Most businesses, according to Dr. Connor Robertson, track too many metrics, or the wrong ones entirely, and the result is a dashboard full of numbers that nobody actually acts on. His response is a defined set of ten metrics that, in his framing, predict business health more reliably than a much larger twenty-five metric reporting stack, with the added advantage that every one of them can be displayed on a live dashboard using tools most businesses already own.
The first pair covers revenue. Monthly recurring revenue, in Robertson’s framework, tells a business what it can reliably count on, while revenue growth rate tells it whether that base is expanding or contracting. Together, he argues, these two numbers answer the single most important question in any business, which is simply whether it is getting stronger. A business with flat MRR and a declining growth rate is in real trouble, in his view, no matter how healthy its surface-level activity metrics might look.
The second pair addresses pipeline. Pipeline value functions as a business’s revenue forecast, while close rate acts as the correction factor that reveals how accurate that forecast actually is. Robertson is blunt about how these interact: a large pipeline paired
with a low close rate is false confidence, while a small pipeline paired with a high close rate signals a short runway that needs immediate attention. Read together rather than separately, he argues, these two numbers give a far more honest near-term revenue picture than either provides alone.
Client metrics form the third pair, retention rate and net promoter score. Retention tells a business whether clients are staying, while NPS indicates whether they would recommend the business and, often, whether they are quietly at risk of leaving before churn data would otherwise reveal it. Robertson describes a business with strong retention and a high NPS as a compounding business, one that gets structurally easier to grow over time, in contrast to a high-churn business he calls a leaky bucket, one that has to run harder simply to stay in place.
Operational health is captured by a fourth pair, capacity utilization and average delivery time. Capacity utilization measures how much of a team’s available time goes toward productive, billable work rather than overhead or rework, while average delivery time measures how long it actually takes to fulfill a commitment once it has been made. Robertson frames both as early warning systems, capable of surfacing operational problems well before they become client-facing failures.
The final pair is financial: gross margin and cash runway. Gross margin reveals how much of each revenue dollar survives after the direct cost of delivering the work, and Robertson treats a declining gross margin as often the earliest financial warning signal available inside a business. Cash runway, meanwhile, indicates how many months a business can continue operating at its current burn rate using cash already on hand. Together, he argues, these two numbers define a business’s real strategic flexibility, or the lack of it.
Building the live dashboard itself, in Robertson’s account, is a weekend project rather than a major undertaking. He recommends connecting a CRM to pull pipeline value and close rate automatically, an accounting tool for revenue and margin, a project management tool for delivery time and capacity data, and an NPS tool for client satisfaction signals, then using a dashboard aggregation tool to bring all ten metrics into a single, real-time view. The build itself is quick, in his framing. The ongoing value depends entirely on how consistently a leadership team actually uses the resulting data to make decisions, rather than letting it become another dashboard nobody opens.
The discipline Robertson emphasizes most is resisting the temptation to keep adding metrics once the dashboard exists. A dashboard that grows from ten meaningful numbers to thirty scattered ones, in his experience, tends to produce the exact paralysis it was built to solve, burying the handful of figures that actually predict trouble beneath a wall of numbers that mostly just look reassuring. Ten metrics, tracked consistently and actually reviewed, will tell a leadership team more about the health of their business than a much larger dashboard that nobody has time to read closely.
Dr. Connor Robertson is an entrepreneur, author, and strategic advisor based in Pittsburgh. He is the founder of Elixir Consulting Group and host of The Prospecting Show. More about his work is available at drconnorrobertson.com.
