About this video
Bottom line up front: revenue, gross profit, net profit and cash against target, with a why for each. Jay on how to open every finance meeting.
Transcript
Jay Dotson: And then we go through what we call a BLUF review. Is anybody familiar with the term BLUF? Anybody heard of this? What does it mean if you've heard it? Bottom line up front. Come on, I love it. Bottom line up front. It's a military communication framework.
Jay Dotson: In the world of finance, there are endless metrics that you could learn and know. But what is most important to your business? I want to know the bottom line, and I want to know it up front. We'll allow that to contextualize everything else.
Jay Dotson: I don't want to spend all my time going down bookkeeping rabbit trails. I want to know: what is the greatest impact, why did it happen, and what do we need to do about it?
Jay Dotson: This is what a BLUF review looks like. I'm looking at the top four metrics across every organization: revenue, gross profit, net profit and cash. Simply looking at actual versus your target. Did you hit it? Did you not hit it?
Jay Dotson: And bigger than that is why. Why did each of these hit it or not hit it? Give me one to two answers for each, so that when I look at the P&L and the balance sheet, I know where to look.
Jay Dotson: I don't care that office expenses increased by 1%. Do you? That's not why we ran out of money. We ran out of money because of plenty of other reasons that are way more material and matter way more to the business.
