Debra Chantry-Taylor: The Scorecard Mistakes That Keep Leaders Flying Blind

Debra Chantry-Taylor 00:00

The scorecard toolkit puts this simply: a lagging measurable is a scoreboard, while a leading measurable predicts at what is likely to happen and gives the team time to correct course. Accountability without authority is not accountability; it's scapegoating with a spreadsheet. We actually recommend that you check your scorecard every 90 days when you do your quarterly review, and say, is this still the right scorecard? Busy creates noise. Busy creates adrenaline. Busy gives people something to blame. But busy is not a commercial result. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Better Business, Better Life. I'm your host Debra Chantry-Taylor and I'm passionate about helping entrepreneurs lead a better life by creating a better business. Today, I'm doing a solo podcast, and I'm talking about something that can make some business owners glaze over faster than a finance presentation after a long lunch. Data, numbers, scorecards, measurables, metrics, KPIs-if you insist on calling them that-but whatever language you use, what we're talking about really is this handful of numbers that tell you what's really going on in your business, not what you hope is happening, not what your sales manager assures you is definitely about to happen, and certainly not what Dave reckons placed in a conversation he had with somebody three weeks ago. It's about what is actually really happening in the business, because businesses don't usually get into serious trouble from one enormous catastrophe that appears out of nowhere. There are normies and clues. Sales activity has been dropping for six weeks. Debtor days have been creeping up. Gross margin has quietly slipped. Customer complaints are increasing. The jobs are being delivered later. Quotes are taking longer to get out. Key people are leaving. Nobody has completed their quarterly conversations. The evidence is usually there. It's just that the business simply isn't looking at it, or it is looking at it six months later when the accountant produces the financial statements and everybody says, "Oh, that's not good. No shit, Sherlock. But by then, the game has already been played, and so today I want to explain why data matters, why most business scorecards don't work nearly as well as they should, how to identify leading and lagging indicators, what good numbers look like, what bad numbers look like, and how to use your scorecard to create better conversations, quicker decisions, and have fewer nasty surprises. I'm also giving you a scorecard measurables toolkit to accompany this episode, and it includes examples across finance, sales, marketing, operations, people, customer service, digital, and the whole business. And this is not a pick five numbers off the list and call it done exercise. If you're using this as a tick box exercise, you're missing the point spectacularly. It's designed to get your leadership team thinking, because the right numbers for a construction business will be very, very different from those for a professional services firm, a manufacturer, an insurance company, a retail, or a veterinary group. They may even be different for the same business 12 months from now, and your scorecard should reflect what matters in your business in this particular season of its growth. And it's why we actually recommend that you check your scorecard every 90 days when you do your quarterly review, and say, "Is this still the right scorecard? Is this going to help us achieve our next 90 days and take us towards our one-year plan, our three-year picture, and our 10-year target. So, why data matters? I have been rereading the book "Data: Harness Your Numbers to Go from Uncertain to Unstoppable" by Mark O'Donnell, Angela Kalimus, and Mark Stanley. And one of the ideas explored in this book is that a strong data component means running the business using a handful of numbers that give you a genuine pulse, help predict future results, and allow you to make faster, better decisions. Now that phrase really matters: a handful of numbers, not 87, not a dashboard resembling the cockpit of a Boeing 747, not every piece of information your software can produce because somebody got excited about Power BI. Just a handful of numbers that tell you whether the business is really healthy. Think about your car. You don't need the dashboard to explain every mechanical function taking place underneath the bonnet.

Debra Chantry-Taylor 04:17

You need to know your speed, how much fuel or battery you have, whether the engine is overheating, whether the tires are losing pressure, whether a warning light has come on. The warning light doesn't necessarily diagnose the entire problem, but it tells you that something needs attention, and that is what a scorecard should do. The data book uses the analogy of the check engine light. A red number doesn't always tell you precisely what is wrong. What it does is it tells you where to start looking before the issue becomes a large, expensive surprise, and that is a mistake I see teams make all the time. They say, "But that number doesn't explain why, and it's not supposed to. The scorecard is not the entire diagnostic system; it's the early. Warning system. It says, "Open the bonnet. Something's going on here. Let's find out what's really going on. And then the leadership team investigates, identifies the real issue, discusses it properly, and solves it quickly and permanently. Because really good leadership teams solve issues quickly and permanently. They don't stare at a red number for 13 consecutive weeks while telling themselves they're monitoring it or know what's going on, because monitoring is not solving. The founder's gut. Now I love entrepreneurial instinct, and you know I'm a visionary myself. I've also worked with hundreds of founders, visionaries, and leadership teams, and the founder will often feel that something is wrong before anybody else has spotted it. They'll say, "I don't think the pipeline is as strong as everyone says. I think we're losing money on these jobs. I'm worried that our customers aren't as happy as we think. We're busy, but I don't think we're productive. And whether you like it or not, quite often they are right. Their brain has absorbed 1000s of conversations, patterns, behaviours, and experiences. Their intuition is picking up something the conscious mind hasn't yet articulated. But the intuition should be the beginning of the investigation, not the final verdict, because gut instinct without data can become real paranoia, and data without judgement can become stupidity. You actually need to have both. So the founder's instinct might say something is wrong with sales. The data helps you determine whether the issue is not enough leads, poor quality leads, too few first meetings, proposals not being sent, a weak conversion rate, deals taking too long, an unrealistic pipeline, or as the book suggests, somebody smoking opium and insisting that one enormous deal is definitely landing next week. Problem is, it's been landing next week since February, and at some stage we need to accept that it may not be landing at all. And the book makes this point rather bluntly: positive talk cannot be allowed to overrule factual measures week after week. It describes the habit of relying on mythical future deals as smoking opium. I see this regularly. A sales manager reports a pipeline of 3 million pounds, $3 million, depending on where you're listening. It sounds fantastic. Everybody relaxes. We've got a great pipeline, but when you inspect it, half of the opportunities haven't had meaningful contact in the last 90 days, several have no agreed next step. One of the prospects has stopped replying altogether and is ghosting you. Another opportunity has been sitting at 80% probability since the invention of the fax machine. So whether we like it or not, that is not a pipeline. That's a collection of wishes entered into a CRM system. A useful pipeline number needs rules. What qualifies as an opportunity? What stage is it genuinely at? When was the last meaningful contact? Is there an agreed next action? What is the realistic close date? What probability weighting are you applying? Because data is only useful when people can trust it. Bad data creates false confidence, which may be more dangerous than having no data at all. Leading versus lagging indicators. Let's talk about the distinction that causes leadership teams the most confusion: leading and lagging indicators. A lagging indicator tells you what's already happened: revenue earned, profit made, customers lost, employees who have left, products returned, jobs delivered late, cash in the bank. These numbers matter, but they're a result of an earlier activity. So a leading indicator tells you what's likely to happen. It gives you a chance to intervene before the final results arrive.

Debra Chantry-Taylor 08:39

Sales calls made, first meetings booked, proposals sent, outstanding jobs, production milestones completed, customer check-in calls, invoices raised on time, people reviews completed. The scorecard toolkit puts this simply: a lagging measurable is a scoreboard, while a leading measurable predicts that what is likely to happen and gives the team time to correct course, you'll find the link to the scorecard measurables toolkit in the notes for this podcast. So imagine this: imagine you're trying to lose weight but only weighing yourself once every three months. You step on the scales at the end of the quarter and discover you've gained six kilos. Useful information, yes. Is it true? Yes, but it's still a bit bloody lagged, isn't it? The lagging measure is your weight, where the leading measures might include things like how many days you've exercised, how many meals you planned, your daily protein intake, your alcohol-free days, your average steps, how consistently you slept. Those behaviours don't guarantee the result, but they strongly influence it. And business works in the same way. Revenue is a lagging indicator. Revenue does not magically appear because it's written as a goal. There's normally a chain of activity before it. Needs are generated, prospects are contacted, meetings happen, needs are understood. Totals are sent, follow-ups take place, deals are closed, work is delivered, invoices are raised, cash is collected. So, if revenue is low, saying we need more revenue is not a solution. Thank you, Captain Obvious. All you need to do is locate the broken link in the chain. So, reverse engineering the result. One of the most useful ideas in the data book is to begin with the result you want and work backwards through the activities required to produce it. EOS calls us getting what you want, and the logic is really simple. In order to achieve this, we must do that. Then, in order to do that, we must do this first. You continue until you reach an activity that somebody can complete, influence, and measure each week. Let's use a straightforward sales example. You want one new client each month. You know that you close half of the proposals that you actually present. Therefore, to win one client, you need two proposals. You know half of your needs assessment lead to a proposal. Therefore, you need four needs assessments. You know, one in four meaningful prospect conversations leads to a needs assessment. Therefore, you need 16 meaningful conversations. You know that you successfully connect with half the prospects you approach. Therefore, you need 32 suitable prospects added to your target list each month, or eight each week. Now we have something useful. One new client per month is a lagging result. Eight suitable prospects added each week is an activity you can manage now. Four meaningful contacts each week is another, and one needs assessment each week is another. Now you don't need to have all of those, but you pick the one or two leading indicators and a one lagging indicator, and that way you've got a nice chain to see where the possibility of things going wrong is. Obviously, the precise conversion ratios will differ in your business. That's why copying somebody else's scorecard is largely pointless. Perhaps you need 20 prospects to generate one meeting. Perhaps almost every qualified prospect books. Perhaps your sales cycle is 10 days. Perhaps it's 18 months. Use your own actual data, and when you don't have actual data yet, make an intelligent estimate. Begin tracking it and refine it over time. Don't wait for the perfect solution, and don't leave the goal blank for six months because you don't know the perfect answer. Pick a number, test it, learn, adjust. I always say that clarity creates confidence, but clarity rarely arrives fully formed before you begin. Sometimes you have to start measuring before the pattern becomes visible. Bit of a heads up: the same number can lead and lag. People can get terribly hung up on whether something is technically leading or lagging. Don't turn it into an academic debate. The same number can be lagging for one function and leading for another. A qualified lead, for example, is a lagging result for marketing. Marketing has already done the work to generate it, but it's a leading indicator for sales. A closed sale is a lagging result for sales, but it becomes a leading indicator for operations because operations now knows work is coming.

Debra Chantry-Taylor 13:05

So completed work is lagging for operations, but leading for finance because it should lead to an invoice and eventually cash. And so, in the data book, they specifically warn against becoming too attached to terminology. Focus on the logical sequence that produces the desired result and select the numbers that best predict it. That is commercially practical. So don't waste 45 minutes arguing about the label. Just ask: Does the number help us see what is coming? Can somebody actually influence it? And will we act when it changes? If the answer is yes, it may deserve a place on the scorecard. Now I've got a real life client example where they were busy but they were losing money. So I worked with a business where the team kept talking about how busy they were. Everyone was flat out. People were working late. The schedule was full. The founder was exhausted, and from the outside it looked like a successful growing business. But the profit wasn't following the activity, and this is really dangerous because busy feels like success. Busy creates noise. Busy creates adrenaline. Busy gives people something to blame, but busy is not a commercial result. So when we look beneath the surface, popped up in the boot, if you like, or the bonnet, on the on the car, the issue was not a shortage of work. It was how the work was being quoted and delivered. So the business was tracking revenue, but it was not looking closely enough at things like quoted hours versus actual hours, gross margin by job, rework, jobs running overdue, work in progress, capacity utilisation, changes requested but not charged, invoices delayed because jobs had not been closed properly, so the revenue looked respectable, but the business was still leaking money, and in that situation, more sales could have actually made things worse. You're pumping more stuff into a leaky funnel, and that's going to just mean that we end up losing more money rather than making money. So they would have simply sold more unprofitable work and overwhelmed an already stretched liberty, and that is why operation numbers matter. The companion toolkit describes them as numbers that protect margin after the sale has been made. People love talking about growth, but far fewer enjoy talking about whether the growth is actually profitable. A business can literally grow itself broke, and I know because I've owned businesses that succeeded and businesses that failed. I've lived through the consequence of not seeing the full picture quickly enough. And revenue is vanity when it's not supported by margin, cash, and execution. A $10 million business making no money is not automatically better than a $5 million business producing healthy profit and cash, it's just bigger, and sometimes it's bigger, messier, and considerably more stressful. Financial numbers are not enough, so another common mistake is to call a financial report a scorecard: revenue, gross profit, net profit, cash, debtors. Those numbers are absolutely vital for any business, but most of them are lagging. Your profit and loss statement is telling you about the past. Your scorecard should help you manage the future. So, again, in the data book, the authors warn against diluting the weekly scorecard with purely informational numbers, simply because the owner wants everything in one place. And I say this a lot. Visionaries want to be able to go to one place and see it all, but it's not a scorecard. Financial statements can carry the detailed lagging information. The scorecard needs a strong concentration of predictive activity-based measures, and that doesn't mean that revenue margin or cash should never appear. They often should. What it means though is they should not be the entire thing. For finance, leading measures might include invoices issued on time, overdue debtor value, debtor days, cash position against forecast, unreconciled transactions, quotes waiting for approval, expenses outside of budget, chargeable hours recorded. One of my clients discovered that his cash problem wasn't really a sales problem. The work had been completed, customers were happy, the revenue had technically been earned, but the invoices were not being raised promptly, and then nobody was systematically following up overdue accounts. The business didn't need a grand new strategy; it needed to send the bloody invoices out and get the money in the door, and that is why data is useful. It can stop the team from inventing a sophisticated answer to a very ordinary problem.

Debra Chantry-Taylor 17:27

Another client example: What gets measured gets improved. So I've seen this happen with rocks as well. A leadership team sets an important 90-day priority. Perhaps they need to launch a product, recruit a senior person, complete a system implementation, document a key process, or improve customer retention, and then for 13 weeks the rock owner says, "Yep, it's on track. Week one on track, week two on track, week three on track, week eight still apparently on track, week 12 suddenly off track. That rock was not on track for 12 weeks and then struck by lightning, the team lacked meaningful milestones or measurables. So, for a recruitment rock, you might track things like the role scorecard completed, advert live by a specific date, number of qualified applicants, first interviews completed, finalists identified, offer made, offer accepted, start date confirmed. For a process documentation rocket could be number of core processes identified, number drafted, number reviewed, number approved, percentage trained, process adherence checked. A rock without a number or a milestone attached is far too easy to describe optimistically. So we really want to make sure that our rocks are well defined, and they either have some milestones that are being measured every week, or they've got some measurables are being looked at every week to ensure that we're actually achieving the right results. The toolkit recommends adding measurables linked to current rocks, so the team can see weekly whether the priority is genuinely moving the needle. Hope is not a project management methodology. People numbers without dehumanising people. Some leaders become really uncomfortable when we talk about giving people numbers. They worry or make the culture cold, harsh, or transactional. And absolutely, it can when it's implemented badly. A call centre that worships call volume while ignoring whether customers are actually helped, is using data badly. A consulting business that measures only chargeable hours may encourage people to overservice clients, hoard work, or avoid internal development. A sales business that rewards revenue without considering margin may create a highly motivated team selling terrible deals that don't make any money. People are creative; they'll work out how to hit the number. Therefore, you, as the leadership team, had better choose the right number. Immeasurable should clarify success, not distort it. The idea that everyone has a number is not about reducing a human being to a spreadsheet cell. It's about making. Making expectations clear. It's all about boundaries. I talk a lot about boundaries, and you know, if we think about games, people love playing games because they know what the boundaries are. They know how to win. They can see the scorecard. They can see what's going on. They know how they get a penalty. So really, if you could imagine, if you don't have those boundaries clearly defined, then how do people know how to win that game? And business is a game too. So imagine being in a role where your manager says, "I just need to be more proactive. What does that mean? Proactive how? How often? With whom? What result are we trying to create? Compare that particular measure with each week, we needed to make 10 proactive client check-in calls and record any emerging risks. Now the person knows what winning looks like. A good measurable creates fairness. It reduces subjective management. It helps distinguish a person who lacks clarity, a person who needs training, a broken process, an unrealistic expectation, a capacity problem, or a person who simply isn't doing the job. And again, the data book, which I love so much, just notes that numbers can cut through, murky communication, create accountability, build clarity, and help teams solve problems faster. It also argues that clear expectations can create calm because people understand how to succeed in their role. They know how to play the game and win. That said, you can't give someone a number they cannot influence. Don't give the receptionist responsibility for company revenue. Don't give marketing responsibility for closed sales when sales owns a conversion. Don't give a project manager responsibility for margin while allowing sales to quote whatever it likes. Accountability without authority is not accountability; it's scapegoating with a spreadsheet. What about in families? Family business data. Data can be particularly helpful in family businesses because family businesses contain overlapping systems. You have the family, you have the ownership group, you have the operating business.

Debra Chantry-Taylor 22:04

A person may be a sibling, a shareholder, director, and an executive all at once, and that creates enormous potential for confusion. So, a conversation that sounds like it's about performance can quickly become entangled with history, loyalty, inheritance, parental approval, or fairness between siblings, so numbers can help create a cleaner conversation, not a cold conversation, a cleaner one. For example, your department has missed its gross margin target for eight consecutive weeks, is clearer than Dad doesn't think you're commercially minded. Customer response time has increased from four hours to 22 hours is clearer than your sister says your team doesn't care. Only 40% of agreed follow-ups were completed is clearer than you never take responsibility. So data does not remove the need for judgement, empathy, or context, but it gives the family something concrete to discuss. It helps separate the individual from the seat that they occupy. You may love somebody deeply as a brother, a daughter, a parent, or a cousin, while still acknowledging that the measurable attached to their role is consistently off track, and that's what we call care frontational leadership. We challenge people because we care about them, the business, and the results everybody says they want pretending an issue does not exist is not kindness. It's just delayed cruelty, bad scorecards. Let's talk about scorecards that look impressive but achieve almost nothing. Number one, too many numbers. I've seen leadership scorecards with 4050, or 60 measurables. Even 20 is too many because nobody knows where to look. Almost every number is read. Half the numbers are out of date. The meeting becomes a recital rather than a leadership discussion. Revenue, yep. Leads, yep. Website visits, yep. Staff lead balance, yep. Nobody is thinking. Nobody is solving. They're just reading a spreadsheet aloud, which is not why talented leaders agree to spend 90 minutes together. For the leadership team, aim for roughly five to 15 numbers. Less is more, but there may be dozens more at department level, and that is fine. That's about drilling down to understand what's really going on. The leadership team, though, only needs the critical numbers that provide the pulse of the whole business. In my toolkit, I suggest one to three measurables per leadership seat, often with more emphasis on leading than lagging indicators. Number two issue: numbers nobody owns. Who owns customer satisfaction? Everyone. No. When everyone owns a number, nobody owns a number. One person must be accountable for reporting it, understanding it, and driving the conversation when it's off track. Others may contribute, but one person owns it. Issue number three: numbers without goals. A scorecard says leads 12. Is that good? Is that bad? Were we expecting three or 30? Every measurable needs a goal, a range. Or a threshold, you might want a number to be greater than or equal to a target, less than or equal to a target, exactly equal to a target, or inside an acceptable range. And that target should create an early warning without making the score scorecard permanently red. Again, the data book recommends that goals can generally be met about 80% of the time, while still providing enough tension to improve performance, and don't forget, there's always a yes/no in a scorecard as well. There's not be a number. It could be a number, it could be a percentage, it could be a range, but it could also be a yes/no. Are all of our clients happy? That's a yes/no. The no would then lead us to drill further down. Issue number four: vanity metrics. Things like social media followers, website traffic, newsletter subscribers, downloads. These can be useful, but they can also be meaningless. 10,000 website visitors who never inquire may be less valuable than 500 highly relevant visitors who convert. A LinkedIn post receiving 100,000 impressions may create no commercial result. It was just a fun environment. Meanwhile, a post seen by one ideal prospect may lead to a $50,000 engagement. So the question is not can we measure this. The question is does it matter? So don't measure where the light is brightest. Measure where the answer is likely to be. The data book uses an analogy where they use the story of someone searching under a streetlight because that's where the light is, even though the keys are somewhere else. Issue number five: numbers that never trigger action. A number is read every single week.

Debra Chantry-Taylor 26:36

Nobody adds it to the issues list. Nobody asks why. Nobody changes the target, nobody fixes the process, and nobody addresses the person. And after a while, red just becomes wallpaper. Again, the data book compares missed targets with rumble strips on a motorway. They're not a reason to panic, but they are a signal to correct course. When teams repeatedly miss targets without acting, either they're ignoring something important or the measurable is not important enough to keep. Your scorecard should produce action; otherwise, it is a declaration. And green numbers can hide problems too. Don't only question red numbers. Sometimes green numbers are lying to you. Not literally, of course, because numbers lack that level of initiative. But the way they are defined can create a misleading picture. A sales team may hit its proposal target by sending poorly qualified proposals. A customer service team may hit its response time goal with useless automated replies. Operations may hit an on-time delivery target by quietly moving promise dates. Recruitment may hit its time to hire measure by employing the first available person rather than the right person. Marketing may generate its target number of leads, but none fit the ideal customer profile. So, ask what behaviour is this measurable encouraging? Could someone technically hit the number while harming the business? And what companion measure protects the quality? For example, sales activity plus conversion rate, on-time delivery plus error rate, utilisation plus customer satisfaction, speed to hire plus successful probation completion, leads generated plus qualified lead rate, revenue plus gross margin, customer response times plus resolution rate. One number rarely tells the entire story. You want enough information to avoid being misled, but not so much the signal disappears in the noise. That balance takes iteration. Suck it and see. Keep changing. Take your time. Get it right, because your first scorecard will not be perfect, and this matters enormously. Your first scorecard will probably be a bit rubbish. Let's be honest. It's normal. You'll discover that some numbers are impossible to collect. Some are collected inconsistently. Some don't predict anything useful. Some goals are too easy. Some goals are complete fantasy. Two numbers measure essentially the same thing. Another belongs on a departmental scorecard rather than the leadership scorecard. A critical number is missing. The person named as owner has no actual control over it. That's good. All of that stuff is good. That means that you are learning. One of the business examples in the data book describes Bush Construction moving through several versions of its scorecard. Its sales measures initially became too complicated, then was simplified to five meaningful numbers. The team learned effective scorecards evolve should drive action and do not need to be perfect before you begin, and that mirrors what I see with clients. The best teams don't build a scorecard once and bronze it. They review it. They ask, "Is this still the right measure? Does this target still make sense? Has the business changed? Are we getting useful issues from it? Is it helping us predict? We had one client whose scorecard worked well when the business was smaller, but then as the company grew and added more people, expanded its services, and created the operational complexity, the original numbers were no longer enough. And that wasn't a failure; the business had changed. The scorecard needed to grow up with it, and your numbers should be stable enough to reveal trends, but not so sacred that you keep tracking something irrelevant for three years. Weekly numbers matter. Why weekly? Because monthly is often too slow. Imagine discovering at the end of the month a proposal stopped going out in week one. You've already lost four weeks. Imagine waiting till the quarterly review to discover a key customer has received no proactive contact for three months. Imagine learning six months later, that debtor days have been steadily climbing. A weekly rhythm allows the team to see patterns while there's still time to respond, and it also reduces drama. So when numbers are reviewed regularly, they become normal. There's less scope for ambush. You don't reach the end of the year and suddenly announce that someone has been underperforming for nine months. The information has already been visible. The conversations have been happening, support has been provided, actions have been agreed, and that's just healthier for everybody involved. It also means that one bad week is not going to trigger hysteria.

Debra Chantry-Taylor 30:52

You can distinguish a one-off fluctuation from a genuine trend, and context really matters. Perhaps a public holiday affected the number. Perhaps a major project temporarily changed capacity. Perhaps several customers paid a day after the reporting cut off. So don't overreact to noise, but don't explain away every mess either. There's a fine line between context and excuses, and leadership really means knowing the difference. Data should lead to issues. The real power of the scorecard is not the scorecard itself. It is the quality of the conversation it creates. A red number should produce a question: Why? What has changed? Is this a one-off? Is there a pattern? Is the target wrong? Is the process being followed. Does somebody need support? Do we have a capacity issue? Is the person in the wrong seat? Are customers behaving differently? Has our market shifted? Have we created a bottleneck elsewhere? The scorecard surfaces the issue, then the team solves it, and in my experience, recurring issues often reveal a missing measurable. If the same customer delivery issue appears every month, what weekly number could have warned you earlier? Perhaps it's overdue jobs. Perhaps it's work in progress. Perhaps it's jobs waiting for customer approval. Perhaps production milestones missed. Perhaps available capacity for the next four weeks. If the same recruitment issue appears every quarter, what should you track? Applications received, candidates passing the initial screening, interviews completed, offers accepted, time to hire, probation success, or if cash is constantly a surprise, what number is missing? Is it invoices not raised? Is it overdue debtors? Is it cash forecast variance? Is it work completed but not billed? Is it deposits not collected? A good question for your team is: What number had we tracked it would have warned us about this three weeks earlier? And that one question can radically improve a scorecard. Everyone has a number. As your leadership scorecard matures, take data deeper into the business. Departments should have scorecards. Individual roles should have clear measurables. Not necessarily dozens. Often, one meaningful, manageable number creates enormous clarity. A receptionist might own unanswered calls. A bookkeeper might own invoices raised within 24 hours. A project manager might own percentage of milestones achieved on time. An account manager might proactive client reviews completed. A recruiter might own qualified candidates presented. A warehouse manager might own dispatch accuracy. A leader might own quarterly conversations completed on time. The number should connect the person's everyday activity with what the business is trying to achieve. That is where data becomes motivating rather than bureaucratic. People can see how they contribute. One of the case studies in the data book describes safety audit compliance moving from poor to 100% once it was consistently measured and visible. Leaders reported that people became motivated by knowing their numbers and understanding why they mattered, and that's because visibility changes behaviour. What gets measured tends to get attention. What gets discussed tends to improve. What gets ignored tends to become an issue. So, how do you build your scorecard? Where do you even begin? I would suggest you start with what you want, not with the software, not with the spreadsheet, not with a dashboard, not with a list of generic KPIs downloaded from the internet. I want you to think about that they're designed, not even in the accompanying toolkit that I've put in the links for you. That's designed just to get you thinking. Well, I want you to think about what results must the business produce. I mean, usually the broad outcomes are fairly. Win suitable customers, retain valuable customers, deliver what was promised, deliver it profitably, attract and retain the right people, generate enough cash, complete the priorities required for the future. As I always like to say, every single business sells shit, makes shit, feels for shit, and they do that through people. So whatever your shit is. It could be a service. It could be a product. You need to make sure that your scorecard is ensuring you are delivering on those promises. Once you know what the broad outcomes are, then you can work backwards. What activities create those results? What points in the process predict success or failure? What number would give you an early warning. What can be measured every single week, and who genuinely owns it? For every proposed number, then ask yourself the questions: Seven questions. Does it help us achieve our one-year goals or longer-term vision?

Debra Chantry-Taylor 35:56

Is it simple and consistently measurable? Is it sufficiently predictive? Can somebody actually influence it? Does one person clearly own it? Will we act when it is off track? Be honest about that one. And does it belong at leadership level or department level? Then begin. Get your scorecard. Set the goals. Put next week's date on it. Assign some ownership to each of those numbers. Agree when the numbers must be submitted. Review them every week, and when something is off track, create an issue and solve it. After a quarter, look back over the 13 weeks. What patterns can you see? What numbers created useful conversations? What never changed? What was constantly red, what was always green but told you nothing, and so therefore what should be removed, replaced, or moved down a level? This is a discipline; it's not a one-off workshop. The data book summarises several principles behind strong data habits, including what gets measured gets done. The scorecard provides a pulse and predictive ability, leaders must inspect what they expect, and one person must own it. And consistency is worth the effort. So let me leave you with this: data is not about turning your business into a machine devoid of instinct, creativity, or humanity. It is about seeing clearly. It is about knowing the difference between a feeling and a fact, it's about spotting small problems before they become expensive ones. It's about helping people understand what success looks like. It's about replacing vague frustration with a useful conversation. It's about giving founders the confidence to stop gripping the wheel quite so tightly, because when you genuinely know the pulse of the business, you don't need to chase everybody for updates. You don't need to wake up at two a.m. wondering whether the pipeline is real. You don't need to wait for the quarterly financials to discover that the margin has disappeared. You don't need to micromanage every detail to feel safe. Clarity creates confidence, and confidence creates freedom. So download the scorecard measurables toolkit that accompanies this episode. Go through it with your leadership team. Circle the numbers that might be relevant. Don't copy all of them; that would be completely bonkers. Use them to generate thinking, and then narrow your scorecard digs a small number of weekly measurables that tell you whether your business is healthy, whether the future is heading in the right direction, and where you need to act. And remember, a number only deserves a place on your scorecard when it is genuinely owned, consistently measured, and useful enough to trigger action. That is also the final test of that in the toolkit. Your business is already producing clues. The question is whether you are paying attention, because flying by the seat of your pants may feel exciting for a while, but eventually you run out of runway. And just remember, I love to use sports cars as an analogy. You don't drive a sports car at speed around a track by looking in the rear vision mirror. You drive it by looking ahead where you're going, knowing where you need to be, and looking at your dashboard for signs that you need to do something differently. So, thanks for listening. Go build a better business so you can live a better life.