One Page Dashboard, Big Results - Episode 196

 You can't steer a car with your eyes closed, and you definitely can't scale a business that way either. And yet, it seems that's how most business owners are operating. Surrounded by data, but not sure which numbers to trust, or how to use them.

That's where the One Page Business Dashboard comes in. Whether you're a team of one or of 150, this tool is designed to bring together the most important metrics you need, without overwhelming you. Think of it as your business's daily GPS.

Simple, focused, and always pointing toward growth. Today, we're walking through how to use the dashboard, based on the size and stage of your business, and how to avoid the chaos that comes from flying blind. Welcome to the Budding Entrepreneur Podcast.

Good day, and welcome to the Budding Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Randy Bridges. In each episode, we dive into practical business strategies that you can put to work in your business right away.

We also focus on inspiring stories from leaders, who are shaping and making things happen in their industry. It's all about giving you the tools and insights to take you and your business to the next level. So get comfortable, and let's jump right in.

Alright, alright. We are on episode 196, and today is Friday, April 25th, 2025. In our last episode, we talked about the role of the strategic advertising in generating immediate results.

This week, we're pulling back and looking at the bigger picture in a smaller and smarter way. We'll focus on how to track what matters in a single, clear dashboard. If you've ever felt like your business data is scattered, inconsistent, or just plain confusing, you're in the right place.

So here's what we're going to cover today. We're going to look at why every business needs a one-page dashboard, how your dashboard changes depending upon your size, what key numbers actually mean, and we'll break them down simply, and finally, how your dashboard connects to scaling with confidence. And of course, we'll wrap up with a sneak peek at next week's show, but for right now, let's dig into our quote of the week.

Now, I've used this one before, but it's just so good, because it can flex so well as all good truths do, and this comes from Peter Drucker. 

He said, what gets measured gets managed, and I've heard Alex Hormozi talk about this too. Whatever you focus on is what will get better, and that's really a fairly common thing that we in the consulting world understand, but a lot of times, people that are in business for the first time might not quite understand that concept, right? And because what you measure matters, you take control, and that's something that's often missed.

Without any kind of a dashboard or with the wrong dashboard, you're guessing, and that's not how your growth happens. Most of the very large companies have a C-suite that gets together, and they have agreed upon three or four key elements that they often call the big three or the big four that are the elements that will move the corporation towards the goals that are established in order to grow the business. And so in this case, we're not really doing anything more than that.

We're simply taking it at a smaller dose of what they're doing, dialing it back, and making it appropriate for the size and type of business you have. So let's talk about that, because the one page matters in this. If you've just got four dials, one dial being cranked up is going to require another one to go down.

And so as business owners, we don't struggle because we lack data. We struggle because we don't know which data to trust. Everything's buried in spreadsheets and toggling between financial reports, task lists, marketing dashboards, all this stuff.

We just don't really feel in control, and that is the problem that we have to deal with most commonly. So what I found over the years is that a lot of business dashboards try to do too much. They're overloaded with charts, metrics, and colors, but none of it ties back to action.

The one page business dashboard fixes that. For me, it strips everything down to what matters for my current business stage. Just the essentials, no more.

And based upon how a business is built, and ideally how it functions, this can make or break the direction that you're going. And here's what makes the one page dashboard powerful. As your business evolves, your dashboard evolves too.

Because what matters when you have five employees is totally different from what you need when you have 50, or even 100. So let's dive into how your dashboard shifts depending on where your company stands. And we'll go through this process so that you understand the thinking of building the dashboard based on size and factors.

And then as you grow, you'll say, oh, that was how I need to think about the next phase of my business. So let's dig into that. 

A good dashboard isn't just a collection of numbers. It's a decision-making tool, and that's a key element in how we are going to be using it and developing it. Primarily, it should help you know what to focus on, what to fix, and where to invest next. It should ideally answer questions like, am I profitable? Is my team working efficiently? Can we afford to scale right now? Most importantly, your dashboard should match your stage of business.

Far too many owners either overcomplicate things or they miss key warning signs entirely. They're often using tools that aren't built for where they are. So instead of one universal dashboard, let's look at four different versions, each designed for a current phase of business from startup to scaling.

Now at startup, you're looking at maybe you and a handful of employees, maybe five at most. Startups need survival. They do not need sophistication.

And you want to keep your dashboard lean if you're in startup mode. So some of the key metrics that you're going to be looking for are cash runway. This is how many months you can survive based upon the money that you have set aside.

So it's total cash divided by monthly expenses to get those months that you can survive. So if you have 60K and your monthly expenses are 15K, your maximum is four months runway. You'll also want to look at for that cash runway, what is your monthly revenue? You want to see all your income coming in.

And you want to understand the last point for this is client acquisition rate. How many new clients or deals per month are you bringing in? For this kind of a startup, your purpose is number one, prevent chaos. You want to make sure you don't get caught without what you need in order to run the business.

The second purpose is to build early discipline. When you understand the money coming in versus the expenses of what you're doing and you put all this together, you can make disciplined decisions rather than just picking and choosing things because they sound good. You're always looking at them from the perspective of what's going to move my business forward and what are my current clients or current customers really wanting from me.

The final one, keep your decisions simple and grounded. Those three purposes will really lock you in that using this kind of a simple one-page dashboard is going to give you the essential elements you need to make all your business decisions moving forward for quite some time. So let's look at the second type of a business, the micro business.

This is normally five to 10 employees and you can see how it kind of blends with and crosses over into the startup category. What you've ended up with here is you've got consistent revenue and probably a very tired owner, right? I mean, it's very common. Startups are some of the most difficult types of businesses to continue running well.

But now that we're in the micro business, we're going to see some things change a little bit. Our key metrics on the one-page dashboard for a micro business are profit margin. Now this is net profit divided by revenue times 100.

For example, if you have 75K in net profit and say 500,000 in revenue, so you take 75K divided by 500K and then times 100 equals 15%. Now, if this is a service-based business with say three to 10 employees, right within our target, or a lean product business with limited overhead, a 15% net margin is a healthy place to build from, but build from only. With strategic improvements, it can likely move towards 20 to 25%, which is a great sweet spot for most owner-operator businesses looking to scale sustainably.

Another key metric is client retention rate. You know, are your clients sticking or are they churning? And to a point, not only do you want to see your client retention rate, you also want to look at your team retention rate. That's a second half of that one that would be a good one.

If you don't have a lot of clients, are you keeping the people that are keeping your business going? And finally, the third metric would be team utilization. And this is where we're looking at billable hours versus what I consider to be wasted effort, which is just people getting paid to maybe not necessarily bill anything. And for this micro-business, the purposes are simple.

Clarify what to delegate and help the owner stop being the bottleneck. The third category of business for this is the small business. Your traditional 10 to 25 employees.

These are businesses that have gained traction, but they want to start growing without introducing chaos. Their key metrics really change pretty dramatically here. And we're getting now from an overview look into deep dive customer and team focus.

The first key metric is something called a Net Promoter Score. You'll often hear it referred to as NPS, and it's essentially you're surveying your customers. You're asking them, how likely are you to recommend us on a zero to 10 scale? Now, there are two parts of the net promoter, and that's the percentage of promoters with a score of nine to 10, and the percentage of detractors, which is a score from zero to six.

Now that seven and eight really don't count much. I don't add them in because I think that what they do is they kind of just give you a neutral view of something. They're not going to tell anybody about you, but they're not going to tell anybody bad about you either.

You're in that, you know, kind of a weird place. You know, you're looking at a seven or an eight as, no thanks, I appreciate you not bashing us, right? Let's say by this category, you have 70 people that are willing to give you a score. And that's a key factor, is they have to be willing to give you this.

You have 70 of them, 60 of them are promoters. They're giving you a nine to 10 score, and 10 detractors. So what you have here is an NPS score of 50.

Not great, not bad, but it gives you an idea in relation to the total number of 70. You're just doing okay. The second key metric is revenue per employee.

This is where you start looking past your profit margin and you start using your revenue by employee. Better businesses are in the 200 to $400,000 in revenue per employee. So if you have 500,000 in net revenue at 200,000 per employee, you're looking at about two and a half employees.

So two employees are going to stretch for getting things done. And three employees are going to bring down your average revenue per employee. And it's not necessarily going to be a good number.

For businesses in this 10 to 25 employees, you'd be looking at more like a million to $2 million. So now you're looking at a reasonable sized company with reasonable amounts per employee. And the final key metric is operational efficiency.

You want to measure your input versus your output related to time, money, and team. How much are you paying somebody? It's related to the revenue per employee. How much are you paying them versus how much are they generating? And a lot of times there are people in a company, especially in the 10 to 25 employee range, that they're not actively generating money.

They're actively using money. So you want to watch that operational efficiency as a ratio to give you an idea of how much you should be paying people and how much you can actually afford to pay people. Now, for purpose, these three are going to help us spot the bottlenecks.

They're going to help us build our systems and prepare for the stable growth that we're going to want. And in our fourth category, we're talking about mid-sized businesses. This is on the average of 25 to 150 employees.

And we're now going to be looking in our dashboard to give us precision. It becomes a management tool at this point. And you'll see, as we start looking at this, it's going to give us good feedback about what our impact is to the customers and what happens as a result of working with us.

The first key metric is EBITDA. Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. Now, a good example of this is, say you make $100,000 a year.

You have $10K in interest, $20K in taxes, not an uncommon number, by the way, $15K in depreciating your assets, and $5K in amortization, which is payments over time. So what your EBITDA is, and you add all these together, it started with $100K in net income. It's now $150K.

So that gives you a good idea of what your revenue to costs are and where your impact is. And you can go back and look at this for your cash runway. This is a more structured version of things, less on the cash side and more on the asset side.

The second one is client lifetime value. How much are your clients paying you in total value over time? And a lot of times this is something that smaller companies can focus on, but I don't necessarily think it's a good idea for them to focus on it all the time. That's why it wouldn't belong on the dashboard.

Maybe an annual goal to increase a lifetime value would be a good goal to have, but still don't know that it should be that dialed in that you're looking at it on a daily basis. And finally, employee engagement score. Do your people love the mission or just the paycheck? And where this really shows up heavily in hurting companies is you get a lot of people that have stayed with the company for a long period of time.

They're making really good money, but the value they're providing may not be as high as it should be, especially when compared to younger people, other people that have been with the business for less time. They're still excited about things. They're still dealing with this.

The longer you're with a company, the more comfortable you become. So we want to see what that score is in terms of people giving us good feedback about where they see themselves, doing the employee reviews. Are we getting good information back or are we just getting information, right? With a mid-sized business, your purpose is twofold.

Run a performance culture and connect strategy to real-time results. If we wrap all these up together, you can see how they logically move from one to the next. But the dashboard is not a report.

It's a control panel. Think of it as flying your plane with controls that are giving you feedback on how well you're doing as your flight proceeds. With it, your dashboard can tell you what's happening right now, what needs your attention, what's working well, and most importantly, where you're ready to grow next.

So I hope this provided you some context, more than just content, on why the one-page business dashboard is such a good tool for you to be able to use as your business is growing and as you move through the process. Next week, we'll be shifting our focus from internal clarity to external connection as we explore the topic of Mastering the Client Journey from Lead to Loyal Advocate. Most businesses think their job is done once a client signs a contract.

But in reality, that's just the beginning. Because when your client journey is aligned with your systems, your marketing, and your team, growth becomes predictable and your reputation becomes unstoppable. 

That's it for this episode. I hope you picked up some valuable insights and maybe even sparked a few new ideas. If you want to keep the conversation going or maybe even explore partnerships, don't hesitate to reach out. And hey, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share this with someone who needs to hear it.

The steps you take today could be the start of something big tomorrow. For the budding entrepreneur, I wish you the best in your health, your wealth, your business, your family, everything about you. Take care, and we'll see you back here next week.