The Best Bain & Company Waterfall Charts: What Sets Them Apart

The Bain red: intentional and consistent

Bain's signature red — a bold, primary red — appears throughout their presentations, and waterfall charts are no exception. In a Bain bridge chart, the starting and ending total bars are typically dark charcoal or black, which provides high contrast against the white background. The positive bars use Bain red, and the negative bars use a deeper crimson or burgundy.

This is an interesting inversion of the common convention. Most firms use red for negative and a neutral color for positive — red signals "bad." Bain uses their brand red for positive contributors and reserves the darker shade for negatives. In context, because Bain decks are so consistently red throughout, readers quickly learn the encoding rather than importing outside associations.

The lesson: color conventions matter, but consistency within a single presentation matters more. If you establish your encoding clearly — ideally with a legend on the first chart — you can use almost any color scheme.

Fewer bars, bigger story

Bain waterfall charts tend to use fewer bars than McKinsey or BCG equivalents. Where a McKinsey chart might break revenue growth into eight specific drivers, a Bain chart covering the same topic often uses four or five — grouping smaller contributors into a single "Other" bar.

This is a deliberate editorial choice. Bain's philosophy leans toward "what do you need to know to make a decision?" rather than "here is everything we found." Showing fewer bars forces the analyst to do the interpretation work — deciding which drivers are significant enough to call out — rather than offloading that task to the reader.

In practice: if you find yourself with a waterfall chart that has more than six or seven bars, ask which ones could be combined. The criteria: bars of similar magnitude that point the same direction and tell the same underlying story can usually be merged. The detail can live in an appendix.

Using waterfall charts to build a narrative arc

In Bain decks — more than McKinsey or BCG — you'll often see a waterfall chart used as a "situation" slide before the recommendation. The chart shows the current state: revenue is declining because of these three factors. The next slide then shows the opportunity: if you address these factors, here's the potential bridge to the target state.

Two waterfall charts in sequence — one showing the problem, one showing the solution — is a powerful storytelling structure. It creates a natural "from here to here" narrative that senior executives find compelling. The visual form reinforces the logical structure.

This pairing works best when the categories are parallel: the same factors that caused the decline appear as levers in the solution waterfall. The reader mentally maps one chart onto the other.

Price vs. volume decomposition: a Bain specialty

One specific waterfall type appears with unusual frequency in Bain's published work: the price/volume/mix decomposition. This breaks revenue growth into three components — how much came from charging more (price), how much from selling more units (volume), and how much from selling a different mix of products (mix).

This three-way decomposition is analytically powerful because each driver has a different strategic implication. Price-led growth is often more sustainable than volume-led growth. Mix improvement may signal portfolio repositioning. Bain uses this decomposition to quickly orient conversations about whether a company's growth is high-quality or low-quality.

For FP&A teams: if your company tracks revenue by both price and volume, a price/volume/mix waterfall is one of the highest-value single slides you can add to a quarterly business review. It immediately frames the quality of growth in terms executives can debate.

Bain's label style: percent alongside absolute

In a significant number of Bain waterfall charts, bars are labeled with both the absolute value and a percentage — "$45M (+12%)" or "–$15M (–4%)." This dual labeling tells the reader both the size of the contribution and its relative significance.

The absolute value answers "how much?" and the percentage answers "does it matter?" When a bar represents $3M in a $500M revenue context, the absolute number alone may not convey how small it is. Adding the percentage makes the materiality of each driver immediately visible.