What's on your CEO dashboard?

If you sit in front of an anesthesia machine all day, or you have bought a car, a mobile phone, a boat, a plane , an RV or almost anything that is mechanical lately, it probable has a dashboard which displays things. Those things are typically sensors, analytics and a display that tells you about how things are functioning, like your patient.

You can even ask Alexa.

Recently, a magic man under the hood of my Jeep told me that the battery on my key fob was running low.

The data can be automatically entered using constant, real time remote sensing or it can be entered manually. In addition. the information displayed can be descriptive (you are getting 38 miles/gallon), predictive (you will arrive at your destination in 45 minutes) or prescriptive (slow down, you are over the speed limit.).

In addition, lots of industrial designers have spent most of their time figuring out how , when and where to display the results on your dashboard.

How would you display data in a smart operating room?

When it comes to startups and scaleups, though, dashboards to measure how things are going is often an afterthought until someone, typically an investor, board member or potential investor asks you for information you should have been tracking all along.

From the very beginning of your company, you should have a dashboard that will evolve along with your company and the parts will reflect the varying level of importance of things you should track.

There are templated dashboards, dashboards you can buy that integrate with your CRM, like Salesforce, your enterprise resource planning (ERP) database or you can just create it yourself on a spreadsheet.

Why should you measure and display how your company is humming along?

1. You don't get what you don't measure so your management team and board or directors and advisors will want to know
2. Your employees will want to know
3. Investors will want to know.
4. You will get warning signals
5. You can do preventive maintenance so it won't cost you a lot to fix it later or break down in the middle of the night during a snow storm

In his book, Traversing the Traction Gap, Bruce Cleveland notes that your company is not a monolithic enterprise that marches down a path. Rather, it is the four core architectures of an enterprise-product, revenue, team and systems (HR, marketing, payroll, revenue cycle management, etc)-that must successfully complete this journey, Call them your company vital signs. All startups must develop competencies in these four architectures, then continue to measure, refine, and optimize each of them along the path from startup to scaleup to grown up. In the beginning , you will focus on product development and marketing, since everything else is a cost. But, you should be thinking how you will develop and measure systems as necessary.

Thus, your first step is to define your key performance indicators in each of the four areas. The second step is to populate the database either automatically or manually. The third step is to visually display and disseminate the data where, when and how is most appropriate..

Finally, as the data are (remember data is plural, datum is singular) being displayed, you should make the necessary adjustments. These days, sometimes they are called pivots. Team meetings should be about how to address or fix that red blinking light.

Here is is example.

Here are five metrics CEOs should track during their digital transformation. Here is a list of 136 others. You can find others at www.scalingup.com.

You can make your dashboard as complicated or as simple as you like. I'd keep it simple. Just measure something. Anything. Then measure something else.

The?rule of 40 formula?requires just two inputs, growth and profit margin. To?calculate?this metric, you simply add your growth in percentage terms plus your profit margin. For example, if your revenue growth is 15% and your profit margin is 20%, your?rule of 40?number is 35% (15 + 20) which is below the?40% target.

There are three types of profit margins: gross, operating and net. You can?calculate?all three by dividing the?profit?(revenue?minus costs) by the?revenue. Multiplying this?figure?by 100 gives you?your profit margin?percentage. In each case, you?calculate?each?profit margin?using a different?measure?of?profit.

With more than $700 million in assets, Sunshine Coast Credit Union (SCCU) is a full-service co-operative financial institution serving over 17,300 members through 3 locations and mobile services. In 2018, SCCU measured their employees’ feedback across a number of criteria using the McKinsey Organizational Health Index (OHI) . Their?lowest score was related to Bottom-Up Innovation – which meant their employees had very little opportunity or incentive to contribute to innovation. In response, SCCU decided to deploy an IdeaScale community, both for the sake of engaging their employees in continuous improvement processes and increasing their credit union’s innovation capacity.

If you are a non-profit, you might want to track donors and the amounts, volunteer activities, marketing metrics and outcome or impact numbers.

A CEO dashboard should come as standard equipment with your company as soon as you drive it off the lot, just like putting monitors on a patient as soon as they are moved on to the operating table. It is not an option or an upgrade. You must manage the numbers or pay a fine.

Of course, knowing what to to do when you get a dashboad red blinking light is another story. But, that's why we have You Tube.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs