Speaking finance without faking it — Business acumen: how your buyer's company actually works

The goal is not to sound like a CFO. It is to be someone a CFO can have a useful conversation with — a lower bar, achievable in a fortnight.

The vocabulary that earns credibility. No more than these, used correctly: gross margin · operating margin · EBITDA · cash flow · working capital · DSO · capex · opex · budget holder · scheme of delegation · business case · payback · ROI · NPV · total cost of ownership · cash-releasing saving · ARR · churn · net revenue retention. Fluency is not whether you can define them, but whether you can use one in a sentence about their business without breaking stride: "If your operating margin is around 6%, a £100,000 saving does about as much for the bottom line as £1.6m of new revenue — is that roughly how the board looks at it?"

The questions that make you sound commercial. None requires you to know any finance, only to know what finance people ask:

"How does this area get funded — capital or revenue?"
"Whose budget would this come out of, and what's their approval limit?"
"When does your planning cycle run — this year's budget or next year's?"
"What does the business case need to prove for this to get signed?"
"If you do nothing, what does that cost you over the next two years?"
"Are you after a cash-releasing saving, or is avoided cost enough for finance?"

The honest limits. Three things destroy credibility faster than ignorance. Inventing a number — "typically customers see a 300% ROI"; probed once and unsourced, everything else you said becomes suspect. Giving accounting, tax or legal advice — you do not know their policy, their auditors or the facts. Bluffing a term — using EBITDA or NPV slightly wrong in front of someone who uses them daily reveals you are performing rather than thinking.

The replacement is one sentence: "I don't know — I'll find out and come back to you by Thursday." Name the gap, commit to a date, deliver early. It is the only move that converts weakness into evidence of reliability.

Field note
There is a specific moment most new sellers get wrong. Someone senior uses a term you don't know — "we'd need this in the capital programme", "what's the run-rate impact?" — and you nod. Three sentences later you are lost and the rest of the meeting is theatre. The recovery costs almost nothing at the time and is impossible afterwards: "Sorry — when you say run-rate impact, do you mean the annualised effect on operating costs, or something narrower?" Nobody has ever thought worse of a salesperson for that sentence. Plenty have thought worse of one who nodded and then sent a proposal answering the wrong question.

7. Applying it in life sciences and health tech

NHS trusts: cost centres, not profit centres

A profit centre is measured on the profit it generates; a cost centre on delivering its output within a budget. Almost everything in an NHS trust is a cost centre, and that reshapes your value argument. A commercial buyer can be sold on revenue growth; an NHS department head cannot, because their income is set outside their control. Your value must arrive as cost, capacity, quality, risk or compliance.

Provider income comes mainly through the NHS Payment Scheme, which replaced the National Tariff Payment System from 1 April 2023. Its dominant mechanism is aligned payment and incentive — a fixed element covering most activity plus a variable element, with most elective activity paid at national unit prices. The implication matters more than the detail: a trust doing more work does not straightforwardly earn more money, so "20% more activity" may simply be more cost.

The distinction that decides NHS business cases: cash-releasing versus non-cash-releasing. A cash-releasing saving means money genuinely stops leaving — an agency or locum shift not booked, an outsourced contract reduced, a post removed. A non-cash-releasing saving, usually released time, is real but payroll is unchanged, so a finance director cannot bank it. "We save each consultant two hours a week" will not clear a finance review; "we reduce outsourced reporting spend by £180,000 a year, based on your published volumes" will.

Capital is the other constraint. NHS capital is cash-limited through CDEL, and trusts pay a public dividend capital dividend to the Department of Health and Social Care at 3.5% of average relevant net assets, so capitalising an asset creates a small ongoing revenue cost — on a £300,000 asset averaging roughly £150,000 net book value, on the order of £5,000 a year. A real reason a finance director may prefer a subscription. Trusts also have a statutory duty to break even taking one year with another: nobody in the building is trying to make a profit, only to avoid ending the year in deficit.

Pharma: real profit centres, and hard internal walls

Commercial and brand teams are profit centres — revenue, a P&L, a forecast, a budget owner measured on growth; the most conventional B2B environment in the sector. R&D, medical affairs, regulatory, quality and manufacturing are cost centres, defended on capability, compliance and risk rather than return, so a revenue-upside pitch lands badly. The walls between them are real and often compliance-mandated — a medical affairs budget cannot fund something promotional, and assuming money flows sideways is a beginner error with reputational consequences. And validation is a cost line: in GxP environments software must be validated, often at substantial internal cost, and it belongs in total cost of ownership.

Biotech: burn, runway and grant cycles

A pre-revenue biotech has no revenue, no profit and no margin. It has cash, a burn rate and a runway, and every purchase is judged against those three. Burn rate is net cash consumed per month; runway is cash ÷ burn.

Worked example 7. £6,000,000 cash, £400,000 a month net burn → runway = 15 months. A £200,000-a-year platform billed annually in advance costs £200,000 ÷ £400,000 = half a month of runway; billed quarterly at £50,000, each payment costs an eighth of a month. For a company 15 months from zero the CFO's question is not "is this worth it" but "does this survive us to the next raise". Billing structure, start date and term are the deal, not the paperwork.

Two more mechanics. Funding rounds gate everything — money released by a Series B is spent against a plan agreed with investors, so deals often cannot close before a round closes and can close very fast afterwards. And grant funding has its own calendar: UK life-science SMEs draw heavily on Innovate UK and UKRI competitions such as the Biomedical Catalyst, which run with fixed dates — its industry-led R&D small-projects round opened 10 November 2025 and closed 10 December 2025, with up to £25m available. Grant money is ring-fenced to specified eligible costs within a defined project period, giving you a hard deadline, a scope that cannot stretch, and a risk the deal evaporates if the bid fails.