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Join for freePosted: Mon 26th Oct 2026
Most small business owners only look at their numbers when something goes wrong, or when the accountant asks.
By then, it's too late to act.
In this practical session, Dr Edward Klinger, founder of ScaleUpGym, shows you how to track the handful of numbers that actually tell you how your business is doing.
No spreadsheets full of formulas and no finance background needed.
Leave with a simple weekly dashboard you can start using straight away, so you can spot problems early and make decisions with confidence.
The five numbers every small business should check weekly, and what each one tells you
How to spot a cash or revenue problem weeks before it becomes a crisis
A simple one-page dashboard you can set up in under 30 minutes
Edward holds a PhD from McGill University and an MBA from Wharton.
Over 30 years, he has founded and scaled multiple businesses, raised $30 million in funding, driven $50 million in new revenue at PwC, and led a $100 million joint venture at Perot Systems (now Dell), operating across 25 countries.
He built ScaleUpGym after seeing the same pattern everywhere: ambition without structure, knowledge without execution.
A black belt in karate, Edward knows results come from showing up and following a system – every day. That's the principle behind everything he builds.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Caitriona O’Connor: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s Lunch and Learn. My name is Caitriona, and I’ll be your host today. For those of you attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for startups and small businesses.
I’m pleased to introduce Edward Klinger, founder of ScaleUpGym. In this session, Edward will show you how to track the handful of numbers that will actually tell you how your business is doing.
If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please post them in the chat, and we’ll do our best to answer them at the end of the session. Today’s webinar will be recorded, and we’ll send you a follow-up email with the recording and further resources later today. Over to you, Edward.
Edward Klinger: Thanks, Caitriona, and thanks so much for having me back. I’m Ed, founder of ScaleUpGym, and today is all about numbers. But I promise it’s not going to be full of spreadsheets and formulas – we’re going to keep it very simple, and you don’t need a particular finance background either.
Some of you may have joined me for the last session, where I talked about how to get an operating system for your business. You have a phone, and inside your phone is an operating system. There’s an operating system inside your car, and you’d never get into a plane unless there was one.
So the question is, where is the operating system for our business? Most businesses don’t have one – normally, it’s in the head of the small business owner. That causes all sorts of issues because we’re human beings; there’s a lot up in the air, and sometimes things fall through the cracks.
So this is about creating a discipline for ourselves by putting in place an operating system. If your plan is your destination, an operating system is your compass. It tells you every day whether you’re heading in the right direction or not.
I spent years building sensor networks for electricity and water utilities, and the whole point was very simple: see what’s happening whilst it’s happening, so that you can act before something breaks. On those networks, nobody waited for the annual inspection to find out if something was wrong.
If a cover was lifted or a reading was out of range, the sensor flagged it at that moment, and someone could act before something bad happened, such as a blackout, a burst main or even worse. A small business deserves exactly the same treatment – a few simple sensors that you read every week.
Today, we’re going to build the first piece for your business, and it’s the one that matters most because it’s the one you can run out of – money. By a quick show of hands in the chat, when was the last time you looked at your numbers? Not because your accountant asked you to, but because something went wrong.
If you could put a tick or a note in the chat, that would be great. If you haven’t, that’s absolutely fine – there’s no judgement. Most of us look at our numbers when something forces us to, such as a tax bill or a quiet month.
Great – two weeks, and so on. Some of us aren’t doing it at all, while others are looking at least once a week. So, a diversity of answers – fantastic.
Here’s the idea for today in one line: your accountant or bookkeeper tells you what happened; your dashboard tells you what is happening. I’m not downplaying the importance of accountants and bookkeepers – they’re critical – but we’re now talking about a different type of system: an operating system.
Let’s make this concrete. Your annual accounts arrive months after the year has ended. They’re built for HMRC, not for decisions, and they tell you what happened at a point when it’s far too late to change it.
That’s driving by looking in your rear-view mirror. Picture a business whose year ends on, let’s say, 31 March – the accounts might not be finished until the autumn, as a small company has up to nine months to file them.
So if a big customer quietly stops paying, let’s say, last November, the accounts only confirm it in black and white the following autumn – nearly a year after you could have done something about it. Your weekly dashboard, which is what we’re talking about today, is entirely different.
It takes 10 minutes every Monday, and it’s built for you, not for compliance. It tells you what is happening whilst you can actually do something about it. That’s looking through the windscreen towards where you’re going.
Take your car as an analogy. It doesn’t send you a report at the end of the year telling you that you ran out of fuel – the fuel gauge tells you whilst there’s still a petrol station ahead of you. That’s all a weekly dashboard is: a fuel gauge for your business.
Now, you need both. Think of your car again: your annual accounts are the MOT, which you need every year by law, and the dashboard is the fuel gauge, something you glance at every time. Nobody thinks the MOT replaces the fuel gauge, but unfortunately, a lot of small businesses only have the MOT.
If I asked you right now how many weeks your business could run before you ran out of cash in the bank, could you tell me without looking anything up? Put it in the chat if you could – how many weeks could your business run on the cash in the bank right now? Put an estimate.
Okay, so we have 12. Anyone else? Any other guesses as to how long your business could run? About 45 years, 16 weeks. Great, so there’s a diversity of answers here.
So which numbers are we going to track? We could track an infinite number of numbers, but we only need five. The first one is cash in the bank.
It’s not what you’re owed, and it’s not what’s coming – it’s what’s actually there today. And it’s the only number that can end your business on its own.
Picture a plumber with £12,000 in the bank on a Friday – they’re probably feeling pretty good about it. But dig a little deeper, and £4,000 of it is VAT due at the end of the month, while £3,000 is a supplier bill that’s already been agreed.
So that cash is really about £5,000. When you write down this number, ask yourself: how much of this is actually mine?
The second number is money in – what you invoiced or took in this month. This is the pulse of your business: is it moving, and is there momentum?
Imagine a cafe owner whose takings are down on a Tuesday. One bad day may mean nothing – maybe it rained and people just passed by. But if the money in has dipped three Mondays in a row, that’s a trend.
Maybe it’s the roadworks outside, or a competitor down the road. Weekly is the sweet spot: often enough to spot a trend, so that you can act on it early enough.
The third number we’re going to track is money owed to you – your unpaid invoices and how late they are. Lots of businesses that failed were profitable on paper but just never got paid in time.
Picture a web designer who finishes a £6,000 project on 30 March on 30-day terms, and the client eventually pays at the end of May. So for two months, you’ve effectively been lending your client £6,000 out of your own pocket, interest-free.
How late is your oldest unpaid invoice right now? Could you put that in the chat? How long have people not been paying you for work that you’ve actually delivered?
Okay – 120 days, four weeks, 10 months, over a year. Wow. So these are real issues that we have to fix.
The fourth number is gross margin: what you keep from each sale once you’ve paid the direct costs of delivering it. If you’ve been busier than ever but no better off, this is usually the thing that needs fixing.
Take a baker, for example. She’s selling a £60 birthday cake, and the ingredients and packaging cost, let’s say, £18, so she’s keeping £42 – a 70% gross margin.
Now, the cost of living is going up, so flour, butter and eggs go up, and her costs creep up from £18 to £24. She doesn’t change her price, and her margin quietly drops from 70% to 60%.
Same cakes, same hours, less money. She won’t notice this unless she’s paying attention, and that’s why it’s on the list every week.
The fifth number is pipeline. This is the work that you’re genuinely confident will land in the next 30 to 60 days – not every conversation you’ve had, just the ones you’d actually bet on.
Let’s say you’re a bookkeeper and you’ve got 10 prospects who have all said they’re interested. Three of them have asked for a proposal, and two actually have a start date in mind. So the real pipeline here is two, maybe three.
The other seven are just hope, and hope is not a strategy. The simple test is: would you bet £50 of your own money that this work lands in the next 60 days? If not, it shouldn’t be on the list.
Now, look at these numbers. There’s one about today, two about this week, one about how healthy each sale is and one about the future. So we have a balanced perspective of our business, and we can look backwards as well as forwards.
Previously, I described an operating system in three layers, and the same idea applies here. Layer one is the five numbers – these are the sensors, the raw readings.
Layer two is a dial, like a fuel gauge. Instead of staring at five numbers and trying to work out what they mean together, you roll them up into one weekly reading – green, amber or red in our system. We call that the financial index.
The screen you can see here is taken from a dashboard in a live business operating and scaling system – BOSS for short. Why BOSS? Because you’re the boss of your business and the boss of your career.
This is the BOSS platform, part of ScaleUpGym, and you can see the financial index on the screen where it says “Financial”. It sits alongside all the other elements of your business, because your business doesn’t run on finance alone.
If you look at this screen, it’s showing you a number of other key elements you need for your business. One is your business model canvas, which shows your strategy – the what and the why of your business – while VISTA shows how you’re going to achieve your results.
Then there’s personality, because you can’t separate yourself from the business. Your personality covers things like your ownership and accountability levels – do you take responsibility or externalise things, and are you biased to action, starting quickly, or do you hesitate?
There’s your health index – are you stressed, and are you getting enough sleep? – as well as a community index comparing yourself to others. Then there are your short-, medium-, and long-term goals, which could be financial or performance-based.
Your signals are the market signals telling you about competition, compliance or regulation in your area of business, patterns, trends and leads – people you should be chasing, because these are opportunities. And there’s your CRM system, which tells you about your pipeline.
So nothing sits in isolation – everything comes together, and what we’re talking about today is a snapshot of this. You don’t need fancy software to do any of this; that’s not the point. A sheet of paper or a very simple spreadsheet is a perfectly good dashboard, as long as you actually look at it.
So here’s what it actually looks like. This is an illustrative example, with made-up numbers for a small service business. We have five rows for the five numbers, and the columns are this week, last week, which way it’s been moving – the trend – and a status.
Before I tell you what I see, please take five seconds and tell me in the chat which row you’re most worried about. Is it row one, which is cash in the bank, or row two, three, four or five?
Fantastic – ones, fours, threes... all of them... one, two and five. By the way, I love the participation. This is what makes these sessions meaningful, and I want this half hour to be extremely useful, so stand by, because we’re going to get to the crux of the matter.
So let’s look at what we have here. Money in is up, which is good, and pipeline is up, which is also good. But cash is down, and money owed to you has jumped from £4,100 to £5,600 – that’s £1,500 in one week.
So this business is busy, and it’s selling, but it’s also running short of cash because customers aren’t paying fast enough. It’s a bit like a nurse taking your vital signs – one reading on its own won’t tell the full story, because you might have just run up the stairs and your pulse is higher than usual.
It’s the combination that matters. Cash down on its own might mean you paid a big bill, but cash down and money owed up in the same week is a pattern – customers are paying slower.
Without this page, the owner feels busy and successful. With it, you know that this week’s job is chasing invoices, not necessarily chasing new sales.
So what does this Monday morning look like? It takes 20 minutes, with three actions: we phone the two clients with the oldest invoices, and we ask the first new client who comes in for a deposit upfront. That’s it.
This is how you resolve problems when you know what’s coming: problem spotted in 10 seconds and sorted before it becomes a bigger one. There are also two smaller things here to be aware of.
First, the margin has slipped from 64% to 62%. Now, 2% sounds like nothing, but on £3,200 a week, it’s about £64 – or over the year, £3,000 quietly leaking out of your business. It’s still green, but it’s worth a glance at your costs.
Second, the pipeline is up – great – but that’s for six to eight weeks’ time, not this week’s bank balance, so let’s keep that in mind. That’s the whole point: the dashboard doesn’t just report; it tells you where to act next. And you can build this spreadsheet in 30 minutes, or even put it in a notebook.
So how are we going to spot problems before they become a crisis? There are three signs to look for. The first is a cash runway of under eight weeks.
Remember the gut check we took earlier – how many weeks could you run on your cash in the bank? Here’s how you work it out: take your cash and divide it by what you spend in a typical week.
If the answer is under eight, it’s not time to panic, but it’s something you need to look at and act on this week. For example, say we have £8,400 in the bank and we spend about £1,200 in a typical week. £8,400 divided by £1,200 is seven, so that’s seven weeks.
So that busy, growing business is already under the line – eight weeks is your red line. And now you can see why chasing those invoices is this week’s priority.
Why eight? Because most fixes you can make – chasing payments, cutting a cost or landing a new sale – take about a month to show up in your bank. Eight weeks gives you enough room to act calmly and in a collected manner, instead of in a panic.
The second sign is money owed growing faster than money coming in. If your unpaid invoices are climbing faster than your sales, then you’re busy, but you’re effectively lending your customers money. So chase, tighten your payment terms or sell something new.
Imagine running a shop where customers walk out with the goods and promise to pay you next month. One or two you might allow, but half the queue? No – you’re not running a bank, and a very generous one at that, because you’re not even charging interest.
The check is very simple: put money owed and money in side by side. If money owed keeps rising for three weeks whilst money coming in stays flat, that’s your sign.
The third sign is a thinning pipeline – a pipeline that’s getting weaker. This is a sneaky one, because it’s not always evident to us. Today’s pipeline is your revenue in six to eight weeks.
When the pipeline dips, everything else still looks fine for now, but by the time it shows up, you’ve already lost two months. So watch the pipeline, and you get those two months back.
Think of a farmer. What you plant today is what you harvest in two months, and if you stop planting in spring because you’re busy, the barn will still be full in summer – but in autumn, it will be empty, and by then it’s too late to plant.
That’s exactly what happens to busy businesses: you’re flat out delivering, so you stop selling. The fix is to protect one hour per week.
Numbers on their own can be overwhelming, so we give each one a very simple status. Think of traffic lights – when you pull up to a junction, you don’t stop and think about what red means, because somebody decided that a long time ago. You just look, and that’s what we want from our numbers.
Green is very good – you’re on or ahead of your targets, so keep going. Amber means you’ve been drifting the wrong way for a couple of weeks in a row – nothing’s broken, but look closer this week.
It’s like a smoke alarm. If it goes off once while you’re making toast, nobody calls the fire brigade, but if something’s burning two days in a row, you go and look. One bad week is noise; two weeks in a row is a pattern.
Then there’s red. Red means you’ve crossed your line in the sand, and that’s the day you must act – chase those invoices, cut a cost or go and sell your product or service.
The key thing is that red isn’t a failure, and we mustn’t look at it as one. It’s just a prompt telling us that something needs to be done today, rather than hoping for something better next week.
The key is to set these lines once, whilst you’re calm and collected. For example, a runway under eight weeks is red, under 12 weeks is amber, and after that, the dial does the work for you.
You can do the same for any of the five numbers we talked about. For money owed, an invoice more than 30 days late might be amber, and more than 60 days red. Gross margin in our example was 62%, so you might say below 60% is amber and below 55% is red.
Write those numbers down and stick with them. Now, does this actually make a difference? Well, it did for Emma.
Emma is a solo virtual assistant, and she did something very simple – something I want each and every one of us to do. Take a protected hour once a week – call it your sacrosanct hour – when you work on your business rather than being buried in it, which is what we’re continuously doing.
Let’s say every Saturday, you spend one hour reviewing your numbers – it’s non-negotiable, with no exceptions. It’s a bit like going to the gym: one session changes nothing you can see in the mirror, but keep it up every week for six months, and you’re going to look different – fitter and better.
Nobody can point to the single session that did it; it’s turning up that’s important. And Emma’s story is a big success: in six months, she went from two to 14 clients, and she also raised her rates.
Think about that – she raised her rates because she had confidence in her business and what she was doing. So my question is, what’s your half hour? Pick a half hour, put it in your diary and then act on it.
So here’s what I want us to be left with today. In the last 20 minutes or so, we’ve gone from the rear-view mirror to the windscreen: five numbers, a simple colour for each one and three warning signs that you’ll now spot before they become a crisis.
You wouldn’t drive using only your rear-view mirror, so why run your business that way? It’s not a big project; it’s a very small habit, like the gym. It’s not any single Monday that’s going to change everything – it’s turning up week after week.
Concretely, I’d like us to do three things. First, write down your five key numbers – your cash, your money in and the others we discussed. Don’t worry if you don’t know the numbers precisely; that on its own is a sign that you need to drill in.
And if you don’t know all five, that’s fine – just start with one, your runway. Second, set your lines in the sand and decide what’s green, amber and red.
Third, book 10 minutes every week – let’s say every Monday – to work on your business. Thank you so much for your time today. I hope this was useful, and I welcome any questions.
Caitriona: Thank you so much. If anyone has any questions, please do pop them in the chat. In the meantime, I have a question here: how can you distinguish between a temporary fluctuation and a genuine underlying problem?
Edward: Great question. Something temporary is something you can attribute to a cause, and of course, you need to give some thought to why things are happening. In the example I gave, it might have been a rainy day, and you simply didn’t get footfall coming into your business.
On the other hand, if there’s construction going on outside, or a competitor down the road you didn’t even know about, that might be something more permanent. I’d also add that if you have a seasonal business, it becomes even more important to do what we discussed today.
That seasonality means you’re going to get dips or big bumps in your business. Sometimes you’ll be doing very well and other times you won’t, and you need to be able to manage those times as well.
Caitriona: Thank you. What are the biggest mistakes small business owners make when tracking their financial performance?
Edward: I think it’s like the resolutions we make at the beginning of the year – maybe to go on a diet, go to the gym or get better. We go into it wholeheartedly, but then we lose track or get too busy with other things, and the consistency goes down.
Consistency, I would say, is the number one problem for small businesses. We don’t pay enough attention to managing our own business and working on it – we’re always buried in it.
If we’re able to step away a little, that will be a manifestly important way to improve your business. It’s about consistency and accountability to yourself.
Caitriona: Thank you. We had a question from Mandy, who’s asking: are money in and money owed not the same thing?
Edward: Money in and money owed are two entirely different things. Money in is what you actually have in the bank, while money owed is what someone owes you because you’ve done the work but haven’t been paid yet – and it counts towards profitability.
So you might be profitable as a business, but that profit hasn’t translated into cash in the bank. The difference matters because your bills will keep coming around like clockwork, and you need to pay them. Being profitable doesn’t mean you have money in the bank.
Caitriona: Thank you. Then there’s a question from Stefan, who’s asking: what’s a good way of setting up this dashboard – as an Excel sheet, or do you have any other suggestions?
Edward: An Excel sheet is perfectly fine, and it takes you seconds. Put those five numbers in, put the columns in, and use that.
You can even use a notebook – some people are more visual and want to write things down. Just take a notebook or a piece of paper and write it down; it can be as simple as that, and it’s a very good start to getting this accountability and discipline going.
Caitriona: Brilliant, thank you. That takes us to the end of the session. Thank you so much, Edward, for your presentation today, and thanks to everyone for joining us. We’ll be sharing the recording and further resources in a follow-up email this afternoon.
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