Most finance courses throw formulas at people. We started differently back in 2018 because I'd seen too many business owners struggle — not with numbers, but with talking about them.
Running vexolarian means working with teams who need to understand cash flow without drowning in spreadsheets. We teach the conversations that happen before the calculations.
You can memorize every financial ratio. But if you can't explain why it matters to your team during a Monday morning meeting, what's the point? We start with real situations our participants face.
The best finance professionals I know ask better questions than they give advice. We spend time helping people figure out what they're actually trying to solve — not just handing them tools.
Theory falls apart when someone asks you an unexpected question in a stakeholder meeting. Our sessions include practicing those awkward moments where you need to say "the budget won't stretch that far" professionally.
Teaching finance communication isn't about credentials on a wall. It's about spending years translating between accountants and operations teams, figuring out what actually helps people make decisions.
Senior Finance Educator
Bronwyn joined us in 2021 after working in corporate treasury for eleven years. She'd gotten tired of watching smart people struggle because no one taught them how to present financial information clearly.
Her approach involves lots of role-playing — she'll play the skeptical board member or the confused department head. Participants say it's uncomfortable at first, but that's exactly what makes it useful.
She's particularly good at helping non-finance managers understand what their CFO actually needs from them. And she has this way of breaking down cash flow forecasting that suddenly makes it seem obvious instead of mysterious.
We start by analyzing how participants currently talk about money at work. What words do they use? Where do conversations get stuck? Most people haven't thought about their finance vocabulary before.
Then we introduce frameworks — simple structures for presenting budget requests, explaining variances, or discussing investment options. Nothing complicated, just reliable patterns that work across different situations.
One participant used our budget conversation framework to finally get approval for a project that had been rejected three times. The numbers hadn't changed — just how she presented them.
Every month we analyze a real scenario from our network. Sometimes it's a successful funding pitch, other times it's a budget discussion that went sideways. We look at what happened and why.
Participants work in small groups to identify the communication turning points. Where did clarity help? Where did jargon create confusion? What questions exposed assumptions?
These sessions get intense. People realize how often finance conversations fail because of unclear expectations, not actual disagreement about the numbers.
During our August 2025 intensive, each participant brings a real financial communication challenge they're facing. Could be preparing for a board meeting, training their team, or negotiating with vendors.
We workshop these individually. Bronwyn asks questions, the group provides feedback, and we iterate until the message lands clearly. It's specific, practical, and immediately applicable.
This is where the learning gets concrete. You leave with refined presentations you can actually use, not just concepts to think about.
We're not trying to turn everyone into accountants. Most people need better financial communication skills, not deeper technical knowledge. That's what we focus on — helping you talk about money in ways that actually move projects forward.
Everything we teach connects to actual situations you'll encounter. No theoretical exercises that look good on paper but fall apart in practice.
Financial communication skills won't solve every problem. Sometimes the budget genuinely doesn't work, or stakeholders have conflicting priorities. We acknowledge that.
Our August 2025 program includes follow-up sessions in September and October. Because applying new communication approaches takes time and you'll have questions.
We cap programs at sixteen participants. Effective communication training requires individual feedback, and that doesn't scale to large groups.