28 Jan 2026 · 5 min
Bill Gallagher walks through picking 8 to 12 key metrics with red, yellow, and green zones so you can leave the office without worrying. He shares how he took extended time off after delegating to a leadership team, then shows you how to brainstorm which operational and financial numbers actually matter.
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Hey there. So I have a question for you. Can you get away from the business for a month or more and have total peace of mind that you know how the business is doing? If you can step away from the business for an extended period of time and very quickly know how things are going because you've got a very simple set of KPIs, then really you'd have total peace of mind and you could be more strategic and you could have a better personal life and you could have a better family life and everything else. Right? And it comes down to this. There are a top 10 set of KPIs that you could use to know how things are going in the business and whether you were good or not and would give you a great deal of clarity and ultimately peace of mind because they would also bring clarity to the rest of the team so they would know what to focus on. The thing is, it's not the same for every company. So there are some common things that you want to know like the top line and the cash position of the company, but there's a whole bunch of others that'll be unique to any business. So here's the challenge. Brainstorm this. What if you needed to go away because of some like family situation and you need to go away for a whole month? What are the 10 numbers that would tell you that things are okay? So you're going to brainstorm now. You're going to look at all the numbers you're currently looking at and what you'd want to look at if you were going to be away for an extended period. And then you're going to keep ranking them and whittling them down until you've got 10 numbers, maybe interact with some of your other team, some advisors, your, your cpa, things like that. You could look at it a lot of different ways, probably more operational than a little bit of financial. But you can get down to about 10 numbers and like 8 to 12 is kind of the range. You ought to have 8 to 12 numbers and then establish sort of red, green, yellow ranges for each of these things. And those could be your top level company dashboard. That would tell you and the leadership team whether things were on track or not and what you needed to focus on. So that's really the key. You can get to that now. You're going to figure out a whole bunch of numbers that you do want to know at some point around some role or whatever. We call those double click numbers, right? I got my 8 to 12, my top 10, and then there could be numbers behind each of those where I could look deeper at what's going on when I have a problem. But I don't want to look at those until I've got something that's yellow or red in terms of range. I want to focus on and see my, my dashboard. I want to see gauges are green, that business is good to go. I can go out to the beach and spend some time with my kids or that kind of thing.
That's what I did years ago.
And I got myself out of running the business in a time of great growth and managed to take my family to Italy for the month at a really beautiful time in the lives of our kids and, you know, made an enormous difference for me. But here's a cool thing about having a set of numbers like that. They could shoot me a picture or type those into an email to me every day and I knew everything was okay and they knew what to focus on and to intercede on things. Even before it became a problem I needed to worry about. The team got stronger in the process and I was able to take more and more time off forever and ultimately to step away from the leadership of that company and the rest of the leadership team to step up. So that's the key. Figure out what your few top numbers are. Not 20, not 30 numbers, not a whole mess of things that your bookkeeper or controller CFO gives you. But the few numbers, operational and financial, that let you know that any everything is however it is gives you clarity and clarity leads to peace of mind. Hope that's helpful. We'll talk to you again next time. Keep scaling.
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