Let’s be real. When you walk into a board meeting, no one’s waiting eagerly to see a variance vs. budget ADR table. Boards don’t care about the line-by-line ADR or which channel had the lowest CPA. What they care about is simple: profitability, risk, and where the business is heading.
NB: This is an article from Juyo Analytics, one of our Expert Partners
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter and stay up to date
So if you want to keep their attention (and the investment flowing), stop drowning them in numbers and start telling the story behind them.
The Secret Language of the Board
Here’s the thing: boards speak a totally different language. If you want them to listen, you have to translate.
- Talk risk, not room nights. Don’t say “occupancy dropped in March.” Say “seasonality hit harder than expected, here’s the impact on cash flow.”
- Talk opportunity, not segments. Not “corporate bookings grew 6%”, but “corporates are back faster than forecast; this is our chance to capture share and drive profitability.”
- Talk future, less history. Less “here’s what happened last quarter,” more “here’s what these numbers mean for the next one.”
If you show only the what, you risk losing your board. To win them over, you have to show the what this means and the now what.
Where It Goes Wrong
And yet… This is exactly where so many presentations fall apart. Too many board decks flop because they confuse data volume with insight.
The most common mistakes we see:
- Death by detail: drowning the board in 50 slides of KPIs.
- No narrative arc: jumping from ADR to RevPAR to GOPPAR with no storyline.
- Backward-looking only: 30 minutes narrating the past instead of shaping the future.
The outcome? Eyes glaze over, the energy in the room drops, and instead of driving the discussion, you’re on the defensive. Board members start drilling into details you never planned to debate. And worst of all, you walk out having missed the chance to shape strategy.
How to Present the Data
The alternative? Storytelling.
Storytelling is the map, visuals are the compass. Data on its own overwhelms: visuals turn complexity into clarity. The goal isn’t to show every metric available but to highlight the story you want to tell.
