Fewer numbers than you think, and the ones that pass three tests. Most owners’ pages carry between two and five numbers that are true, precise, reported every week and telling them nothing. Take those off first. What is left is usually a handful: the money in and out, the work that got out of the door against what was planned, and one or two numbers that only the business’s own history can name.
The three tests
Can this number move without the thing you actually care about moving? If it can, it is a proxy, and it will be gamed without anybody meaning to game it. People are not cheating when they improve the number you put in front of them. They are doing what you asked.
Does closing it require the outcome, or only the activity? Calls made, tickets closed, loads dispatched: all activity. Customer still there next month: outcome.
Are you counting a thing you would rather have less of? One of the people who built Summit spent years inside a company that measures everything, and the number he stopped watching was customer queries closed. A query only exists because something already went wrong, so a rising count of closed queries can mean the operation is failing faster and recovering diligently, and on the page it reads as productivity. A number can be true and still be a lie about the business.
Weekly is sometimes too slow
For cash, a weekly view is managing in the rearview mirror. By the time the week closes, the decisions that made it are five days old and the ones you would have changed are already paid for. The founder’s own answer, after a bookkeeper who could never tell him how the company was doing, was a morning sheet: six numbers on the desk before nine, every day, so the week is managed while it is still happening.
Plan against actual, not just actual
A number on its own tells you what happened. The same number beside what you expected tells you whether something is drifting. Write the expectation down first, then compare, every time. That is the whole difference between a report and a measurement, and it is how a route, a product or a customer that is slowly going wrong gets caught in week three instead of month nine.
Try this
Print your current weekly page. Run every number on it through the three tests. Cross out the ones that fail. Do not replace them yet. The space a lying number leaves behind is more useful than the lie was.
Is Operations the gear in the way?
The Ascent Scan scores what you watch and how the work gets out against the other three gears. Free, six minutes.
Read the whole story of the number that lied, free →
More questions owners ask
- Why is my business profitable but I never have cash?
- What would I free up if customers paid me 30 days sooner?
- Which part of my business should I fix first?
- Why do I keep hiring for the same job?
- Is my business growing, or just getting busier?
- How do I know if a customer is costing me money?
- Why does every decision still come back to me?