There is a number on your dashboard you have never seen.
Pilots fly with dozens of instruments. Most owners fly with two: sales and the bank balance. Very few can say, this morning, where cash will be in six weeks, which location, division or product is quietly costing them margin, or what blind spot needs to be addressed. Below is a glimpse of the screen that answers it.
The instrument panel for your business.
Sample data, from a business we built this for. Every tile is chosen for the industry and the business model.
- Why is inventory at one site 12 days over target?
- Why has one location run above its expense budget three weeks in a row?
- Is a vendor about to be paid twice this month?
- Which two invoices are more than 45 days late, and why is $28K still outstanding?
- Payroll is funded through week 13.
Do you know how you're flying?
A pilot does not stare at the gauges. A pilot needs them the moment one moves.
A cockpit has dozens of indicators. For most of the flight nobody looks at them. They are there so that the instant something starts to drift, it is seen in seconds, not after the engine has failed.
Most owners fly with the window and nothing else: sales, and the bank balance. They find out about a problem when they are already deep in it. We build the instrument panel, so you can keep your eyes on the horizon and still know the second something needs you.
Your industry has its own warning lights.
There is no standard dashboard. A retailer, a landlord and a manufacturer fail in different ways, so each gets indicators chosen for how it actually makes and loses money. Find yours.
- Sales per square foot and per staff hour, by store
- Inventory days on hand and slow-mover share
- Shrink and markdown rate
- Gross margin by store, by brand
- Net margin per property after every cost
- Occupancy and booking pace vs forecast
- Days to turn a unit and repair backlog
- Debt service coverage and reserve levels
- On-time delivery and order-to-ship days
- Scrap, rework and warranty cost rate
- Cash tied up in inventory and open orders
- Quote-to-order conversion and backlog coverage
- Job margin fade, estimate vs actual
- Over- and under-billing on every job
- Backlog coverage in months
- Retainage held and cash gap by project
- Utilization and revenue per provider
- Days in receivables by payer
- Referral-to-start conversion
- Capacity and wait time by location
- Prime cost as a share of sales
- Sales per seat and table turns
- Food-cost drift by menu item
- Daily sales vs the same day last year
Then we tailor them to your business model, your systems and your thresholds. Yours will likely look different.
Design mine · book 20 minutes →The numbers that warn you months before the problem arrives.
The gauges above catch today's problems. These catch the ones that take a year to show up: a margin that slips a little each month, a customer who is becoming too important, a decision that only one person can make. None of them hurt yet. All of them are visible.
A margin that gives up three-quarters of a point a month looks harmless in any single month. It crosses the line in nine. The point of the panel is to show you this while you can still change the answer.
There is one number we check first in every business. Most owners can't answer this one. We'll show you where yours lands.
Find out your 1% →Three questions we will answer in 20 minutes.
No slides. You tell us where the numbers are hardest to get, and we show you how the screen would answer it.
- 1Where will your cash be in six weeks?Not the bank balance today, the number that decides whether next month is comfortable.
- 2Which location, division or product is quietly costing you margin?Usually it is one of them, and it is rarely the one the owner suspects.
- 3What blind spot needs to be addressed before it gets bigger?The alert you would want at 7 AM, before the problem shows up on Friday.
In place within 60 days.
A short diagnostic, then the install. The team runs it without us in the room.
A handful of numbers, an owner for each.
Thirteen weeks out, by entity or location.
Starting with what only the owner knows.
Fed from the systems you already use.
What it looks like when the back office catches up.
Custom manufacturer, annual sales in a little over two years.
Production per hour at a $10M-a-month pharmacy, with 14% lower cost per unit.
Of cash visibility across every entity for a retail, rentals and construction group.
Find out what your screen would say.
Pick a time. I will bring a live dashboard, ask three questions about your business, and show you what would be on your screen first thing tomorrow morning. If it is not a fit, I will tell you.