The sheet for the first station, and it is free.
Volume hides sin. One number at the bottom of the page tells you nothing about where it came from, and a business can be busy in every direction while only part of it is actually paying. This first sheet asks which parts of the work are making the money — lane by lane, job by job — because every other decision in this gear needs to know which work is worth defending.
Finances gear · sheet 1 of 10
The gear turns on three things, and they fail in a fixed order. You cannot fix what you cannot read, you cannot read in time if you look too slowly, and you cannot price work you have never separated. Work them in that order.
| Lever | The question it answers | Your sheets |
|---|---|---|
| Literacy | Can you read your own numbers past the bottom line, and can you build what your work costs from the ground up? | 2, 3, 4 |
| Cadence | Do you look often enough to change what happens today, and do you know how fast money arrives against how fast it must leave? | 5, 6, 7 |
| Margin | Do you know which work makes money and which loses it, at the level of a customer or a line, not in aggregate? | 8, 9 |
When work is plentiful, revenue rises, everybody is happy, and nobody looks. When work is thin, attention goes to the absence of work rather than to the cost of doing it. There is no volume condition that produces financial attention on its own. That is why this is installed as a habit rather than waited for.
Keep this sheet. The others are worked, and worked again — a sheet filled in once is a document, and a document is not the point. The point is that you look without being asked.
Nine more, and they belong to the three reads inside Base Camp.
The sheets above belong to the read that is free, so they are free too. The ones below end the three reads behind the door — they are the pages you and your direct reports actually fill in, month after month.