Data is abundant, but insight is scarce. It is easy to build a dashboard with 50 different charts: Total Users, Website Visits, Twitter Followers, Email Opens. But most of these are "Vanity Metrics." They make you feel good because they go up and to the right, but they don't help you make difficult decisions.

A great dashboard for a small business should fit on a single screen and focus on "North Star" metrics.

1. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) & Payback Period

How much cash do you burn to get a new customer? If you spend $500 on ads to get a customer who pays you $50 a month, it takes 10 months to get your money back.

• The Trap: Ignoring the payback period. If your payback period is 18 months but you only have 6 months of runway, you will grow yourself into bankruptcy.

2. Net Burn & Runway

This is the survival metric.

• Gross Burn: Total money out.

• Net Burn: Total money out minus total revenue in.

• Runway: Cash / Net Burn.
  If your runway dips below 6 months, this metric should turn flashing red on your dashboard.

3. Churn (The Leaky Bucket)

For recurring revenue businesses, Churn is more important than Sales.

• The Metric: Net Revenue Retention (NRR).

• If you lose 5% of your customers every month, you have to grow by 5% just to stay flat. Fix the bucket before you pour more water in.

4. Gross Margin

Not all revenue is equal. If you sell a service for $1,000 but it costs you $800 in labor to deliver it, you only have $200 to run the business. Track your margin percentage religiously. If it starts compressing, you either need to raise prices or cut delivery costs.