Value creation decks are often 70% fluff and 30% recycled McKinsey slides.
We’ve all seen them. Sleek formatting, lots of arrows pointing in bold directions. They’re the corporate equivalent of a Tinder profile. Great photos, zero substance, and you just know it’s not showing up when it’s time to commit.
You get slides like:
• “Capture revenue synergies through cross-sell enablement”
• “Digitise the core via omni-channel transformation”
• “Implement zero-based budgeting to unlock margin”
It all sounds impressive, until you try to actually do any of it.
Here’s the truth no one likes to say out loud. Most of these decks are written to impress investment committees, not to be executed by operators. They’re built backwards from strategy frameworks, not forwards from operational realities.
Why does this keep happening?
Because strategy consultants and junior PE associates are rewarded for insight density, not outcome clarity. It’s easier to throw 47 ideas at the wall than to commit to 3 that actually move EBITDA.
So, we end up with 80-slide decks that:
1. Could be used for any company in any sector
2. Don’t prioritise initiatives based on impact or ease
3. Forget that execution lives or dies on resourcing, sequencing, and focus
If your value creation plan can’t be understood by a COO, executed by a mid-level manager, and tracked by a dashboard, it’s not a value creation plan. It’s a presentation.
Real value creation is messy, painful, and operationally brutal. It starts with hard trade-offs and a deep understanding of the actual levers inside the business.
It looks more like this:
• Rebuild the sales comp plan so reps stop gaming the funnel
• Fire the agency that’s been charging $60k/month to “drive awareness”
• Move customer service from “cost centre” to “retention engine” (or just fix the fact it takes 4 days to reply to an email)
• Stop discounting like a mattress outlet and build real pricing power
• Hire someone who understands digital
• Restructure the org chart so people actually know who owns what
• Re-platform the website so it doesn’t take 11 clicks to book a demo
• Automate the 17-report circus your Head of Ops runs manually every Monday at 6am
And it’s not a 4-year plan. It’s 90-day sprints with measurable outcomes. If it doesn’t show up in the P&L or the balance sheet, it’s noise.
A good value creation plan reads less like a strategy paper and more like an ops playbook. Clear goals. Named owners. Defined KPIs. Timelines that scare people just enough to focus.
Building decks is easy, building momentum is much harder.