13 KPIs every business owner should know
Most businesses have hundreds of available metrics and no shared list of the ones that matter. A KPI is not a number you can produce. It is a number someone owns, with a threshold, reviewed on a cadence.
A metric without an owner and a threshold is trivia.
Owners are handed reports full of numbers and left to guess which ones deserve attention this month.
The right five to nine numbers, reviewed monthly with named ownership, change behavior across the business. A hundred numbers change nothing.
How to know if you have this
- You have reports but no thresholds or targets
- Metrics are defined differently depending on who prepares them
- No individual owns a specific number
- Nothing on your reporting is forward-looking
How Advisory Motion solves it
- 01Select the KPIs that connect directly to cash, margin and capacity in your model
- 02Define each precisely once, so the number means the same thing every month
- 03Set a target and a red line, with a named owner for each
- 04Report them on one page next to the decisions they should trigger
The starting thirteen
Weeks of cash on hand · operating cash flow · DSO · cash conversion cycle · gross margin by line · contribution per unit of capacity · revenue per employee · utilization or throughput · backlog or pipeline coverage · quote-to-close rate · customer concentration · net margin · owner distributions as a share of operating cash flow. Most businesses need nine of these, not all thirteen — the selection is the work.
Illustrative composite · not a client identification