SPOT Dashboard™

You get shipped off to an island

Once a day a message in a bottle arrives. One sheet of paper from your team.

What is on that sheet? And can you write your instructions on the back of it and have the business keep running?

That is the test. We have been putting it to founders across a table for 18 years, and we call it the Island KPI.

The second half is the half that matters. Anybody can list numbers they would like to see. Writing an instruction on the back means the page has to carry enough for you to actually decide something, from an island, with nobody to ask.

Almost nobody fills the page on the first pass, and the 2 ways it goes wrong show up in about 30 seconds.

• You cannot say what belongs on the sheet. You do not have a dashboard. You have reporting.
• You can list the numbers, and then you cannot write an instruction on the back. The page is missing the numbers decisions actually turn on. It is a scoreboard for a game you are not allowed to play.

What you get when the page is right sounds smaller than it is. You stop opening 6 tabs to answer 1 question. And when 2 people in your company quote different revenue numbers, nobody argues about who is right, because everybody already knows which page is the page.

A pane has edges. A source does not.

Every software vendor on earth will sell you a single pane of glass. Every advisory firm will sell you a single source of truth. Both phrases mean everything in one place, and everything in one place is exactly what makes a page unreadable.

We are not building the place the data lives. We are building the thing you look through before you decide. SPOT is a Single Pane Of Truth. A source has no limit and never had one. A pane has edges, and the edges are the whole feature.

Which means the enemy here is not a missing report. It is the reporting you already own. The 40-tab model nobody opens. The board pack somebody builds for 3 days and 4 people skim for 4 minutes. The screen in the lobby cycling charts that stopped meaning anything the month it went up. A dashboard nobody opens before deciding is financial theater with better fonts, and the version that lands after the last moment anyone could have acted has its own name: Autopsy Accounting.

Run the arithmetic on that pack, because nobody ever does. Building it takes 3 days a month, which is 36 days a year, the better part of 2 months of a salaried person, every year, forever. Now ask what decision it changed last quarter. If the answer takes more than a few seconds, you have your number.

Three groups, and the third one is the only one that is yours

Position. Where you stand today. This is your balance sheet, read as a snapshot instead of a document.

• Cash in the bank, as of today
• Your Cash Shot Clock™, which is how many days that cash buys at your current burn
• Accounts receivable, with AR days sitting next to it
• Deposits held

That last line is not optional, and here is where we part company with your accountant. Deposits get filed as a liability, down in the column labeled things that are bad, and they are the cheapest capital you will ever get. They go on the page. If the line reads zero, that is not a formatting problem. That is the message.

Performance. How the engine ran. Your profit and loss statement. Ultra CFO™ calls the P&L the Performance Report, because grading the machine is the entire thing it does.

Ours is built with a line in it that the version your accountant hands you does not have, and it is the most useful line on the page.

• Revenue
• minus cost of sales, which gets you gross margin
• minus direct labor, the salary cost of the people who produce the thing you sell rather than the people who run the company
• = contributing margin, in dollars and as a percentage
• minus overhead, marketing and the Owner's Piggy Bank™
• = net profit, in dollars and as a percentage

If you only get 1 number off this page, take contributing margin.

Gross margin still has its place. It is the right number when you are pricing a product line or negotiating with a supplier. But most of the companies we work with sell people's time and expertise, and in a service business your people are the cost of delivery. A gross margin that leaves direct labor sitting below it is grading a factory you do not own. Contributing margin puts your largest real cost back inside the number, which is why on an operator's page it is the one that replaces gross margin rather than sitting beside it.

Position and Performance sit next to each other on purpose. A healthy Performance Report beside a falling cash line is the most common surprise in this business, and it has its own entry.

The 1 or 2 you are actually watching right now. Marketing spend when the choke point is demand. Same-day job closeout when it is production. Whatever it is, it is almost always whichever of the 10 levers sits closest to the thing currently holding you back, and it moves as the business changes what it is fighting.

The first 2 groups look roughly the same in every company we have ever opened. This group is the reason no 2 SPOT Dashboards™ look alike, and it is the group founders leave off.

What one actually looks like

Everybody describes a one-page dashboard. Almost nobody shows you one. So here is a page for a $7M specialty contractor, 8 lines. We made the company up for this entry, so nothing on it belongs to a real client.

Line	Today
Cash in the bank	$312,000
Cash Shot Clock™	74 days
Accounts receivable	$488,000, at 52 AR days
Deposits held	$95,000
Revenue, month to date	$610,000
Gross margin	31%
Net profit	6%
Crews booked, next 2 weeks	6 of 9

Now write on the back. 74 days puts the clock in the Tight band, and $488,000 parked at 52 days is where that came from, not the sales pipeline. So the instruction is: bill the closed jobs this week instead of waiting for the 1st, and put a deposit line into the standard agreement. One page, under a minute, and nobody had to open anything else.

Notice what is missing. There is no EBITDA on that page, and that is deliberate. EBITDA is a buyer's number, and this is an operator's page. It is the right number when you are selling the company or sitting with a lender, and it is the wrong number on a Tuesday, because it politely sets aside interest, taxes, and the equipment you had to buy, which are 3 of the fastest ways an account empties. A good part of the advisory world will disagree with us here. The bank statement will not.

Why the ceiling is 10, and where that number came from

Below 5 numbers you are missing the context to read any of them. A revenue figure with nothing around it is a mood, not a measurement.

Above 10, the page stops being read, which is the same as not having one.

10 is the ceiling, not the target.

We should be straight about where 5 to 10 comes from, because a band with no provenance is worth what you paid for it. We did not pull it out of a dataset and we are not going to dress it up as one. It comes from 18 years and more than 1,000 businesses, watching which pages actually get opened before a decision and which ones quietly stop getting opened at all. It is a reading of how much attention a page can hold, not a rule you are out of compliance with. If your page runs to 12 lines you have not failed anything. You have a question worth asking: do 2 of those lines belong on somebody else's page?

One note on where this sits in the system. Vital Numbers are the 3 to 5 that actually drive an outcome. A SPOT Dashboard™ carries those plus the position numbers you need in order to read them, which is why it gets 10 and they get 5.

There is no company dashboard

Our own acronym says one pane, so let us settle what it is one of. One pane per person. Never one pane per company.

The chief executive's page is not the crew supervisor's page, and pretending otherwise kills both. Gross margin has no business on the supervisor's sheet, because at 2pm on a Wednesday there is nothing he can do to it. Jobs closed out same day, 7 of 9, belongs there, because he can go fix that before lunch.

And those 2 pages are the same page. Same-day closeout is when the paperwork lands, which is when the invoice goes out, which is AR days, which is the Cash Shot Clock™ reading the chief executive is staring at. One chain, 2 rungs apart, and the supervisor is holding the far end of it.

Break the chain and you get the 2 failures we meet most often: a leadership dashboard nobody below leadership can affect, and a front line measured on numbers that do not add up to anything. Both of them look like reporting is happening. Neither one moves the business.

Availability is not a reason

Almost every extra number on a page got there because it was easy to get. The software already produced it. Somebody asked for it once, 2 years ago. It was on the template.

Every number past the tenth spends attention that belonged to the other 10, and that cost never announces itself. Nothing breaks. Nobody complains. The page just quietly stops being the thing anyone checks before deciding, and 6 months later you are back to running the company on a bank balance and a feeling.

So the test for adding a line is not "is this true" and it is not "can we get it." It is: what would I do differently on Tuesday if this number moved? No answer, no line. That question costs nothing and it does most of the work.

Which 5 to 10 belong on your page is the other matter entirely. That is a reading of one business, its choke point this quarter, and who is actually going to act on each line. That reading is what a CFO Huddle™ is for.