This week, I spoke on stage for a breakout session at the 2024 Dirt World Conference. 

This was a great opportunity because the room would consist almost exclusively of my firm's niche: construction companies.

But this chance of the year was far from a guaranteed success. I was a backup choice to speak.

(Yeah, I was the benchwarmer who got called up at the last minute. But I still got called up!)

I reached out to the conference organizers to ask them two critical questions:

1. How many people will be in attendance?
2. What size firms are the attendees running?

The answers weren't comforting:

1. Somewhere between 5 and 100
2. Anywhere between 6-figures and 9-figures

That makes preparing a highly engaging, relevant, last-minute talk a little more challenging!

I approached the keynote like I normally do - find topics that all businesses care about (profit and cash), add stories, and keep the material simple.

The result?

~70 attendees
Several 6-figure firms
Plenty of 7-figure firms
Many more 8-figure firms
3 firms over $100,000,000
11 brand new ideal leads
3 discovery meetings
1 sales call booked
This was a win!

Shortly after the keynote, I was chatting with someone who asked, "Don't you worry that keeping things super simple will mean that most of the audience thinks you're too basic for their needs?"

My answer to that is always, "Absolutely not".

The key is to simplify - not dumb down.

Today, I'm going to explain my approach to presenting financial material to audiences of any size and any composition that leaves everyone feeling like they learned something useful.

Let's dive in. 

The Curse of Wisdom

At the core of this conversation is a realization that you and I probably suffer from The Curse of Wisdom.

The Curse of Wisdom states that highly competent professionals in a given area of expertise tend to forget just how much others know about the topic.

In other words, because we live in our little CFO world every day, we're constantly exposed to things like financial strategies, projections, cash flow forecasting, and financial models.

It's that constant exposure that makes us so competent at what we do.

But we forget that other people aren't exposed to those topics all the time, and thus, they simply don't know the things we know. 

We take our knowledge for granted.

So we can easily end up creating keynotes that are overcomplicated, forgetting our audience doesn't have a clue what liquidity ratios are all about. The talk ends up unrelatable, and no one finds value.

On the other end of the spectrum, we can over-simplify our talks to the point that they're dumbed down. The material loses its substance, and the audience leaves with generic material that is more or less useless. Even worse, most audiences will sniff this out and may leave feeling insulted.

This is where the balance between simplified and dumbed-down comes into play.

Here's how I think about each...

Simplified

I ask myself one question: How can I make the material clearer without losing the essentials and the essence of the message? 

I focus on making the material more relatable while keeping in all of the necessary details. This comes with an underlying assumption that the audience is capable - they just need a clearer explanation. 

Here's an example of over-complicated vs. simplified:

Over-complicated - The company's liquidity ratio is suboptimal due to high asset turnover!

Simplified - We're selling products quickly, but we need to manage cash flow a bit more carefully to keep things balanced.

Dumbed Down

Sometimes, we don't intend to necessarily dumb things down, but it's easy to go too far with simplification.

We ignore the important details of our material, assuming that the audience can't comprehend it or maybe even that they just don't care about the necessary depth of the topic.

In the end, the audience may understand the basic premise of what we're saying, but it may be at the cost of giving them incomplete or misleading takeaways.

Here's an example of a dumbed-down version of our earlier liquidity ratio example:
We're doing fine. We just need to be careful with money. 

In this example, we've gone too far. Too much has been removed from the message, and it's now lost.

To sum it up, think about it like this...

✅ Simplifying is about making complex ideas clearer without losing accuracy or respect for the audience's intelligence.
✅ Dumbing down limits their understanding by removing important information.

Takeaway:

The application of this concept isn't just limited to keynotes. You can (and should!) apply it to monthly CFO calls and even sales or marketing conversations.

Take a look at how you're communicating with your audience.

Are you landing on overcomplicated, simplified, or dumbed down?

Adjust accordingly.