Track everything and you understand nothing. The goal of a KPI set isn’t completeness — it’s a short list of numbers that, checked regularly, tell you whether the business is healthy and where to look when it isn’t. These ten cover the vital signs for most growing companies.
Money coming in
1. Revenue — against plan, not just last month. Raw revenue is a headline; revenue versus your own target and versus the same period last year is a signal. Seasonality hides in month-over-month comparisons.
2. Gross margin. Revenue minus the direct cost of delivering it. The most common blind spot we find: growing companies whose revenue climbs while margin quietly erodes — busier and poorer at the same time. Track it overall and, if you can, by product or service line.
3. Average days to get paid (DSO). Profit on paper isn’t cash in the bank. If this number creeps up, your customers are financing themselves with your money — see our guide to automating invoicing for the fix.
Money going out
4. Operating cash flow. Can the business fund itself month to month? This one number catches problems that revenue and profit both hide.
5. Payroll as a percent of revenue. For service businesses especially, labor is the big lever. A stable ratio while growing means you’re scaling; a climbing one means you’re just adding cost.
Customers
6. Customer acquisition cost (CAC). Total sales and marketing spend divided by new customers won. Knowing it per channel tells you where the next dollar should go.
7. Customer retention / repeat rate. Whatever form fits your model — renewal rate, repeat purchase rate, churn. Keeping a customer is almost always cheaper than winning one, and this number is the earliest warning you get.
8. Revenue concentration. What share of revenue comes from your top three customers? Over 40–50% and you don’t have customers — you have dependencies. Track it so growth decisions can deliberately dilute the risk.
Operations
9. Utilization or throughput — whichever fits: billable hours as a share of available hours, jobs completed per crew per week, units shipped per day. This is your capacity gauge, and it tells you when hiring is (and isn’t) the answer.
10. Pipeline coverage. Open qualified opportunities versus your revenue target for the coming period. Below about 3× coverage, next quarter’s problem has already started — you just haven’t felt it yet.
That’s the standard we build to: one screen, ten numbers, refreshed automatically, definitions everyone agrees on. If assembling these currently means spreadsheet archaeology, a free data audit will show you the shortest path to that screen.