Pattern: Before / after framing

What it is

You visualise two futures side by side: the trajectory the target is on today, and the trajectory under your proposed intervention. The reader has to see the delta to feel the stakes.

It's the rhetorical cousin of the peer-gap — same visual grammar (comparison), but across time instead of across peers.

Why it works

• It quantifies the opportunity cost of inaction. "Doing nothing" becomes a concrete, visible path, not an abstraction.
• It makes the Answer tangible. The prescription isn't a paragraph; it's a trajectory the reader can point at.
• It pre-empts the status-quo defence. Management usually argues "we have a plan". Your chart shows what their plan looks like vs. yours.
• It satisfies both the Architect (math adds up) and the Storyteller (emotional delta between two futures).

When to use it

• ✅ You have a credible counterfactual model (peer transformation, precedent transaction, clean-sheet analysis)
• ✅ The gap is material — ≥20% difference in outcome by the forecast year
• ✅ The timeline is 3–7 years — long enough for the delta to accumulate, short enough for the reader to believe
• ❌ Don't deploy without a defensible methodology for the counterfactual ("our plan delivers 25% growth" is not a methodology)
• ❌ Avoid for pure-short theses — the structural argument there is "mis-pricing today", not "better future tomorrow"

Recipe

The canonical two-line chart

Share price / EBITDA / revenue
    ▲
$200┤                                            ● Our plan
    │                                       ●  ●
$150┤                              ●    ●
    │                         ●
$100┤               ─ ─ ─ ─ ● ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ● ── Current trajectory
    │       ●── ─── ●── ── ●
 $50┤ ●
    └─────────────────────────────────────────▶
      2024    2025    2026    2027    2028    2029

Key design decisions:

1. Solid line = your plan. Dashed line = current trajectory. Solid reads as "real", dashed as "unfortunate path of least resistance".
2. Colour the delta between the two lines in a muted accent. The gap IS the argument.
3. Annotate the end-state numbers. Not "strong outperformance" — "$X vs. $Y, a $Z delta by 2028".
4. Include a single milestone marker on each line showing when the key intervention occurs (CEO change, spin announcement, asset sale).

The three-column variant

Used when the Before / After gap is too large for a single chart to show without distortion:

┌───────────────────┬───────────────────┬────────────────────┐
│  CURRENT          │  MID-TRANSITION   │  TARGET END-STATE  │
│  (2024 actual)    │  (2026 projected) │  (2028 projected)  │
├───────────────────┼───────────────────┼────────────────────┤
│  Revenue  $8.2B   │  Revenue  $9.1B   │  Revenue  $12.4B   │
│  EBITDA   $0.9B   │  EBITDA   $1.5B   │  EBITDA   $2.3B    │
│  Margin   11%     │  Margin   16%     │  Margin   19%      │
│  FCF     ($200)M  │  FCF      $350M   │  FCF      $1.1B    │
│  ND/EBITDA 4.1x   │  ND/EBITDA 2.8x   │  ND/EBITDA 1.4x    │
│                   │                   │                    │
│  Share price      │                   │  Share price       │
│  $48              │                   │  $86–112           │
└───────────────────┴───────────────────┴────────────────────┘

           +60–130% upside versus today

Methodological guardrails

Before publishing a Before/After, answer these on paper (or in the appendix):

• What precedent transformation supports your forecast? Name it. ("Marathon Petroleum under Elliott engagement, 2019–2022: 149% TSR.")
• Which specific operational levers close the gap? List them with estimated contribution. ("$180M from procurement, $120M from SG&A rationalisation, $90M from portfolio re-pricing.")
• Why hasn't management already done this? Pre-empt the rebuttal — usually: incentive misalignment, internal politics, lack of operator capability, or deliberate under-investment.

Headline language that works

• "Under current leadership: [outcome A]. Under our proposed plan: [outcome B]."
• "The status quo delivers [X] by 2028. Our plan delivers [Y] — a [Δ] shareholder outcome."
• "Two futures. Both are public. Shareholders choose."
• "Doing nothing is not neutral — it is a decision worth [$ delta]."

Common mistakes

1. Unsupported forecast line. If your "Our plan" trajectory is hockey-stick with no methodology, the whole slide dies. Show the underlying operator-level math.
2. Too-short horizon. 1-year before/after is noise. 5-year is meaningful. 15-year is speculation.
3. Ignoring interim volatility. Don't draw a straight line up — real transformations have an EPS dip in year 1 as costs hit. Show it; it builds credibility.
4. Using "industry consensus" as the floor. Sell-side analysts are usually optimistic. Don't anchor Current Trajectory to their estimates — anchor to management's own prior guidance track record.

Exemplars

• Starboard · Darden (Sep 2014) — classic before/after: current margin trajectory vs. proposed operational plan, explicit $215–326M EBITDA bridge.
• Pershing Square · Canadian Pacific (Feb 2012) — before/after on operating ratio with Hunter Harrison's CN track record as the counterfactual.
• Ancora · Norfolk Southern (Apr 2024) — "PSR-powered scheduled network" projected delta vs. current operations.
• Elliott · Phillips 66 (Feb 2025) — midstream-spin vs. status-quo conglomerate, 75% upside framed on a single time-series.
• Greenlight · Peloton (Oct 2024) — subscription-business bull case trajectory vs. the market's current full-company mis-read.
• Engine Capital · Parkland (2023–2024) — multi-deck campaign where each iteration updates the before/after based on management's response.

Full list: examples/by_pattern.json → before_after

See also

• patterns/peer-gap.md — comparison across peers (spatial); same grammar applied across time in this pattern.
• patterns/precedent-transaction.md — the credibility anchor for any "After" line comes from a prior comparable transformation.
• slides/before-after-recipe.md — exact layout for the canonical slide.
• valuation/ — the "After" line ultimately needs a valuation framework to produce a $ number.