Governance
You have to govern the whole model, not just a single headline figure or a high / medium / low set of options. Every combination a client can reach needs to remain inside an approved commercial frame.
Barefoot Builder experiment · Interactive pricing
What if your client could explore the price, rather than just receive it?
I built a working example to test how an existing, signed-off financial model could become a governed client-facing pricing dashboard — giving the client useful levers to explore without giving them the model itself.
Built in an afternoon
Fictional c.£45m programme model
Guide freely available
The experiment
From a signed-off model to controlled client interactivity.
A proposal normally gives a client a fixed number. Making the underlying economics interactive is a different proposition: the client needs enough freedom to understand the trade-offs, while the business retains control of the model, assumptions and commercial boundaries.
The example uses a deliberately messy fictional resourcing model for a c.£45m core-platform programme covering build and run — the kind of model where important assumptions are buried across the workbook rather than neatly packaged for presentation.
What I learned
The dashboard is the easy bit.
The interesting problems aren't the sliders and charts. They're the controls required to make the output commercially safe and trustworthy.
Accuracy
Translating Excel into a dashboard has to be exact and reliable. The implementation needs to reconcile across the combinations a client can reach, not simply reproduce a few spot-checked examples.
IP protection
The client-facing layer needs to carry the resulting figures and enough explanation to make them useful, while protecting the assumptions and mechanics you don't want to disclose.
Free build guide
Build it yourself.
I've documented the approach so you can see how the experiment was put together rather than just seeing the finished front end.
- Architecture and separation of the underlying model from the client-facing layer
- Preparing the model and deciding which levers to expose
- Reconciliation and accuracy-testing approach
- Governance and IP-protection considerations
- Build process and templates used
Want to see it working?
I'll run a live walkthrough if there's enough interest.
If five or more people would find it useful, I'll run a free 45-minute session showing the setup, how the model is reconciled and what I learned from building it.
Interested? DM me on LinkedIn or ask publicly in the comments. If we get to five, I'll arrange the session.
Barefoot Builder
Making complex change practical.
This experiment is part of a broader approach: take a commercial or operational problem, make the idea tangible, test the difficult parts and turn what works into something usable.