The company was 23 years old and very successful. They delivered legal services to mid-sized companies, and they were good at it. The partners were experienced, the clients loyal, and the business grew steadily. But the digital world was catching up — and the board wasn't equipped to understand what that meant.
Quarterly presentations were full of CTR, ROAS, impressions and conversion rates. The board nodded. Approved budgets. Moved on to the next agenda item. No one asked critical questions — not because everything was perfect, but because no one knew what questions to ask. That's a dangerous position for a board to be in.
The problem wasn't that the board members were incompetent. Quite the opposite — skilled lawyers, economists and business leaders with decades of experience. But digital marketing is a specialist field with its own language, its own norms and its own logic. And no one had ever translated that language into something the board recognised.
I was brought in by the managing director, who was frustrated that digital initiatives consistently ended with half-hearted approvals and insufficient budgets. "They say yes," he told me, "but they don't understand what they're saying yes to. Then next quarter they ask questions that show they didn't really believe in it from the start."
We began by mapping exactly what the board didn't understand — and more importantly, what they needed to understand to make good decisions. We reviewed the last eight quarterly presentations and identified all the places where explanations were either too technical, too context-free or too self-satisfied.
Then we designed a Digital Literacy programme specifically for this board. Not a generic digital marketing course — but a tailored learning process grounded in the company's own numbers and challenges. Three workshops over eight weeks, two hours each.
The first workshop was about context: What is a good ROAS in your industry? What are the benchmarks for conversion rates in B2B professional services? What are digital channel market shares for companies your size? The board didn't just learn numbers — they learned what the numbers meant in relation to competitors and the market.
The second workshop was about the customer journey. We mapped exactly what happens from a potential client first hearing about the firm to signing a contract. How long does it take? Which digital touchpoints play a role? What are the critical friction points? Once board members understood the customer journey, metrics suddenly started making sense — not as abstract numbers, but as measurements of real human processes.
The third workshop was the most critical. We invited the digital team to present a specific initiative — not to have it approved, but as a case study. We stopped the presentation many times and asked board members to articulate what they understood and didn't understand. Then we demonstrated how to ask the right questions — not "what is our ROAS?" but "what did we expect ROAS to be, and what have we learned from the last two quarters of data?"
Simultaneously, we redesigned the reporting format. We removed all jargon. We reduced the number of metrics from 34 to 7 — the seven that are actually decision-relevant at board level. We added a comparison baseline: not just "what are the numbers now?", but "what was the expectation, what is the reality, and what explains the difference?"
Eight weeks after the first workshop, we held the first quarterly meeting with the new format. The managing director told me afterwards it was the best board meeting he had experienced in his time as a leader. The board asked precise, critical questions. They rejected one proposal because they felt the budget was too large relative to the expected return. They approved another — unanimously — because they understood the logic and believed in it.
It was the first unanimous approval of a digital strategy in the firm's 23-year history.
What had actually changed wasn't the information. It was the frame of understanding. The board received the same figures they had always received. But now they knew what they meant — and they knew what questions to ask if they didn't understand. That kind of competence isn't a course. It's an investment in the organisation's ability to make good decisions for years to come.