Commercial Conversations Workshop
Four hours that will change how your leaders engage with financial performance
Leaders need better financial conversations, not more financial training.
Your leaders aren’t avoiding financial conversations because they’re not smart enough. They’re avoiding them because nobody gave them a framework for having them.
One four-hour Commercial Conversations workshop fixes that.
Most organisations respond to this with financial awareness training. It doesn’t work – not because the content is wrong, but because it answers the wrong problem.
Leaders don’t want to become accountants. Finance is abstract – it’s a synthesis of everything the organisation does. Leaders deal in specifics: their team, their customers, their decisions.
The real reasons leaders avoid financial conversations come down to three things:
- Fear: They disengaged from numbers at school and have been avoiding financial conversations ever since. It’s not stupidity. It’s history.
- Focus: They don’t know what to focus on, so they focus on the wrong things – or nothing at all.
- Friction: They’re worried about asking the wrong question in front of colleagues. So they stay silent.
None of these are an intelligence problem. They’re framework problems.
Why This Works When Training Doesn't
The Commercial Conversations Workshop gives leaders the framework they were never taught.
Built around the Frame, Focus and Flow model from Money Talks – Matthew Needham’s book on financial conversations – the workshop moves leaders from avoidance to confidence in a single session.
The workshop establishes why this matters for your organisation right now: the economic pressures, the performance gap, and why the conversation problem is costing you more than you realise.
But most of the time is spent in the solution, giving leaders a repeatable framework to understand what drives performance in their part of the business, identify the levers they can pull, and engage confidently in conversations that shape decisions.
They don’t leave knowing more about accounting.
They’ll leave knowing exactly how to use the numbers to make better financial and commercial decisions.
In four hours, your leaders will walk away with:
- A simple way to see what’s really driving performance in their area – and what isn’t.
- Clear focus on the handful of numbers and levers that move results so they stop getting lost in reports
- A repeatable way to turn financial data into practical conversations about decisions, trade-offs, and priorities
- The confidence to ask better questions and challenge assumptions in meetings, without feeling exposed
- A shared language for financial performance that improves the quality of conversations across your leadership team
- By the next leadership meeting, you’ll see more leaders speaking up, asking better questions, and engaging directly with the numbers and levers driving performance.
What others say
“The team and I loved the session, and I’ve already applied the learnings in my work. I’ve also seen the team engage even more with our people metrics and with our company half year results, so it was time well spent from my perspective.”
Nicole Paterson
GM – Organisation Capability, Genesis Energy, New Zealand
The Details
Four hours. Online or in-person. Up to 25 participants. Limited availability.
The workshop is tailored to your leadership group/organisation – the examples, context and conversation reflect your industry and your people.
The same workshop has been run for HR leaders, operations leaders and senior executive teams.
Online via Zoom or Teams.
In-person at your premises or a venue of your choice.
One poor financial decision by a senior leader can cost your organisation many multiples of this. The Commercial Conversations Workshop changes how every leader in the room makes decisions for the rest of their career.
$9,250 inc GST
Available across Australia and New Zealand.
I run a limited number of workshops each quarter – if you’re considering this for your team, the conversation starts here.