Finance: Decoded
You walk into the budget meeting with a polished campaign deck and walk out cut anyway. This is the book that explains why, and hands you the language to change it.
Read the P&L. Speak the CFO's language. Tie every dollar of spend to a number finance already trusts. Short enough to read in a weekend, useful enough to keep on the desk.
Decoded The numbers behind the marketing, made readable.
Why this book exists
It was never a brains problem.
Picture a marketing director who is excellent at the craft. The campaigns work. The team respects her. Then the budget meeting starts, the talk turns to margin and payback and cash, and she goes quiet. Not because she isn't smart. Because nobody ever translated the business side into language that makes sense.
Finance: Decoded does the translation. It takes the income statement, the balance sheet, the cash flow statement, and the handful of numbers a CFO actually watches, and lays them out in plain text. No pretending it's harder than it is. By the end you read the numbers, you speak the language, and you defend marketing as an investment instead of an expense.
What you'll walk away with
Fluent in the room where the budget gets decided.
Read the three statements
Income statement, balance sheet, cash flow. What each one says, what the CFO scans for first, and how they connect.
Know the six numbers
Margins, CAC payback, LTV-to-CAC, return on capital. The metrics that matter, and the ratios that are just noise.
Speak the vocabulary
EBITDA, CAPEX vs OPEX, working capital, accruals, goodwill. The words you've been nodding through, decoded.
Translate marketing into finance
Turn brand, leads, retention, and content into the numbers finance already rewards.
Defend the budget
Build a request that survives the cut, and answer the questions before they're asked.
Read a company cold
Walk through a 10-K and an earnings call in thirty minutes, and size up a company before you take the job.
Three parts. Eleven chapters.
Each chapter ends with a TL;DR and a Stop-and-think prompt, so you can read it once and use it that week.
Part One · Reading the Room
- Why you keep losing the budget meeting
Part Two · The Language
- The income statement, or where your budget lives
- The balance sheet, or where the company's body lives
- The cash flow statement, or where the truth lives
- The numbers that matter, and the ones that don't
- The vocabulary that unlocks the room
- Reading the 10-K and the earnings call
Part Three · The Conversation
- Translating marketing into finance
- Defending the budget
- Proposing marketing as an investment, not an expense
- What you now know
Plus: supplements on reading a company before you take the job and using AI to speak CFO, and a full glossary of every term and formula in plain language.
Who it's for
The marketer who feels the ceiling.
This book is written for the director-level marketer with five to fifteen years in. She runs a budget. She has a CFO above her, a sales leader beside her, and a team underneath her.
- Not the entry-level marketer who needs the basics
- Not the CMO who already lives in the boardroom
- The one in between, smart and good at the job, who was never taught the business side
When a marketer can read the numbers, they stop getting talked over and start getting the budget. That's the whole point. — The byPlaintext promise
Two formats. One weekend.
Pick paperback for the desk or the ebook to start tonight. Both carry the full book, glossary, and supplements.
$24.99
Print edition, shipped to you.
$9.99
PDF + Kindle, instant download.
Ready to read the room?
Order Finance: Decoded and start defending your budget with numbers, not adjectives.
Order now →Decoded
Then read the fine print.
Law: Decoded is the other half of the conversation marketers get cut out of. Read both and you can defend the budget and ship the work. Get the pair from $17.99.