Client notesWhat people said after the sitting
These notes name a briefing and a constraint. They are not scores, and they are not all glowing. If you want to commission work, the sitting still starts with your files, not with these paragraphs.
We used to arrive at the sitting with a forty-slide file and a finance manager who had been up until two. The new pack is eight pages. The chair still asks hard questions; she just no longer spends the first twenty minutes hunting for the margin line.
Irakli Tsiklauri · Finance director, logistics group, Tbilisi
The bilingual legends were the part I cared about. Our shareholders in London used to get a separate English file that was always a version behind. Seeing GEL and the sterling column on the same waterfall, with a source line that named the NBG rate date, stopped that argument.
Mariam Dvali · Chair, family holding
I asked for traffic-light dots on every row. They refused until we wrote the thresholds into a minute. Annoying at the time. Correct. The dots we have now actually mean something in the room.
Zurab Lortkipanidze · General manager, hospitality group
Board-morning support sounded ceremonial. It was not. Giorgi sat to the side with the proof. When a new director pointed at the headcount bar and asked whether contractors were in, Tamar’s source map had the answer without a scramble.
Ana Chkheidze · Company secretary
The workshop was useful and also slightly humiliating. We had been proud of a twelve-chart page. Nino made us cut it to three in front of our own director. We still draw our own pack. We just no longer decorate the appendix.
Levan Maisuradze · Head of management reporting
Turnaround on the monthly refresh is as promised when we send the files on time. When we were late in March, they did not pretend the Thursday sitting could still have a full revision. They said which pages would stay as last month. I would have preferred more flexibility that week, but at least nobody walked in with half-drawn bars.
Ketevan Gigauri · Finance lead, wholesale company
Eight pages for a Thursday sitting in Saburtalo
A logistics group came with a pack that mixed last year’s budget, this year’s forecast, and a set of maps that showed routes nobody was asking about. The constraint was time: the new chair wanted a readable pack for the sitting in three weeks, and the close was already slipping. We sat with the finance director on a Tuesday evening, struck the maps, kept volume, margin, cash, and overdue receivables on pages one to four, and moved the rest to an appendix the chair could ignore. The mild complaint afterwards was that page two still felt busy. We cut two sparklines before the next month. The maps did not return.
A first pack for shareholders who do not live in Tbilisi
A family holding needed English on the same page as Georgian, and a sterling column beside GEL, without producing two documents. Discovery took longer than the drawing. We spent the extra hours on the source map: which entity, which rate, which date. The draft that came back from the chair still asked for a decorative cover. We printed a plain cover with the sitting date and the word ‘confidential’ in both languages. That was the only cover they used after that.
