The Weekly Metrics Dashboard I Used to Run Lead Cookie

When I ran Lead Cookie, the LinkedIn outreach service I started in July 2017 and later sold (opens in a new tab), the whole company fit on one Google Sheet. There was no dashboard software. Each week got a row, each number that told us whether the business was healthy got a column, and every week I pulled the sheet up with the team.

I published that sheet in March 2019, when it covered about 20 months of the business. This page walks through it column by column: what each number counted, why it was there and how we used it. The figures are Lead Cookie's from 2017 to early 2019, kept as history. The last section brings in my later writing on what the sheet missed: cash, clean books, the health of each account and the quality of each lead.

It is written for the leader of a service business that bills every month and wants to decide which numbers deserve a look every week.

The sheet at a glance

We didn't track the first few months of the business well, but about four months in we got relentless about it. Columns were added over time, so the early rows have gaps. The table shows the columns as they stood in March 2019, with the values from the sheet's last row.

Customers and recurring revenue

The first columns counted active customers on each service. By early 2019 we sold two: the outbound service and a Nurture service. Nurture MRR and outbound MRR came next, and Actual MRR was the two combined: the recurring revenue we were billing that week.

Projected MRR showed us revenue we had sold but had not started billing. Most customers had a two- to three-week onboarding. They paid a setup fee, but we didn't start billing the monthly subscription until we kicked off their account. So we built a projected number that added in what we had sold but not yet started.

The sheet showed that actual MRR typically lagged projected MRR by about four months. Part of that came from our retention numbers. Part was timing: customers often pushed their start dates beyond two weeks because of their own internal timelines. In the week of March 4, 2019, the gap was $15,000.

Target Actual kept us honest. Each quarter we set an MRR target for the end of the quarter, then stepped the weekly target up toward it. Comparing actual MRR with that step told us every week whether we were on track or off.

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Leads, calls and closed deals

The sales and marketing numbers were probably the most useful we had for spotting problems before they arrived. They form a chain:

1. If MQLs fell below our target of 20 leads a week, I knew sales call volume would soon drop.
2. If sales calls dropped, closed deals would drop.
3. If we weren't closing enough deals, revenue would eventually fall.

Three simple metrics from the top of the funnel to the bottom let us find a problem in the sales process quickly. An MQL, for us, was any new lead entered into the CRM in the past week: a leading measure of whether marketing was creating enough opportunities for sales calls. Sales calls counted the calls held that week, and closed deals the deals won.

Profit

Profit was simple: revenue minus expenses, calculated once a month so we made decisions that kept the business profitable.

I struggled to turn a profit for the first six months, because I was naive and overspending in many areas. The sheet is more candid than that sentence: its profit column still shows losses in several months of 2018.

Retention

Every week we recorded how many clients had churned in the past seven days, and every month we worked out retention. As a lead generation business we had high churn, and at first that concerned me. Over time, talking with other business owners, I found our churn was not far off what they saw in the industry.

The formula was simple:

Churn = customers churned in a 30-day period ÷ customers at the start of the month

I was a big believer in focusing on the positive, so we flipped the percentage and reported retention instead. It is the same figure turned around, but it was a much more motivating thing to discuss as a team. From January 2018 to March 2019, monthly retention on the sheet ranged from about 70% to 95%. The last row, dated March 4, 2019, recorded 78%.

One thing I would change: count lost revenue as well as lost customers. Average revenue per customer differed a lot between our two services. In the March 4, 2019 row, Nurture averaged about $327 a month per customer and outbound about $1,083, more than three times as much. A customer count alone misses that difference.

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Average monthly revenue per customer in Jake’s March 4, 2019 dashboard: about $1,083 for outbound and $327 for Nurture. This is why the article distinguishes lost customers from lost revenue.

Content as a leading indicator

For a long time we weren't doing much with content or email marketing. To fix that, I started measuring it. Each week we counted the pieces of content published, the emails sent to the list, and the subscribers to the Lead Cookie and jake-jorgovan.com lists.

Content and the email list drove leads, so these numbers were leading indicators for our MQLs.

What a lead was worth

Because we had tracked our numbers well for a year, I could work out the value of every lead, sales call and customer. I used those values to decide how much I could spend to acquire a customer or a sales call. The table below is the one I published in March 2019.

Each value is total revenue divided by the count above it. So each figure is revenue, before the cost of delivering the work. The periods cannot be reconciled from the table, either. The table counts revenue from October 2016, nine months before I sent the first Lead Cookie pitch, and it gives no period for the lead and call counts. Treat the values as the rough figures I published then. For your own spending decisions, take a defined group of leads and estimate the gross profit (what a customer leaves after the cost of serving them) from the customers it produced, over a stated period after each one starts. Divide that by the group's leads, calls or customers, and keep acquisition spending below the result to leave room for overhead and profit.

How we used it every week

Every week I pulled up the dashboard and we went through it as a team. I shared all of these numbers with everyone, because they gave the team insight into the financial health of the business. I never understood why so many owners are afraid to share them. My team didn't find it strange. They felt in the know, and more confident in the decisions we made together.

In our October 2019 weekly team meeting agenda, the dashboard came second, right after weekend updates, and took one to three minutes. Quarterly targets followed. Later in the meeting came a customer review of 10 to 15 minutes that served as our weekly health check on every account, and a review of the accounts due for renewal in the next two weeks.

What still holds, and what I'd change

What holds

One simple sheet, updated weekly. Sold revenue tracked beside billed revenue. A quarterly target broken into weekly steps. Leading indicators at the top of the funnel, so a problem shows up before it reaches revenue. And the whole team looking at the same numbers. Whether you are a one-person business or scaling up, start tracking. Numbers let you look at the facts of a situation whatever your mood that week.

Track cash beside profit

When I tried to sell Lead Cookie in 2019, my books were a nightmare. A cheap accountant had done a poor job for two years, and I had run my consulting and other ventures through the same company and books, so I had to go back and separate two years of transactions. The broker then presented our cash-based numbers as an upward trend when we had just collected a lot of prepayments that would be accrued over the coming months. Due diligence found the gap, and the letter of intent fell apart within 48 hours.

Years later, in a larger business, I needed both accrual and cash accounting. Bigger enterprise accounts came with 90-day payment terms, and the business looked very healthy on an accrual basis while there was hardly any cash in the bank. I wrote about that in how to prepare for business growth. If I rebuilt the sheet today, it would carry cash in the bank and money owed to us beside monthly profit, from books kept clean and separate for each business.

Watch each account as well as the totals

Totals tell you that retention fell; they don't tell you which client is about to leave. At Lead Cookie the weekly customer review did that job in conversation. In December 2023, writing about preparing for growth, I described a more formal system. It tracked KPIs on each account, starting with whether we delivered the agreed scope to every client that month, and gave each client a Green, Yellow or Red health status with quantified definitions. Red meant a client complaint, a mistake on the account, a missed scope or another problem. If you simply ask your team how an account is going, they will always say great, so you need quantitative data. A count of accounts in each status belongs on the weekly sheet.

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The approach described in this article, shown as a visual guide.

Count the leads that qualify

My 2019 post defined the MQL column as new leads entered in the CRM, with no qualification rule for that count. Fit already mattered in Lead Cookie's first months. By May 2020 the market had changed. As I wrote then, it demanded lower-quantity, higher-quality outreach. Our new service cost more and needed different customers, and our sales process moved from a one-call close to two calls: a discovery call and a sales presentation. When your offer changes like that, count the leads that meet your qualification bar beside the raw count, and track discovery calls and presentations separately.

Which number on your sheet would warn you first that next quarter's revenue is in trouble?