How to Build Investor Dashboard for Startups

How to Build Investor Dashboard for Startups

Transparency between startups and their investors isn't just a nice-to-have anymore—it's a fundamental requirement for building lasting relationships that fuel growth. When founders struggle to communicate their progress, metrics, and challenges effectively, they risk losing investor confidence, missing crucial funding opportunities, and creating unnecessary friction in what should be a collaborative partnership. The modern startup ecosystem demands real-time visibility, data-driven insights, and streamlined communication channels that traditional email updates and quarterly reports simply cannot provide.

An investor dashboard serves as the central nervous system for startup-investor relationships, transforming scattered data points into coherent narratives that demonstrate progress, identify challenges, and showcase opportunities. This digital interface consolidates financial metrics, operational KPIs, growth indicators, and strategic milestones into a single, accessible platform that investors can review at their convenience. Rather than waiting for scheduled updates or requesting information reactively, stakeholders gain proactive access to the information they need to support the company's journey effectively.

Throughout this comprehensive exploration, you'll discover the essential components that make investor dashboards genuinely valuable, learn practical implementation strategies that work for startups at different stages, and understand how to balance transparency with strategic communication. From selecting the right metrics to choosing appropriate technology platforms, from designing intuitive interfaces to establishing update rhythms that maintain engagement without creating reporting burdens, this resource provides actionable guidance for founders ready to elevate their investor relations through purposeful dashboard development.

Understanding the Strategic Value of Investor Dashboards

The relationship between startups and their financial backers has evolved dramatically over the past decade. Investors today expect more than quarterly board decks and annual financial statements—they want continuous visibility into the businesses they've backed. This shift reflects broader changes in how capital flows, how quickly markets move, and how competitive advantages are built and lost in compressed timeframes.

Establishing a dedicated dashboard for investor communication serves multiple strategic purposes beyond simple information sharing. First, it positions the founding team as sophisticated operators who understand the importance of data-driven decision-making and stakeholder management. Second, it reduces the administrative burden associated with responding to individual investor inquiries, freeing up valuable time for actual business building. Third, it creates a historical record of the company's journey that becomes increasingly valuable during future fundraising efforts or strategic transactions.

The companies that secure follow-on funding most efficiently are those that have maintained consistent, transparent communication with their existing investors throughout their growth journey, not just when they need additional capital.

Perhaps most importantly, well-designed investor dashboards transform passive capital providers into active strategic partners. When investors have regular visibility into operational realities, they can offer timely advice, make valuable introductions, and provide support precisely when it matters most. This proactive engagement often makes the difference between startups that merely survive and those that thrive through inevitable challenges.

The Psychology Behind Effective Investor Communication

Understanding what drives investor confidence helps founders design dashboards that genuinely strengthen relationships rather than simply checking compliance boxes. Investors fundamentally want to know three things: whether their capital is being deployed effectively, whether the team is executing against stated plans, and whether they'll be informed promptly when circumstances change. Dashboards that address these psychological needs create trust and reduce anxiety that can otherwise manifest as micromanagement or difficult board dynamics.

The frequency and format of updates also carry psychological weight. Too frequent updates can signal desperation or lack of focus, while infrequent communication breeds suspicion and disengagement. The sweet spot for most early-stage companies lies in monthly updates supplemented by real-time access to key metrics. This rhythm provides sufficient visibility without creating unsustainable reporting burdens for resource-constrained teams.

Essential Metrics Every Investor Dashboard Should Include

Selecting the right metrics represents one of the most critical decisions in dashboard development. Include too many data points and you overwhelm viewers with noise that obscures genuine signals. Include too few and you fail to provide the comprehensive picture investors need to understand business health. The optimal approach focuses on metrics that directly connect to the company's current stage, business model, and strategic priorities.

Financial health indicators form the foundation of any investor dashboard. These include cash runway, which tells investors how long the company can operate at current burn rates before needing additional capital. Monthly recurring revenue or gross revenue, depending on business model, provides the top-line growth story. Burn rate and gross margins reveal operational efficiency and unit economics. These fundamental financial metrics should always be prominently displayed and updated with actual data, not projections or aspirational figures.

Growth indicators tell the market traction story that investors ultimately care about most. Customer acquisition numbers, whether measured in new users, new accounts, or new contracts, demonstrate demand for the product or service. For subscription businesses, monthly or annual recurring revenue growth rates provide clear signals about business momentum. User engagement metrics like daily active users, session frequency, or feature adoption rates reveal whether customers find genuine value in the offering.

Investors don't expect every month to show upward trajectories across all metrics, but they do expect honest reporting and thoughtful explanations when numbers move in unexpected directions.

Operational Efficiency Indicators

Beyond top-line growth, sophisticated investors scrutinize the quality of that growth through efficiency metrics. Customer acquisition cost (CAC) reveals how much the company spends to acquire each new customer. Lifetime value (LTV) estimates the total revenue a customer will generate over their relationship with the company. The LTV:CAC ratio, ideally above 3:1 for healthy SaaS businesses, indicates whether the business model is fundamentally sound or whether growth is being purchased unsustainably.

Churn rate, particularly for subscription businesses, functions as a leading indicator of product-market fit and customer satisfaction. High churn suggests fundamental product or service issues that will eventually undermine growth regardless of how much capital is deployed toward acquisition. Conversely, low churn combined with strong net revenue retention indicates a business with compounding advantages that becomes more valuable over time.

Contextual Metrics Based on Business Model

Different business models require different metric emphases. E-commerce companies should highlight metrics like average order value, repeat purchase rate, and inventory turnover. Marketplace businesses need to show both supply and demand side metrics, along with take rates and liquidity indicators. Enterprise software companies should focus on contract values, sales cycle length, and expansion revenue from existing customers.

• 🎯 SaaS businesses should prioritize MRR/ARR, net revenue retention, and expansion revenue alongside traditional growth metrics
• 📱 Consumer applications need to emphasize DAU/MAU ratios, engagement depth, and viral coefficient measurements
• 🏪 Marketplace platforms must demonstrate balanced growth across both sides of the market with liquidity metrics
• 💰 Fintech companies should highlight transaction volumes, take rates, and regulatory compliance milestones
• 🏥 Healthcare startups need to show patient outcomes, provider adoption, and reimbursement progress

Choosing the Right Platform and Technology Stack

The technology infrastructure supporting your investor dashboard significantly impacts both the effort required to maintain it and the value it delivers to stakeholders. Founders face a spectrum of options ranging from simple spreadsheet-based solutions to sophisticated business intelligence platforms. The right choice depends on factors including current team technical capabilities, budget constraints, data complexity, and growth stage.

For pre-seed and early seed-stage companies with limited resources, spreadsheet-based dashboards using Google Sheets or Excel connected to simple visualization tools like Google Data Studio offer a pragmatic starting point. These solutions require minimal technical expertise, cost little or nothing, and can be implemented quickly. The primary limitation lies in scalability—as data sources multiply and update frequency increases, manual data entry becomes unsustainable and error-prone.

Dedicated Investor Relations Platforms

Purpose-built investor relations platforms like Visible, Carta, or Pulley provide middle-ground solutions designed specifically for startup-investor communication. These tools typically offer templated dashboard layouts, automated data connections to financial systems, and built-in communication features for distributing updates. The advantage lies in their startup-specific design—they understand the metrics founders need to track and the formats investors expect to see.

Implementation typically involves connecting the platform to existing data sources like accounting software, CRM systems, and analytics tools. Once configured, these platforms can automatically pull updated data and generate standardized reports, dramatically reducing the manual effort required for investor updates. Pricing generally scales with company size and feature requirements, with entry-level plans starting around $200-500 monthly.

The best dashboard technology is the one that gets consistently updated with accurate data, not necessarily the one with the most features or the most impressive interface.

Business Intelligence and Analytics Solutions

More mature startups with dedicated data teams might opt for comprehensive business intelligence platforms like Tableau, Looker, or Metabase. These tools offer maximum flexibility and sophistication, enabling complex data modeling, custom visualizations, and deep analytical capabilities. The tradeoff involves significantly higher implementation complexity and ongoing maintenance requirements.

These enterprise-grade solutions make sense when the investor dashboard represents just one use case among many for business intelligence infrastructure. If the company already uses these tools for internal analytics and decision-making, extending access to investors becomes relatively straightforward. However, implementing such platforms solely for investor reporting typically represents overkill for early-stage companies.

Data Integration Considerations

Regardless of which platform you choose, the quality of your dashboard depends entirely on the quality and reliability of underlying data integrations. Modern startups typically operate with data scattered across multiple systems: financial data in QuickBooks or Xero, customer data in Salesforce or HubSpot, product analytics in Mixpanel or Amplitude, and operational metrics in various other tools.

Establishing reliable data pipelines that automatically sync information from these source systems into your dashboard eliminates manual data entry while reducing errors. Most investor relations platforms offer pre-built integrations with common startup tools. For custom requirements, middleware platforms like Zapier, Segment, or Fivetran can bridge gaps between systems that don't natively connect.

Designing for Clarity and Actionable Insights

Technical implementation represents only half the challenge of effective dashboard development. The other half involves thoughtful design that transforms raw data into clear narratives that investors can quickly understand and act upon. Poor design choices can render even the most sophisticated data infrastructure useless if stakeholders cannot quickly grasp what the numbers mean and why they matter.

Visual hierarchy plays a crucial role in dashboard effectiveness. The most critical information—typically current cash position, runway, and primary growth metrics—should occupy prominent positions that immediately catch the viewer's attention. Secondary metrics can be positioned in supporting roles, while detailed breakdowns should be available through drill-down capabilities rather than cluttering the primary view.

The Power of Comparative Context

Numbers without context provide limited insight. Showing that the company generated $250,000 in revenue last month means little without knowing whether that represents growth, decline, or stagnation. Effective dashboards always present metrics in comparative context—month-over-month changes, year-over-year growth, performance against plan, or benchmarks against similar companies.

Trend visualization through line charts or area graphs helps investors quickly grasp trajectory and momentum. A revenue number that's been growing consistently for twelve months tells a fundamentally different story than one that's been declining or fluctuating erratically. These visual patterns often communicate more effectively than the underlying numbers themselves.

The goal is not to overwhelm investors with every data point you track internally, but to curate the specific insights that help them understand your business and support your success.

Color Psychology and Visual Conventions

Thoughtful use of color helps viewers quickly distinguish between different types of information and identify areas requiring attention. Green typically signals positive performance or upward trends, while red indicates challenges or declining metrics. Yellow or orange can highlight areas that warrant monitoring without immediate concern. However, overuse of color creates visual noise that diminishes these signals—use color purposefully and sparingly.

Consistency in visual presentation across different sections of the dashboard reduces cognitive load and makes the interface more intuitive. If you represent financial metrics with bar charts, maintain that convention throughout rather than switching between chart types arbitrarily. Standardized formatting for numbers—consistent decimal places, clear currency symbols, and appropriate use of thousands or millions abbreviations—prevents confusion and misinterpretation.

Mobile Accessibility and Responsive Design

Many investors will access dashboards from mobile devices during travel or between meetings. Ensuring your dashboard displays properly on smartphones and tablets isn't just a nice-to-have feature—it's essential for maintaining engagement. Responsive design that adapts layouts to different screen sizes, readable font sizes that don't require zooming, and touch-friendly interactive elements all contribute to accessibility.

Consider creating simplified mobile views that prioritize the most critical metrics while making detailed data available through additional taps or swipes. Loading performance on mobile connections also matters—overly complex dashboards with heavy graphics may work fine on desktop but become frustratingly slow on cellular networks.

Establishing Effective Update Rhythms and Communication Protocols

Building the dashboard represents just the beginning of effective investor relations. The real value emerges from consistent updates that keep information current and relevant. Establishing sustainable rhythms for data updates and narrative communications ensures the dashboard remains a living resource rather than becoming a stale artifact that investors learn to ignore.

Most successful startups settle on monthly update cycles as the optimal balance between maintaining visibility and avoiding reporting burden. This frequency provides sufficient granularity to track progress and identify trends without creating constant distraction from actual business operations. Monthly updates align naturally with financial close processes, making it easier to ensure data accuracy and completeness.

Automating Data Updates

Wherever possible, automate data refreshes rather than relying on manual updates. Financial metrics can typically be pulled automatically from accounting systems once monthly books are closed. Product analytics platforms can push daily active user counts and engagement metrics continuously. CRM systems can update sales pipeline and customer counts in real-time. This automation not only reduces work but also eliminates the risk of forgetting updates during busy periods.

For metrics that cannot be fully automated, establish clear ownership and processes. Assign specific team members responsibility for updating particular sections of the dashboard, build those updates into their regular workflows, and create reminders or checklists to ensure nothing gets overlooked. The goal is making dashboard maintenance a routine part of operations rather than an extra task that gets deprioritized when things get hectic.

Consistency matters more than perfection—investors value regular updates with complete information far more than sporadic updates that only happen when all news is positive.

Combining Quantitative Data with Qualitative Context

Numbers alone rarely tell complete stories. The most effective investor dashboards supplement quantitative metrics with qualitative commentary that provides context, explains anomalies, and highlights important developments that metrics alone might miss. This narrative component transforms the dashboard from a reporting tool into a communication medium.

Consider including a brief monthly narrative section—perhaps 300-500 words—that addresses key developments, explains significant metric changes, discusses challenges the team is navigating, and previews upcoming priorities. This commentary helps investors understand not just what happened but why it happened and what it means for the company's trajectory. It also provides opportunities to proactively address questions before they're asked.

Managing Sensitive Information and Access Controls

Not all investors need access to identical information. Lead investors who occupy board seats typically receive more detailed data than smaller check writers. Employee option holders might receive high-level updates without detailed financial breakdowns. Implementing appropriate access controls ensures sensitive information reaches appropriate audiences while maintaining transparency where it matters most.

Most investor relations platforms support tiered access levels that let you control who sees what. Take advantage of these capabilities to create different views for different stakeholder groups. This approach lets you maintain a single source of truth while appropriately tailoring visibility to different relationships and roles.

Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

Even well-intentioned dashboard initiatives can fail to deliver value when founders fall into common traps. Understanding these pitfalls helps you design implementations that avoid predictable problems and maximize the return on time invested in investor relations infrastructure.

Perhaps the most frequent mistake involves creating dashboards that are too complex and comprehensive. Founders often assume that more data equals better communication, leading to cluttered interfaces that overwhelm rather than inform. The result is dashboards that investors find intimidating or confusing, leading to disengagement rather than the intended transparency. The solution lies in ruthless prioritization—focus on the vital few metrics that truly matter rather than the trivial many that create noise.

The Vanity Metrics Trap

Another common pitfall involves emphasizing vanity metrics that look impressive but don't actually indicate business health. Total registered users means little if most never become active. Gross merchandise value sounds impressive but matters less than the take rate and actual revenue the company captures. Social media followers or press mentions might boost founder egos but rarely correlate with sustainable business success.

Sophisticated investors quickly recognize when dashboards emphasize vanity metrics while downplaying or omitting more meaningful indicators. This approach damages credibility rather than building confidence. Focus instead on metrics that directly connect to the business model and economic viability, even when those numbers tell less flattering stories.

Investors have seen thousands of dashboards and pitches—they can spot cherry-picked metrics and misleading presentations instantly, and doing so destroys trust far more than honestly sharing challenging numbers.

Inconsistency and Reliability Issues

Dashboards lose value rapidly when updates become irregular or data quality degrades. Investors who check a dashboard only to find stale information from two or three months ago learn not to rely on it, defeating the entire purpose. Similarly, dashboards with frequent errors, unexplained data gaps, or metrics that change definition between updates create confusion and erode confidence.

Preventing these issues requires treating dashboard maintenance as a first-class operational priority rather than an afterthought. Build update processes into regular workflows, assign clear ownership, and establish quality checks before publishing updates. If circumstances prevent timely updates, communicate proactively about delays rather than leaving investors to discover stale data on their own.

Over-Automation Without Human Oversight

While automation reduces manual effort, completely hands-off dashboards can create problems when automated data pulls produce unexpected results. A bug in analytics tracking might show user numbers dropping to zero. An accounting system integration might double-count certain transactions. Without human review before data goes live, these errors reach investors and require embarrassing corrections.

The solution involves implementing review processes where team members verify automated data updates before they become visible to external stakeholders. This doesn't mean manually checking every number, but it does mean establishing sanity checks and anomaly detection that flags unusual changes for human verification before publication.

Scaling Your Dashboard as Your Company Grows

The dashboard that serves a ten-person seed-stage startup effectively will need evolution as the company grows to fifty employees and Series A scale, and further transformation at Series B and beyond. Anticipating these transitions and planning for scalability prevents the need for disruptive overhauls at critical moments.

Early-stage dashboards typically focus heavily on product-market fit indicators and growth metrics while financial sophistication remains relatively simple. As companies mature, financial reporting becomes more complex with multiple revenue streams, geographic segments, and cost center breakdowns. The metrics that matter shift from pure growth toward unit economics, efficiency, and path to profitability.

Adding Sophistication Without Adding Complexity

The challenge lies in adding necessary sophistication as the business matures without creating overwhelming complexity. One effective approach involves maintaining a simple executive summary view that highlights the vital few metrics while making detailed breakdowns available through progressive disclosure—investors who want deeper analysis can drill down, while those seeking quick updates get the essentials immediately.

Consider implementing a tiered information architecture with three levels: a high-level executive dashboard showing the most critical metrics at a glance, a detailed operational view with comprehensive breakdowns for investors who want deeper understanding, and an appendix section with methodology explanations, definitions, and historical context. This structure accommodates different investor preferences and information needs without forcing everyone through the same experience.

Incorporating Board-Level Reporting

As companies establish formal boards of directors, investor dashboard infrastructure can often support board reporting needs as well. Rather than maintaining separate systems for general investor updates and board materials, consider designing dashboards that serve both purposes with appropriate access controls distinguishing between board members and other investors.

This integration creates efficiency while ensuring consistency between different reporting streams. Board members see the same underlying data that other investors access, supplemented with additional detail and strategic materials appropriate to their governance role. This approach prevents the common problem where board materials and investor updates tell subtly different stories due to disconnected preparation processes.

Leveraging Dashboard Data for Strategic Advantage

Beyond their primary purpose of investor communication, well-designed dashboards create valuable secondary benefits that justify the investment in their development. The process of identifying key metrics, establishing reliable measurement systems, and maintaining regular updates forces operational discipline that benefits the entire organization.

Creating investor dashboards often reveals gaps in internal data infrastructure and measurement capabilities. Founders discover they lack clear visibility into metrics investors expect to see, prompting investments in analytics and business intelligence that improve internal decision-making alongside external reporting. This forcing function accelerates operational maturity in ways that benefit the business far beyond investor relations.

Using Dashboards in Fundraising Processes

When the time comes to raise additional capital, companies with established investor dashboards possess significant advantages. They can immediately provide prospective investors with comprehensive, well-organized data rather than scrambling to compile information during diligence. The historical record captured in dashboard archives demonstrates consistent execution and provides credibility that verbal claims cannot match.

During fundraising processes, consider creating specialized views that address specific questions prospective investors typically ask. Cohort analyses showing how customer retention and expansion evolve over time, detailed unit economics breakdowns by customer segment or geography, and sensitivity analyses showing how changes in key assumptions impact financial projections all help sophisticated investors build confidence in the opportunity.

Companies that maintain transparent, data-rich investor dashboards consistently close fundraising rounds faster and at better terms than those that treat investor communication as an afterthought.

Building Competitive Intelligence

The process of developing investor dashboards often involves researching industry benchmarks and competitive metrics to provide context for your own performance. This research builds valuable competitive intelligence that informs strategic decision-making. Understanding that your customer acquisition costs run 30% below industry averages or that your churn rate exceeds typical benchmarks provides actionable insights that drive operational improvements.

Many founders find that the discipline of regular dashboard updates creates natural rhythms for strategic reflection. The monthly process of reviewing metrics, identifying trends, and crafting narrative updates forces leadership teams to step back from daily tactical execution and assess whether current activities align with strategic priorities. This regular cadence of reflection often surfaces important insights that might otherwise get lost in operational chaos.

Legal and Compliance Considerations

While transparency generally strengthens investor relationships, founders must navigate legal and regulatory considerations that govern what information can be shared with whom. Securities regulations, confidentiality obligations, and competitive sensitivity all create boundaries that dashboard design must respect.

In the United States, securities laws distinguish between accredited and non-accredited investors, with different disclosure requirements and restrictions for each group. Companies must ensure their investor dashboards comply with these regulations, typically by limiting access to accredited investors who participated in formal fundraising rounds. Simply making detailed financial information publicly available can create regulatory complications.

Protecting Competitive Sensitive Information

Detailed operational metrics can provide valuable intelligence to competitors if they gain access. While investors have fiduciary duties and contractual confidentiality obligations, information security remains a legitimate concern. Consider what information could harm the company if it reached competitors, and implement appropriate access controls and confidentiality reminders.

This doesn't mean hiding important information from legitimate investors, but it does mean being thoughtful about what gets shared, with whom, and through what channels. Highly sensitive information might be reserved for board members and lead investors rather than distributed to every angel investor on the cap table. Watermarking dashboard exports and implementing audit trails that track who accesses what information can help identify breaches if they occur.

International Considerations

Companies with international investors or operations must consider varying privacy regulations like GDPR in Europe or similar frameworks in other jurisdictions. These regulations can impact what customer data can be shared, how it must be protected, and what rights individuals have regarding their information. Ensure your dashboard infrastructure complies with applicable regulations in all relevant jurisdictions.

Data residency requirements in some countries mandate that certain information be stored and processed within specific geographic boundaries. If your investor base includes stakeholders in jurisdictions with such requirements, verify that your chosen dashboard platform can accommodate these constraints without creating separate, disconnected systems.

Frequently Asked Questions

How often should investor dashboards be updated?

Monthly updates represent the optimal frequency for most startups, providing sufficient visibility into progress without creating unsustainable reporting burdens. This cadence aligns naturally with financial close processes and gives enough time between updates for meaningful changes in metrics. Some automated metrics like cash balance might update more frequently, while strategic milestones and team updates might occur quarterly. The key is establishing a consistent rhythm that investors can rely on rather than sporadic updates that only happen when news is positive.

What's the minimum viable investor dashboard for an early-stage startup?

At minimum, early-stage dashboards should include current cash position and runway, monthly revenue or key growth metric, burn rate, and brief narrative updates on progress and challenges. Even a simple spreadsheet shared via Google Sheets can serve this purpose effectively. The goal is establishing the communication habit and providing basic transparency rather than building sophisticated infrastructure. As the company grows and complexity increases, the dashboard can evolve accordingly. Starting simple and iterating based on investor feedback often produces better results than attempting to build comprehensive systems before they're truly needed.

Should dashboards show only positive metrics or include challenges?

Effective dashboards present a balanced, honest picture that includes both successes and challenges. Sophisticated investors know that every startup faces obstacles—hiding problems destroys credibility far more than honestly acknowledging them while explaining how the team is responding. The key is providing context around challenging metrics: what caused the issue, what's being done to address it, and what impact you expect. This transparency builds trust and enables investors to provide relevant support when challenges arise. Investors who are surprised by problems during board meetings or fundraising processes because dashboards only showed positive news tend to lose confidence in management teams.

How can technical founders build dashboards without extensive design skills?

Purpose-built investor relations platforms like Visible, Carta, or Pulley provide templates and standard layouts that look professional without requiring design expertise. These tools understand what metrics matter to investors and present them in familiar formats. Alternatively, modern business intelligence tools offer pre-built dashboard templates that can be customized with your specific data. If using spreadsheets, focus on clarity over aesthetics—clean formatting, clear labels, and logical organization matter more than visual polish. Consider having one or two investors review early versions and provide feedback on what's clear versus confusing, then iterate based on their input.

What's the best way to handle requests for metrics not currently tracked?

When investors request metrics you don't currently measure, first understand why they're asking—what insight are they seeking? Sometimes the specific metric they request isn't as important as the underlying question they're trying to answer, which you might be able to address with data you already have. If the requested metric is genuinely valuable, acknowledge the request, explain what infrastructure or process changes would be needed to track it, and provide a realistic timeline for when you could start including it. Use these requests as opportunities to improve your own analytics capabilities rather than viewing them as burdens. However, don't feel obligated to track every metric every investor mentions—focus on those that genuinely matter for your specific business model and stage.

How do you balance transparency with maintaining competitive advantages?

The key lies in distinguishing between transparency about results and disclosure of proprietary methods or strategies. You can share that customer acquisition costs decreased by 30% without revealing the specific channels, partnerships, or techniques that drove that improvement. You can show strong retention metrics without exposing the exact product features or engagement tactics that create stickiness. Focus dashboard metrics on outcomes and results rather than detailed operational playbooks. Additionally, ensure all investors have signed appropriate confidentiality agreements, implement proper access controls, and consider tiering information access based on investor involvement level. Board members and lead investors might receive more strategic detail than smaller check writers.