Grace Figured It Out. So Can You.
Why the Heck Do We Have Financial Reports?
A Note Before We Begin
Numbers are the language of business and today we start cracking the code. But first: a warm welcome to everyone who found Be Business Savvy through last week’s posts on gender-scrubbing and the Glam Tax. I’m so glad you’re here, and I have follow-ups in the works I think you’ll find worthwhile.
Today’s article might feel like a sharp turn from last week’s topics, but it is a natural extension. One of the points I made last week was that the woman who stopped spending $2000 a year on manicures did two important things: she took a financial perspective on her situation and this allowed her to take control of her money. Today I’m inviting you to do the same thing at work - to take a deep financial dive into your business’ finances and take stronger control of your career.
Because no matter how beautifully put-together you are, no one will take you seriously if you don’t understand the business of the business.
A word about this week: I’m only here on Tuesday. Friday is a day of action, and I’ll be stepping back from all commercial activity — so I’ll see you next Tuesday.
I’ve been watching Project Hail Mary — yes, I know, I’m late to the party — and as Grace gets acquainted with Rocky, it’s Grace who figures out they can communicate through mathematics.
“…math is the universal language,” Grace says.
A sentiment echoed in a meme I had recently seen.
And that made me think about something I’ve been saying for years: women who get passed over for the biggest opportunities aren’t lacking in talent, ambition or even high performance. What they’re often missing is fluency in the language their executives are actually speaking. The language of Outcomes. In other words, the language of…
Numbers.
We’ve Been at This for 6,000 Years
Humans have been using symbols to answer “what’s happening here?” probably since cave paintings, but most certainly since 4000 BCE. The Mesopotamian accounting tokens pictured above1 are an example. That cone, those spheres, that flat disc? Measures of cereals — smallest, larger, largest. The tetrahedron designated a unit of work — perhaps one person-day.
Systems for tracking goods, services and performance evolved over millennia - from scribbles, to tokens, to incised clay tablets, to symbols on papyrus, to paper ledgers, to individualized accounting systems to standardized accounting systems and the financial reports used in businesses today.
And through every single iteration, what mattered was never the format.
It was what the format described.
Financial Reports Are Not the Point
That brings me to a reframing that changes everything:
Financial statements do not exist as an end in themselves. Their numbers are a means to an end.
They don’t exist because we need elegant numeric representations of activity. They exist because executives have to answer big questions — questions that position the organization for short and long-term success in its marketplace.
Numbers are the language of business. Everything that happens inside an organization — every meeting, every project, every decision — eventually gets summarized as a number. The CEO can’t report on millions of activities. Instead, those activities get translated into financial statements.
Not understanding the numbers makes it impossible to understand the story.
It’s like living in another country without learning the language. You can get by. You can even enjoy yourself. But you’re skimming the surface — and that’s fine for a vacation. It’s not fine for the length of a career.
Not understanding the numbers makes it impossible to understand the story. And skimming the surface is fine for a vacation — not for the length of a career."
One More Thing...
If numbers feel like a foreign language, I want you to know you’re in excellent company. Many of us feel that way. But take heart. Some of history’s greatest codebreakers have been women. Decoding complex, layered messages — including those from men? It’s practically in our DNA.
Financial statements are just another code to crack. And history's greatest codebreakers? Women.
So What IS Financial Acumen?
Succinctly:
Developing Financial Acumen means understanding the story of organizational performance as told by numbers. Demonstrating Financial Acumen means taking “right” action based on financial realities.
It’s not about becoming an accountant. It’s about thinking like an executive — understanding how the numbers explain what’s happening in your organization and speaking the language that drives decisions at the top.
And this matters because no matter how beautifully put together you are, no one will take you seriously if you don't understand the story of your business and that story is told in numbers.
Want to Go Deeper?
This post is a doorway and I invite you to walk through.
Inside the Be Business Savvy course — available to subscribers at the founding level — you’ll build Financial Acumen in five concrete ways: understanding the why behind financial statements, putting yourself in your executive team’s shoes, using financial statements to decode organizational performance, seeing how Financial Acumen shows up in the workplace, and planning exactly how you will show up differently.
This course was built for you if you’ve ever sat through a quarterly earnings call or an all-hands where financials were front and center — nodding along while privately wondering what it all means for your organization, your strategy, or your next move; or while thinking, “I’m a people person, this isn’t my concern” (as I did until I didn’t).
Become a Founding Level Subscriber
Founding level subscribers get full access to all of Be Business Savvy — including the full course — plus everything I publish going forward, at the best rate I’ll ever offer.
What’s a Woman to Do?
Rocky and Grace figured out inter-species communication through math.
You can absolutely understand business performance through financial reports.
Here are 5 concrete actions.
What’s a Woman to Do?
1. Audit your fluency — honestly. Think about the last time financial results were presented in a meeting you attended. Did you understand the story being told? Could you connect those numbers to decisions being made? Not knowing is not the problem — not knowing that you don’t know is. Spend 15 minutes with your organization’s most recent financial summary and note what you understand, what you can guess at, and what is genuinely opaque to you. That inventory is your starting point.
2. Reframe what financial reports actually are. They’re not accounting documents. They’re the answer to the questions your executives lie awake thinking about: Are we winning? Where are we losing ground? What do we do next? Every meeting you’ve attended, every project you’ve completed, every result you’ve delivered — it’s all in there, translated into numbers. Once you see financial statements as the organizational story rather than a finance department artifact, they stop being intimidating and start being useful.
3. Practice translating your work into the language. Pick one thing you accomplished in the last quarter and express it as a number — revenue protected, cost avoided, time saved, margin improved. Don’t worry about getting it perfect. The practice of translation is the point. This is what financial fluency looks like in daily life: not reading balance sheets for fun, but habitually connecting what you do to what the organization measures.
4. Upgrade the Be Business Savvy course level. The course takes you through financial acumen in five concrete lessons — from understanding why financial statements exist, to decoding organizational performance, to showing up differently in the rooms where financial decisions get made. It’s built for exactly the woman who has been nodding along at earnings calls while privately wondering what it all means.
5. Channel your inner codebreaker. Women have cracked some of history’s most complex codes. Financial statements are just another layered message waiting to be decoded — and you already have the pattern-recognition instincts for it. The next time you feel that familiar resistance (”I’m not a numbers person”), replace it with the codebreaker question: What is this trying to tell me? Curiosity is the entry point. Fluency follows.
If you’re looking for content that directly addresses the business, financial and strategic acumen you want more of — the kind of development that complements the presence and relational work you’re already doing — Be Business Savvy (specifically the Be Business Savvy course) is built for exactly this purpose. The content is designed to be accessible even if you didn’t come up through finance or strategy, and rigorous enough to make a real difference in how you show up as a viable candidate for opportunity.
I welcome your next step:
❤️ Like, share or restack this post — it’s the best way to help other women find it
📘 Go deeper:
No Ceiling, No Walls (ebook)
No Ceiling, No Walls (softcover)
Make the Most of Mentoring (softcover)
Make the Most of Mentoring (ebook)
Be Business Savvy Course — self-paced, with coaching support
Coaching Executive Women (occasional) (newsletter)
Susan
*A word about the image. They are by Denise Schmandt-Besserat and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. (GO Woman in Science!) I’ve reached out for permission to use it, but not received a reply.