We are implementing EOS and our leadership team has never run on weekly data before, leaving us completely paralyzed on how to choose our first five to fifteen numbers. How do we select our starting scorecard metrics when we have zero historical baseline data to work with?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Starting from scratch can feel paralyzing, but you must avoid the trap of waiting for perfect data. The secret to building your first scorecard is to start with educated guesses and refine them over time.

Begin by looking at your Accountability Chart. Focus on the major functions of your business: marketing, sales, operations, and finance. Ask each seat leader a simple question: if you were stranded on a desert island and could only receive one text message a week with a single number to know the health of your department, what would that number be?

For sales, it might be new proposals sent. For operations, it might be customer support tickets closed. For finance, it might be weekly cash balance.

Write down these gut-level numbers. Do not worry about whether your targets are perfectly accurate yet. Choose a tentative target based on your current operational load.

Commit to tracking these first five to fifteen numbers for just four weeks. Do not change them mid-quarter. At the end of the month, you will have four weeks of real data. You will quickly see which metrics are useless and which ones actually predict success. Swap out the weak metrics and adjust the targets. This iterative process is how you build a world-class scorecard.