Five Numbers Worth Checking Every Monday
You don't need a dashboard with forty charts. A handful of numbers tells you most of what you need to know about how the business is doing.
Key Takeaways
- What it costs to win a customer tells you whether your marketing is paying for itself.
- A customer's lifetime value shows why keeping customers deserves more attention.
- Your close rate shows where leads are slipping away.
- Profit per job separates busy work from good work.
- Revenue per hour worked shows whether you need to hire, or just need to tighten up.
Most owners I talk to have a gut feel for how things are going. Gut feel is useful. It's also how a slow month turns into a slow quarter before anyone notices. These five numbers are the ones I'd check every Monday.
1. What it costs to win a customer
Add up what you spent on marketing and sales, then divide by the number of new customers. If it costs more to win a customer than you make from them, something needs a rethink.
2. What a customer is worth over time
The total you can expect from a customer over the whole relationship, including repeat work. Most owners underestimate this one, which is why they underinvest in follow-up and keeping customers happy.
3. Close rate
The share of inquiries that turn into paying customers. A low number can mean your pricing is off, your replies are slow, or the leads aren't a good fit. Improving it grows revenue without spending another dollar on marketing.
4. Profit per job
Some work looks great on the invoice and barely makes money once you count labor and materials. Tracking this shows which work is actually worth chasing.
5. Revenue per hour worked
Labor is usually the biggest expense. This number shows where time is being well spent, and whether you really need to hire or just need to take some busywork off the team's plate first.
Make Monday easier
Tracking these by hand is fine to start. I built a free spreadsheet you can copy and fill in. Once you know which numbers matter to you, this is also a great thing to automate: a short summary pulled from your accounting and sales tools, sent to your phone every Monday morning.
Free numbers tracker (Google Sheets)
The sheet is view-only to protect the formulas. Open it, click File, then Make a Copy, and you'll have your own version. Enter your numbers in the highlighted cells and the formulas do the rest.
Want your Monday numbers to show up on their own?
On a free 30-minute call we'll figure out which numbers matter for your business and what it would take to have them waiting for you each week.
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