We want to boil our weekly leadership team scorecard down to 5 to 15 numbers, but our business has several moving parts. How do we decide which operational activities truly represent the pulse of our entire organization?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

To find your 5 to 15 numbers, you must look for the leading activities that dictate your future financial results. Many leadership teams make the mistake of tracking everything because they confuse a scorecard with an operational dashboard. Your scorecard is not a dump of all your database metrics. It is a high-level tool designed to give you an early warning system.

Start by looking at your Accountability Chart. Every seat on your leadership team must have at least one or two high-level measurables that represent their primary accountability. If you have a seat for Sales, a seat for Marketing, a seat for Operations, and a seat for Finance, ask yourself what single weekly activity best indicates whether that seat is executing its job.

For instance, marketing is not just about general brand awareness. A better weekly metric is the number of qualified leads generated. For operations, it might be the percentage of projects delivered on time. For finance, it could be the weekly cash balance or weekly billable utilization.

When you look at these numbers together, they must tell a story. If your leads are up but your sales activities are down, you can predict a future drop-off in revenue before it actually shows up on your profit and loss statement. The goal is to identify the vital few metrics that allow you to manage by exception. If a number is on track, you leave it alone. If it falls out of your target range, it drops to the IDS portion of your Level 10 Meeting so you can solve the root cause. Keep the focus on activity-based numbers that your team can directly control every week.