support of the decision. 

Here is the technique that took me embarrassingly long to figure out: pictures, not spreadsheets. A photograph of a leaking roof. A thermal image of an envelope failure. A simple chart that shows backlog growing year over year. These get into a board’s head in a way that a table of FCI numbers never will. The data is the same. The delivery is the difference. If you can replace a slide of numbers with a single image that tells the same story, do it every time. 

You have probably heard me say that “They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but in asset management a picture can be worth a million dollars!” 

As I said last time, people make decisions emotionally and then use logic to justify them. Once your audience has felt the future you painted in Move 2, bringing data into the conversation — visually, sparingly, in support of the story — helps them justify what they already feel. 

The data is not the story. But the story does not stand without the data. Consistent and defensible information is what makes the story you are telling true. By the time you are in the boardroom, the data has already done its job — quietly, in the background, where it belongs. 

4. Hand Them the Moral

Aesop did not end his fables with “make of this what you will.” He ended them with the moral, plainly stated, because the whole point of a fable is the moral. 

Facilities presentations are fables. They are stories about decisions and consequences. Do not make a board reverse-engineer your moral from a slide deck. State it. “Here is what I am asking you to take away from this. Here is the decision in front of you. Here is what we recommend, and here is why.” 

I have watched too many facilities directors pour forty minutes of beautiful work into a presentation and then end with “any questions?” — leaving the moral entirely up to the room. The room, every time, will fill in a smaller moral than the one you intended. 

Paul Harvey never ended a broadcast with “any questions?” He ended with the line everyone was waiting for. So should you. 
 

Until then: pull up that same board presentation one more time. Find me where the data quietly supports the story. Find me the moral. 

If they are not there, you already know the homework.