Whether you’re pitching for investment or running a (division/department) of a business, you need to know your numbers.
The health and viability of every business can be broken down into and brought back to the numbers. This is not something you outsource to your accountant and if you're a smaller business, and the company is big enough to have a CFO, you still need to know and be able to deliver the numbers as required for your area of the business, whether that is just one part of the business or the whole company.
This is not just about the P&L or balance sheet. They are latent metrics. This is also about both live, real time data and trend and demographic data. The number of people I’ve met who don’t know their costs, don’t know their profit margins, don’t know the lifetime value of their clients or the acquisition cost of a client…. it ‘s staggering.
You cannot take educated and informed decisions in business without knowing your numbers. Any decision you make without that knowledge is simply a gamble. You can just as well rock on down to the local casino and roll the dice.
