Software makes it easy to measure everything. Most CRMs, ad accounts and website tools come with dashboards full of charts. Owners look at them once, feel buried, and go back to running the business on gut feel.
We ask clients to look at five numbers. That's it. Together they follow a customer from first contact to money in the bank, and they show where things are going wrong.
The five numbers
Leads generated
How many new enquiries came in this week, from every channel: website, phone, email, social media and referrals. If this number is low, the problem is getting found. Look at your website, your ads, your reviews or your referral network.
Calls booked
How many of those leads agreed to a call, a site visit or a quote meeting. If leads are healthy but bookings are low, the problem is usually speed and follow-up. People enquired, then nobody got back to them quickly enough, or they were contacted once and dropped.
Calls held
How many booked calls actually happened. A gap between booked and held means no-shows. Reminders by text and email, and a confirmation the day before, are the usual fix.
Deals closed
How many of those conversations turned into signed work. If calls are happening but few close, look at the offer, the quote, the price, or how long the quote took to go out after the call.
Revenue
What those deals are worth. If the number of deals is steady but revenue isn't, look at job size. Are you winning the small jobs and losing the big ones?
Why the five together beat any single number
Each number on its own tells you very little. Revenue alone tells you how the week went, not why. The value is in the gaps between them.
Here is an illustrative week for a trades business, not real figures. Say you had 30 leads, 12 calls booked, 7 calls held, 3 deals closed and $18,000 in revenue. The biggest drop is from 12 booked to 7 held: five people agreed to a call and didn't turn up. That points to reminders and confirmations, not more ad spend. Without the five numbers side by side, the natural reaction to a slow week would be to buy more leads.
Your numbers will look different. Write down last week's five and find the biggest drop between two of them. That's where to start.
Why weekly, not monthly
Monthly reporting is too slow for a business turning over $1M to $20M a year. If follow-up breaks in the first week of the month, a monthly report shows it weeks later, after a month of lost enquiries. Weekly gives you four chances a month to spot a problem and change something.
Daily is too fast. Numbers bounce around from day to day, and reacting to every dip wastes time. A week is long enough to see a pattern and short enough to act on it.
Weekly also builds a habit. The same five numbers, at the same time, every week. After a couple of months you know what a normal week looks like, and an unusual one stands out straight away.
How our weekly report and meeting work
When we run the system for you, the five numbers don't depend on someone remembering to update a spreadsheet. Every lead sits in one pipeline in our CRM, tagged with where it came from, and the numbers come straight out of it.
Every week you get a short report: the five numbers, what we did that week and what's next. Then we meet with you every week to go through it together: what moved, what didn't, and what we're changing next. Your account manager is one message away between meetings, and nothing changes in your system without you knowing about it.
The meeting matters as much as the report. A report on its own gets skimmed. Sitting down with someone who can explain the numbers, and agreeing on the next change, is what turns reporting into decisions.
Start this week
- Write the five headings on a page or in a spreadsheet.
- Fill in last week's numbers as best you can, even if some are rough.
- Find the biggest drop between two numbers.
- Pick one change aimed at that drop, and check the numbers again next week.
If you can't fill in some of the numbers at all, that tells you something too. Those parts of the business aren't being tracked, so nobody can manage them.