The three numbers to check every Monday morning
Not a forty-metric dashboard. Three numbers, five minutes, every week — and decisions that stop being made on gut feel.
We often ask the owners we meet: "How do you know if it was a good week?" The most common answer is some variant of "I can feel it." Gut feel is a good servant and a bad dashboard.
1. Money in (and money expected)
The week's deposits, plus what's invoiced but not yet paid. Cash flow kills more businesses than competition does — checking it weekly means seeing the dips six weeks out instead of being hit by them.
2. Incoming requests
Calls, forms, emails, walk-ins: how many new opportunities this week? This number is your early-warning system. Today's sales come from requests made two weeks, two months, or two seasons ago — depending on your cycle.
3. The conversion rate
Out of ten requests, how many become customers? This number shows you where to work. Lots of requests, few sales: the problem is in follow-up or the offer. Few requests, lots of sales: the problem is visibility. Both are fixable — but not with the same tools.
Why three, and not thirty
Because a five-minute ritual survives busy weeks, and a one-hour ritual dies within three Mondays. Consistency beats completeness. When one of the three numbers drops, that's when you dig.
If pulling these three numbers takes you more than five minutes, that's a tooling problem — and it gets solved once, for good.
We can set this up for you.
Every piece of advice on this page is part of what we build for our clients. A 30-minute conversation is enough to see what applies to your business.