Programs

Strategy · Self-serve

Board Ready

One board pack, four documents and a hostile rehearsal, over five weeks, measured over time.

A self-serve program for first-time board presenters, built on Renatus. Four document rooms and one simulation room · Five weeks, one room a week · Unlimited attempts · Ongoing thereafter.

5 weeks · 5 rooms · Total time 1 hour 55 min

Who it's for: Anyone presenting to a board, an executive committee or an investment committee for the first time: a function head presenting their area, a new CEO or founder facing a board they didn't choose, a divisional leader reporting up.
Cadence: 5 weeks
Format: Self-serve
Program sessions: 5

Who it's for

Anyone presenting to a board, an executive committee or an investment committee for the first time: a function head presenting their area, a new CEO or founder facing a board they didn't choose, a divisional leader reporting up.

Output

Four documents built section by section: your priorities, a KPI dashboard with thresholds and owners, an honest read of your metrics, and the board pack itself with a decision requested
A scored report on your presentation, with the moment that earned each score and one recommended focus
Unlimited attempts on the presentation room, each a new scene calibrated to your audience, charted against every attempt before it
Scored against published frameworks: the Minto Pyramid Principle and Aristotelian rhetoric; the documents rest on SWOT Analysis, the TOWS Matrix and RICE Scoring, the Balanced Scorecard, Vanity vs Actionable Metrics and Goodhart's Law, and Plan vs Actual Discipline, Exception-Based Reporting and Decision-Driven Boards

Program contents

Setting the priorities — Strategic Priorities
Building the dashboard — Company KPIs
Testing the numbers — Metrics audit
Building the pack — Board Report
Taking the questions — Presentation Under Pressure

How the program works

A self-serve program for first-time board presenters, built on Renatus. Four document rooms and one simulation room · Five weeks, one room a week · Unlimited attempts · Ongoing thereafter.

The rooms

Strategic Priorities

Framework

Setup: your situation and context, what's generating the most value right now, what's consuming energy without proportional return, the three things you'd focus on in the next ninety days, and what would get in the way of them.

Company KPIs

Framework

Setup: what your company does and what healthy looks like, which perspectives leadership monitors (Financial, Customer, Operations and People by default), the six to twelve metrics that make up the dashboard grouped by perspective, a threshold for each, and who owns each one, how often it's reviewed and where the data comes from.

Metrics audit

Framework

Setup: what you currently track, the headline metric, whose metrics these are, what behaviour they're driving, what's prompting the audit, and who it's for.

Board Report

Framework

Setup: the period being reported, your company's stage and context, your board's composition (who's on it and their relevant networks or sectors), the headline KPIs, where things are off-plan, the decisions you're requesting from the board, and the material risks the board should know.

Presentation Under Pressure

Simulation

Calibration: role title, the audience (a single senior stakeholder, the board, the executive committee or a hostile external audience), industry or sector, a line of working context, and your organisation's website if you give it.

Why this program exists

Someone has told you to present to the board, and you have the numbers, or most of them, but no idea what happens when a director interrupts on your third slide with a question you weren't expecting, or how it feels to be told, politely, that your headline metric doesn't mean what you think it does. This program prepares you for that through a board pack built section by section and a rehearsal under hard questions. Ren takes the audience you name and builds the room around it, and plays every person in it, so no run is the same as the last.

What you'll achieve

A first board pack built section by section: your priorities, a KPI dashboard with thresholds and owners, an honest read of your metrics, and the pack itself with a decision requested
A scored report on your presentation, with the moment that earned each score, one recommended focus, and unlimited attempts, each a new scene, charted against every attempt before it
A pack you can defend under a hostile question, because you've already answered the worst one Ren could find

At a glance

Who it's for: Anyone presenting to a board, an executive committee or an investment committee for the first time: a function head asked to present their area, a new CEO or founder facing a board they didn't choose, a divisional leader reporting up. Every room calibrates to your role and the audience you name, so it serves a function head presenting one area and a founder presenting the whole company. It assumes you own the numbers and the plan for what you're presenting, and that the meeting is at least five weeks away.
Cadence: 5 weeks
1: Setting the priorities · Strategic Priorities · Read Your Priorities and What Gets in the Way; send the priorities on
2: Building the dashboard · Company KPIs · Read the thresholds; agree the dashboard's owners
3: Testing the numbers · Metrics audit · Read Behaviour Rewarded and Counter-Metric; change the metric it names before the pack
4: Building the pack · Board Report · Read Decisions Requested and Exceptions; send the pack to your sponsor
5: Taking the questions · Presentation Under Pressure · Read Lead Argument and Question Response; rehearse the two hardest questions before the real meeting

Session by session

Week 1: Setting the priorities

Decide the three things you'll say to the board and what you've stopped doing to make room for them.

Strategic Priorities

Week 2: Building the dashboard

Build a dashboard of the numbers you'll show, each with a threshold and a named owner.

Company KPIs

Week 3: Testing the numbers

Know which of your metrics flatters you and what the headline needs paired with it, before the board finds it first.

Metrics audit

Week 4: Building the pack

Put a pack in front of the board with one headline, the exceptions named, and a decision requested.

Board Report

Week 5: Taking the questions

Take a hostile question on your own pack, answer it first and the reasoning after, and hold your ground without getting defensive.

Presentation Under Pressure

Whether a market is real, where it is growing, and where the opportunity sits

How an entire industry is structured, who controls it, and where it is heading

Who controls a market, how they compete, and where the real gaps are

Who buys in a market, what drives their decisions, and where the unmet needs are

What competitors charge in a market, how pricing is structured, and what customers will pay

Who supplies the critical inputs to a market, how concentrated it is, and what switching costs

The technology deployed in a sector, and where competitive advantage moves next

How product reaches the buyer in a market, and where channel power is shifting

Financials, leadership, strategy, and reputation on a company

Deep dive into how a company operates strategically, and where it is most exposed

Revenue, margins, cash, debt, and auditor signals on a company

How a company is perceived across customers, employees, media, and ESG

Discover a country's GDP, political environment, infrastructure, and outlook

Discover a city's GDP, economic drivers, workforce, and trajectory

Trade flows, tariffs, agreements, and friction points between two countries

Background, current state, key actors, evidence, and where an issue is heading

What a policy does, who wins and loses, and how it lands in practice

The specific risks facing a market — ranked, evidenced, and with the signals to watch

Single-source exposures, concentration, and trade-route risk for a market

Climate, governance, social, and controversy risk in a sector

Pending legislation, enforcement shifts, and where the rules are likely to change

Licensing, compliance, recent changes, and pending legislation in a jurisdiction

Government stability, policy direction, and the political risks facing a market

What a role pays — verified across named salary databases and job posting data

Whether to take a job at a company, with the evidence behind the answer

Who the credible candidates are, what they earn, and how the search will unfold

How a career in an industry works — entry, paths, pay, and prospects

The three things that will move a business forward this quarter

A 90-day plan that turns a strategy into something a team can act on Monday

Segment, positioning, channels, and pricing — tested against each other so the four hold together

A positioning the market can place — and a category claim worth defending

A pricing strategy that the market accepts and the business can defend in negotiation

Dashboard, thresholds and owners

Dashboard, thresholds and owners

Targets, thresholds and cadence

Whether an opportunity is worth pursuing — with conditions or risks named

The real problem behind the surface one, with options and a recommended next step

How a business creates, delivers, and captures value — and where it is exposed

Where work is breaking, where capability is missing, and the one structural change worth making

Build, buy, partner, or wait — with the killer assumption named

Whether a specific partnership is worth pursuing — with the asymmetries named

The right financing structure for the opportunity — tested against fit, cost, and flexibility

A fundraise structured to close on terms worth living with

Every variance classified — structural, timing, one-off or noise — with the call the pattern demands

How long the cash lasts across three scenarios, with the killer assumption named

Whether the per-unit economics hold up — with the killer assumption named

Whether the pay set serves the talent strategy, with the cost of fixing it

A board report that lands the narrative, the KPIs, the exceptions, and the decisions requested

What metrics are missing, misleading, or quietly rewarding the wrong thing

A complete business plan ready to put in front of investors, partners, or a board

A career decision weighed against criteria that matter, with a pre-mortem and a verdict

What matters most, what you would give up, and what stays true under pressure

Which option holds up under income loss, rate moves, or a downturn

A relocation decision and plan, with the trade-offs each destination forces

What the culture is like — values in practice, leadership behaviour, and where the gap sits

Strategy clarity, alignment, talent density, ways of working, and trust in leadership

What's energising people, what's draining them, and the levers that would move engagement

The patterns in how a person handles pressure, conflict, collaboration, and decisions

PENDING — product being redesigned. See Replit brief.

How a person leads — defaults, strengths, blind spots, and development areas

Real strengths backed by evidence — and the cost each one carries when overplayed

The values revealed by what a person has held the line on, refused, or regretted

What every role owns, what's silently dropped, and which handoffs are breaking

Where the team is aligned on priorities and goals, and where dangerous gaps sit

Where trust, conflict handling, and accountability are strong — and where they break

Any subject explained to a real listener, scored on accuracy, depth, audience adaptation, and handling the unknown

A presentation rehearsal scored on lead argument, evidence, question response, and poise

A stakeholder-influence rehearsal scored on reading the room, framing, negotiation, and durability

A managing-up rehearsal scored on positioning, evidence, flexibility, and outcome

A meeting rehearsal scored on structure, air-time management, progress, and closure

The conversation that's been avoided, with an assessment of how the conversation went

A saying-no rehearsal scored on clarity, rationale, alternative, and relationship

A performance-conversation rehearsal scored on clarity, ownership, empathy, and path forward

A team-conflict rehearsal scored on directness, fairness, action, and aftercare

A hiring interview rehearsal scored on question design, follow-up, bias, and assessment integrity

A leadership crisis scored on decision quality, communication, strategy, and pressure response

A negotiation rehearsal scored on preparation, anchoring, concession pattern, and pressure response

A strategic-decision rehearsal scored on framing, information use, trade-off recognition, and time horizon

An ethics rehearsal where the right path is costly, scored on recognition and response

A prioritisation rehearsal scored on triage, trade-off recognition, communication, and revisability