How credibility compounds
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I was sitting in a boardroom in Sydney with a deck I believed in, a team I was proud of and a company I knew would matter.
Drop Bio Health was building something genuinely pioneering, a biological testing platform that could give people a real window into how their body was ageing and critical insight years before a chronic disease could be diagnosed. The science was solid. The vision was clear. The problem we were solving was real.
But we were early.
The clinical validation was in progress, not complete. The longitudinal data that would prove our core thesis hadn't had time to accumulate. And the investors sitting across the table knew it.
I made my case, as I had hundreds of times before.
I talked about the market, the team, the roadmap, the potential. What I couldn't do, what no amount of preparation could fix, was point to the numbers that would have landed the argument.
That investor and few like them didn't join us.
That experience sits with me still. Not because it was a failure of vision or strategy. But because it taught me something I've spent years since watching other leaders learn the hard way.
Without evidence, you don't have an argument. You have an opinion.
Evidence is the argument.
Every leader I've worked with understands this in principle. In practice, many operate in a kind of permanent promissory mode. They talk about what the numbers will show once the next quarter finalises, the next product ships or the next market matures.
Sometimes that's legitimate.
Build phases are real. There are industries, like healthcare, biotech and deep tech, where evidence takes years to generate and the burden of proof is genuinely high. I've lived that. It's not an excuse. It's a structural reality that changes how you lead.
But there's a version of the promissory mode that isn't structural. It's habitual. And it's one of the most quietly corrosive patterns I see in otherwise capable leaders.
And people have a refined sense for the difference.
When you walk into a room and speak in generalities like 'we're tracking well', 'the pipeline looks strong', 'the team is performing,' the people you're talking to are already doing their own calculation.
They've started filling in the gaps you've left with their own assumptions.
And those assumptions rarely favour you.
Numbers do a specific kind of work that narrative can't. They compress complexity. They create shared reference points. They let the reader or listener locate themselves in the story without you having to explain everything.
More than that, they signal that you know your business and not in a general way. In the specific way that comes from spending time with the data, understanding how resources flow and get consumed, and being willing to stand behind it in public.
The numbers you choose tell a story of their own
Here's where it can get uncomfortable.
Every leader has access to proof about themselves and their organisation. Revenue, retention, churn, engagement, cycle time, error rate, NPS, headcount productivity. The data exists.
The question is which numbers you lead with, which ones you quietly de-emphasise, and why.
Experience tells me that the numbers leaders talk about most confidently are rarely the most revealing ones. They're the ones that reflect well. The ones that confirm the narrative already in place.
The numbers that actually tell you how a business is tracking, and how well the CEO has a handle on it, tend to be the ones that create a little discomfort.
The ones that don't move as fast as you'd like. The ones that require explanation rather than celebration.
So ask yourself:
Which numbers are you genuinely comfortable being asked about in a room full of people who know your industry?
Which numbers do you avoid putting in the deck?
Which numbers, if someone asked about them directly, would cause you to pause before answering?
The gap between the numbers you volunteer and the numbers you'd rather not discuss is one of the more honest measures of self-awareness I know.
It's not a character flaw.
It's useful diagnostic information, if you're willing to look at it.
The leaders I most respect aren't the ones with the best numbers. They're the ones who know their numbers cold, including the ones that don't make them look good.
They can walk into any room, at any point in the cycle, and give you an honest account of where the business actually is.
That's not just good governance, it’s credibility. And credibility is the only currency that compounds.
The hardest version of this problem
I want to come back to the investor room in Sydney, because the hardest version of the evidence problem isn't hiding from bad numbers. It's being in a build phase where the numbers you need simply don't exist yet.
At Drop Bio Health, we were asking people to believe in a trajectory before we could prove it. That's not unusual in early-stage companies, especially in healthcare and biotech where regulatory timelines, clinical validation cycles, and longitudinal data requirements mean the evidence arrives years after the conviction does.
It is, in my experience, the most genuinely frustrating part of building something new.
You can see where it's going. You can feel the signal in the early data. You can construct a compelling logical case. But you can't yet hand someone the proof they need to make the leap with you.
What I've learned from that, and from watching others navigate it since, is that the response can't be to oversell what you have. The response is to be precise about what you know, what you don't know yet, and what the evidence will look like when it arrives.
That kind of clarity about what you know and what you don't is harder than it sounds.
It requires you to resist the pull toward certainty that comes with being the person most invested in the outcome. But it's the only version of the story that holds up when the room gets harder.
People don't expect you to have everything figured out. They do expect you to be straight with them about what you have.
5,000 loads of laundry and 250+ deals
A few weeks ago I logged load number 5,000 of laundry since leaving home.
I know that sounds like an odd thing to track. But it's part of a project I've been building called Laundry Guy, a media brand that turns the most avoided room in the house into the best one, giving men a place to improve their mental fitness. To think, decompress, contribute to their household, and be reminded that even in the most chaotic times, there is one simple, repeated, mindful job that is entirely theirs.
The number matters to me for a specific reason. When I talk about Laundry Guy, I have evidence. I know the problem from the inside. I've lived the accumulation of it. Five thousand loads isn't a marketing claim. It's a data point that earns the right to speak about the experience with authority.
The same is true about partnerships. I’ve closed 250+ deals in my career. Some small, many transformative.
At Drop Bio Health, we published our peer reviewed evidence.
That's what proof does for a leader.
It doesn't just support your argument. It changes the quality of your presence in the room.
When you know your numbers, when they're not a slide you prepared but a reality you live, it changes how you speak. You stop hedging, qualifying and performing confidence and start demonstrating it.
And you can sure that the people across the table from you can feel the difference.
What this means for you
You have numbers. Every leader does.
The question is how well you know them, how honestly you're engaging with the ones that challenge you, and whether you're using evidence to build trust or using narrative to avoid it.
In my experience, the leaders who grow fastest are the ones who treat their data as a daily practice, not a quarterly exercise.
They're not waiting for the board pack to know that state of their business. They have a running, honest picture and they're willing to share it, the full picture, including the parts that aren't moving yet, with the people who need to believe in them.
If you can't sell, you don't have evidence.
If you can't defend, you don't know the numbers.
And if you can't be asked the hard question without pausing, you have work to do.
None of that is a judgment. It's a starting point.
My question to you: If someone who knew your industry well asked you, right now, for the three numbers that most honestly reflect the health of your business, what would you say and would you answer without flinching?
PS If this essay helped, Episode 162 (Why strong CEOs are always closer to their numbers than you think) from my podcast is worth a listen. Tune in on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
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