The five-number dashboard every founder actually needs

Dashboards fail when they answer 'what happened' instead of 'are we healthy'. Activity metrics — posts published, calls made, emails sent — feel productive and predict nothing.

The five numbers that do: qualified leads per week, cost per qualified lead, proposal-to-close rate, revenue per delivery hour, and net revenue retention. Every one of them moves when the business moves, and none of them can be gamed by working harder on the wrong thing.

Put them on one screen, updated automatically, reviewed at the same time every week. If a number needs a meeting to explain, the metric is wrong or the data is.