SPOT Dashboard™

What goes on it

Three groups, and the third is the one that makes it yours.

Position. Where you stand today.

• Cash position, as of today
• Accounts receivable
• Deposits, if the business takes them

Performance. How the engine ran.

• Revenue
• Gross margin, and gross margin percentage
• Contribution margin and its percentage, if the business tracks them
• Net profit, and net profit percentage

The 1 or 2 you are actually watching right now. Marketing spend if the constraint is demand. Completion rate if it is production. These move as the business changes what it is fighting, and they are the reason no 2 SPOT Dashboards look the same.

The island test

The idea started as the Island KPI, about 10 years ago.

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?

Two failures show up immediately. If you cannot say what belongs on the page, you do not have a dashboard, you have reporting. If you cannot direct the business from the back of it, the page is missing the numbers that decisions actually turn on.

Why 5 to 10

Below 5 and you are missing the context to interpret any of them. Above 10 and the page stops being read, which is the same as not having one.

Ten is the ceiling, not the target.

This sits one level up from Vital Numbers, which are the 3 to 5 that actually drive the outcome. A SPOT Dashboard™ carries those plus the position numbers you need in order to read them, which is why its ceiling is 10 rather than 5.

It cascades

There is no single company dashboard.

The chief executive's page is not the marketing lead's page, which is not the accounting manager's, which is not the front-line supervisor's. Each level runs on the numbers it can actually move.

What holds it together is that every page rolls into the one above it. When that chain is intact, a person at any level can point at their own page and say how it reaches the company's. When it breaks, you get a leadership dashboard nobody below leadership can affect, and a front line measured on numbers that do not add up to anything.

Common mistake

Adding a number because it is available.

Availability is not a reason. Every number past the tenth costs attention on the other 10, and the cost is invisible: nothing breaks, the page just quietly stops being the thing anyone checks before deciding. That is the exact route by which a SPOT Dashboard™ decays into financial theater.