Not all monsters Meet the Zoom Giant: Zack, my business partner at Level10 CFO.
Nobody sets out to mislead anyone on a video call. But hand the brain a few data points — a confident voice, decisive body language, a face that reads well close-up — and it will happily assemble them into “tall.” Zack checks every one of those boxes. He’s also 5’3″. I’m 6’3″. After a few hundred client calls together, people reliably assume he’s the taller of the two of us, right up until they meet him in person.
Nothing about what people see on those calls is false. It’s just a handful of real signals doing the job a full picture should be doing instead.
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That’s exactly the mechanism causing real damage inside growing businesses right now — just with numbers instead of faces.
Where the Zoom Giant Actually Shows Up
He doesn’t announce himself. He shows up as a single, true, in-frame fact that quietly gets treated as the whole story — and he cuts both ways, dressing up bad news as readily as good:
- “Revenue is up 22% this quarter” gets celebrated in the board meeting. What’s outside the frame: customer acquisition cost climbed right alongside it, and margin per new customer quietly went negative. The number was real. It just wasn’t the whole picture.
- Your biggest client gets treated as your best client. They bring in the most revenue, take up the most meetings, and get the most attention. What’s outside the frame: the hours your team actually spends serving them, the scope that quietly crept in, and a margin that’s thinner than any other account’s. The revenue was real. It just wasn’t the whole picture.
- Revenue dips for a quarter, and the room goes tense. What’s outside the frame: CAC came down at the same time, margin per customer improved, and the pipeline moving into next quarter is the strongest it’s been all year. That number was just as real. It also wasn’t the whole picture.
- Sales hit its number for the first time in three quarters. What’s outside the frame: they got there by stretching payment terms, and collections is now chasing 90-day-old receivables to actually turn that “win” into cash.
- A single great quarter gets forwarded around the leadership team as proof the business has turned a corner. What’s outside the frame: the trailing twelve months tell a much less exciting story, and one good quarter isn’t a trend.
- A KPI dashboard shows green across the board. What’s outside the frame: it only tracks what was easy to automate, not the handful of metrics that actually predict trouble three months out.
None of these are lies. Every one of them is a true, accurate fact that happened to be in frame. The damage starts the moment leadership makes a real decision — good news or bad — based on the frame alone, because the part that got cropped out is usually the part that mattered most.
None of this means don’t celebrate the win, or take decisive corrective measures at the dip. It means check the whole frame before you bet the next quarter on either one.
A Quick Frame Check
If two or more of these sound familiar, the Zoom Giant may already be shaping how your business makes decisions:
- A metric got celebrated in a leadership meeting without anyone asking what it looks like next to the other four numbers that matter.
- “We had a great quarter” has been said out loud more recently than “here’s what our trailing twelve months actually show.”
- One department’s report gets reviewed completely separately from how it affects everyone else’s.
- Someone has said “the books close fine,” as if that settles the question of whether the business is actually healthy.
- A dashboard exists, but nobody’s asked lately what it isn’t showing.
None of this means anyone did anything wrong. It means the business, like every video call ever taken, has been showing an accurate but partial picture — and it’s worth widening the frame before the next big decision gets made off it.
The Data Trap
The instinctive fix is “get more dashboards.” But more data just means a bigger frame — and a bigger frame still only shows you what someone decided to point the camera at. A 40-tab spreadsheet with everything in it is exactly as vulnerable to the Zoom Giant as a single KPI, if nobody’s asking what’s still missing from it.
That’s why the fix isn’t more visibility. It’s someone senior enough to know which questions the visibility still doesn’t answer.
How Level10 CFO Defeats the Zoom Giant
Here’s the part that surprises people: more data doesn’t defeat the Zoom Giant. A bigger dashboard is still just a wider frame — somebody still has to actually look at it, and know what they’re looking for.
That’s the real distinction. Widening the frame is a leadership function, not a reporting feature. At Level10 CFO, that shows up as:
- Full P&L reviews, not single line items. A senior Controller closes the books accurately; a CFO knows to ask what a “good” number is quietly costing somewhere else.
- Trends, not snapshots. One strong quarter gets checked against twelve months of trailing data before anyone calls it a turning point.
- Cross-functional judgment, not departmental silos. A win in sales gets checked against its effect on cash, margin, and operations before it’s treated as a win.
- AI-enabled systems that pull more of the picture into frame automatically — reconciliations, anomaly detection, a first-pass forecast — paired with someone senior enough to interpret what the wider view is actually saying.
Technology can widen the shot. Only experienced financial leadership decides what to do with it. That’s the difference between a dashboard and a CFO — and it’s the only thing that reliably beats a Zoom Giant.
Don’t Let the Frame Decide for You
Some giants are only tall until you meet them. The same is true of numbers: the most convincing one in the room is only the whole story until someone with the right vantage point shows you the rest of it.
If your business is making decisions off whatever happens to be in frame this quarter, that’s worth 30 minutes to find out.
Book Your 30-Minute Reality Check.
