Leading before lagging
Revenue is a lagging indicator. By the time it moves, the cause is four to eight weeks old and you cannot do anything about it. Booked calls, close rate and technician availability are leading indicators — they move first, and they are the ones you can still act on.
A dashboard that is all lagging metrics is a history lesson. Aim for roughly half leading.
Demand — is the phone ringing?
Weekly, split by source:
- Booked calls per week — the leading indicator for everything downstream.
- Cost per booked call — rising cost with flat volume means the channel is saturating.
- Booking rate (calls answered → jobs booked) — below 70% and the problem is your call handling, not your marketing.
- Unbooked call reasons — a short list, reviewed weekly. This is the cheapest revenue in the business.
Delivery — is the work profitable?
- Average ticket by division — the fastest signal that discounting has started.
- Gross margin by division — weekly, not monthly. Monthly is too late to change anything.
- Callback / warranty rate — a direct margin leak and the best single proxy for workmanship.
- Job completion rate on first visit — drives both margin and review scores.
Capacity — can you do more?
- Billable hour efficiency — billable hours over paid hours. Below 60% is common and expensive; above 75% is strong.
- Revenue per technician per week — the clearest measure of whether adding people is adding profit.
- Technician turnover, rolling twelve months — your capacity ceiling and your recruiting bill in one number.
Durability — will it still be here next year?
- Active maintenance agreements, and net change this month. The one metric that improves both profit and multiple at the same time.
What to leave off
Total revenue with no margin beside it — it invites chasing volume at any price. Social media followers, unless you can trace a booked call to them. Website visits without conversion. Anything nobody has acted on in three months: if a metric has never changed a decision, it is decoration, and it dilutes attention from the ones that do.
Key point. Every metric on the dashboard needs a threshold and a named owner. A number with neither is a number nobody is responsible for.
Cadence
Weekly, thirty minutes, same time, same order, one page. Demand, delivery, capacity, durability. Each red number gets an owner and a date before the meeting ends. Monthly, add the P&L review. Quarterly, look at twelve-month trends and revise the thresholds themselves — targets that never change stop being targets.
Put it to work
Part of Fix My Business and Profit Coaching .