How to Prep Financial Performance Data for Investors, Advisors, and Lenders

Every founder I work with knows their business inside out—but not all of them know how to show that on paper. Whether you're meeting with an investor, applying for a loan, or walking through the next steps with a strategic advisor, your finances aren’t just numbers. They’re evidence. They tell the other side how prepared you are to take the next step—and whether you understand how the business really works.

At BBG, I help founders translate daily decisions into performance data that makes sense outside the four walls of the business. That doesn’t mean dressing things up. It means organizing, simplifying, clarifying, and sharpening what you already know so that someone else can follow the logic, spot the opportunity, and trust your plan.

When we prep financial data for investors, lenders, or advisors, we’re building confidence and trust.

Know Your Audience: Investors, Advisors, and Lenders Want Different Things

The most common mistake I see is founders using one standard export for every type of conversation. It might be accurate, but it’s not strategic.

Investors

Investors want to understand growth drivers, capital efficiency, revenue durability, and how those translate into a scalable model. They need to see how fast you’re scaling, what’s fueling that growth, and how your margins will behave as volume increases. If you’re still early, they’ll focus on customer acquisition cost, sell-through velocity, retention, and repeat order rate. If you’re further along, they’ll ask about unit economics by channel.

Lenders

Lenders focus on reliability when making decisions about how much money to lend. They’ll want to know how stable your cash flow is, how you manage expenses during slower seasons, and whether you can service debt while maintaining operations and absorbing moderate variability. If you’re holding inventory, they’ll ask about aging and movement. If you extend credit to your customers, they’ll dig into AR exposure and collection patterns.

Advisors

Advisors are looking for operational gaps. They’ll study gross margin patterns, production costs, forecasting accuracy, and how consistent your assumptions are over time. If you’re too dependent on one customer or one SKU, they’ll call that out. If your COGS includes pass-through fees that could be renegotiated, they’ll flag that too.

For a winery client preparing a capital raise and a refinance at the same time, we might create two versions of their financials. The investor view would focus on DTC growth, club churn reduction, margin by product line, and forecast precision. Meanwhile, the lender view would center on cash reserves, distributor pay schedules, interest coverage, and net income stability. Each version would make the decision easier—because each one is built around what the audience actually needs to see.

Get the Essentials Right: Revenue, Margins, Cash Flow

Founders typically want to open with projections or KPIs. That’s useful, but only if the historicals are already solid. If your topline revenue includes prebooked sales you haven’t invoiced, or your margin includes outdated freight estimates and missing rebates, the rest of your story starts to wobble.

Before we go anywhere, I check three things:

• Revenue, by month, split by channel

• Gross margin, with a current COGS model and vendor inputs

• Cash flow activity, broken out by inflow and outflow categories—not just ending balance

Let's say you're a CPG founder who’s been using a top-line revenue graph pulled from Shopify. It might look strong—until we layer in returns, expired promotions, delayed wholesale payouts, and short-shipped units. Once we recalculate actual collected revenue, it'll be a totally different picture. Not worse, just real. And real is what gets deals done.

If your income statement is accurate but hard to follow, or your margin hasn’t been reviewed since your last pricing update, we start there. That’s the foundation that makes every other claim believable.

Highlight the Right KPIs for Your Stage and Model

One of the fastest ways to lose your audience is throwing out metrics that sound good but don’t reflect what’s actually happening in the business. You don’t need a long list of KPIs. You need the right ones, selected with intention.

For CPG brands, that means tracking reorder velocity, promotional ROI, AR recovery, inventory yield, or channel-specific margin drag. For wineries, I might suggest club member tenure, conversion rate per visitor, average order value by release, or average margin per varietal. These aren’t generic—they’re operational, and they reflect how you actually manage performance.

Take the example of a scaling snack brand. I'd spotlight four KPIs: inventory turns by product family, retailer reorder rate, gross margin by pack size, and average trade spend per unit. None of those would come from standard reporting. But they would be easy to follow and deeply tied to the pitch.

Your KPIs should reflect maturity and traction. If they don’t, they’re just decoration.

Present the Data So It Gets Read and Understood

The fastest way to slow down a meeting is to send raw spreadsheets with no formatting. Investors don’t want to scroll through seven tabs looking for what matters. Lenders don’t have time to guess what margin should be based on row labels. Advisors can’t help if they don’t know what’s forecast, what’s actual, what’s missing, and what’s irrelevant.

Every report I send on behalf of a client includes:

• A clean one-page summary that aligns with the meeting

• A short performance timeline using consistent intervals (monthly, trailing, quarterly)

• KPIs labeled with context, benchmarks, and explanations

• A clear separation between historical and projected data with assumptions listed

For an artisan snack company preparing to pitch a lead investor, we'd use a simple layout. One line chart for net sales by month, one column view of gross margin by SKU category, and a bulleted KPI panel with notes and footnotes. No noise. No guessing. 

You need to respect the reader’s time, make it easy to locate key figures, and reduce friction throughout the discussion. That’s the difference between data that gets reviewed and data that gets dismissed.

Double-Check That Your Data Matches the Story You’re Telling

If your slide says cash flow stabilized, but your report shows negative movement in 3 of the past 5 months, that’s a problem. You’re not being deceptive, but you’re now on defense.

At BBG, we always run a final alignment check before a big meeting:

• If you’re claiming growth, the revenue graph has to show it with actual lift

• If you’re pitching sustainability, the expense model has to be trending better with cost controls visible

• If you’re showing a forecast, the underlying assumptions must match what you’ve already proven with your historical baseline

You can’t anticipate every question, but you can reduce friction by making sure your numbers and story are a part of a cohesive pitch.

Good Reporting Does More Than Impress—It Builds Trust

When you prepare financial data with intention, you're not just checking a box. You’re showing your lender that you know how to manage cash and protect working capital. You’re proving to your investor that you understand scale, pressure points, and seasonality. 

I don’t build flashy dashboards. I build financial narratives that hold up to scrutiny because they reflect how the business is actually run.

If your reporting still feels scattered—or if you're second-guessing what to send—let’s fix it before the meeting. Contact BBG, and we’ll prep financial data that makes an impact on your investors, lenders, and advisors.