Exhibits

Getting an exhibit is thrilling: it’s an undeniable rush of momentum - now we’re getting somewhere!

The first thing you should do is describe what you see. But remember: you always get brownie points for keeping in mind what’s truly important, sounding organized, and summarizing as you go along. So, a plain description of a chart could sound like:

Okay, I see this chart is titled “Company Profits.” On the x-axis I see this gives us the total revenue earned and total costs of operation starting in 2005…and on the y-axis are dollars. There’s bars representing revenue and bars representing costs, and I guess the little dot is the actual profit, which has been rising from 2005 to 2008, but suddenly dips in 2009…

Or, a more composed and polished version could sound like this:

I see I’m looking at the company’s profits from 2005 to 2012. We also have here the breakdown of revenue and costs for each year. What jumps out to me immediately is that profit was on the rise until 2009, where it takes a big dip. I wonder what happened in 2009, or 2008 for that matter. This is where I’d like to dig deeper.

In another example, the exhibit you get given could be a table of information. Here’s a plain description:

Here we have a table with four columns and five rows. The rows contain different product types. This column tells me the price our client charges for each product type, this one how much their main competitor changes, this one how much volume our client sells per unit, and this one for how much volume the competitor sells per unit. Our clients prices are higher than their competitors’, and the units are generally smaller as well.

While this paints a pretty good picture of what the table in the exhibit looks like, it’s not very informative - as in, do you feel bored listening? Do you know where this is going? What is the point?!

Contrast this to a more summarized approach:

Ah, this table shows us how our client’s prices and packaging sizes for each of these products stack up to their main competitor’s. At a glance I can see our clients prices are all higher - no surprise there - but I think it’d be interesting to figure out the price per unit for the consumer so we can compare apples to apples, since there doesn’t seem to be a standard packaging size for these products.

In describing what you see, you are also moving right along by thinking aloud what you can do with the data provided to you. Why is this information presented to you important? How can it affect the objective you have in mind? You need to make it crystal clear you haven’t forgotten about the final objective by outlining all the steps this new data allows you to take that leads us closer to the final answer. First you’ll calculate x, and then compare it to y, and if x is bigger than we’ll know what? And if y is bigger than what have we learned?

You should expect there to be calculations to be performed. The information provided to you in an exhibit is rarely ready-to-use without additional thought and transformation. If you spot something that stands out, it’s your next clue for where to dig next. If you see a trend, don’t just describe it vaguely; check to see if you can quickly quantify it. “Profits have been increasing for the last five years” is an acceptable statement, but a cooler statement is “profits have increased 7% in the last five years.” “It looks as if there’s a bigger market for this type of product” is good, but isn’t it more exciting to hear “there’s $32M of untapped potential in this market that our client could capture…”?

However, in your eagerness, please do pause and double check yourself: what’s the final objective, and what calculations are actually relevant and/or meaningful to that final objective? If we’re trying to find out why 2009 was a terrible year for profits, maybe it’s not quite so relevant to know how much profits grew in the years prior? Or maybe it would be, because we can then say, once we fix the problem that has been causing the profitability loss, based on the presumption that the underlying dynamics of this market hasn’t changed, our client may be able to resume their previous growth rate. Maybe you want to provide a benchmark of what profit your clients should expect once the problem is fixed, and you can extrapolate based on the previous years.

If it’s not clear by now, there truly is no absolute correct way to approach the problem. Think of it all as stylistic choice - make your choice as to how you can style yourself to come across thoughtful, intelligent and insightful.

And don’t ruin it with shoddy math.