The franchisee scorecard: five numbers, one page, no colour coding

01

Why five

Keep the main scorecard short enough to examine before the review and reserve the detail for the questions it raises. Five measures is my working limit for this method, not a universal rule about attention.

Five also forces an argument inside your own team while you build it, which is most of the value. You will have candidates for eight or nine. Cutting to five means saying out loud which three things you are choosing not to manage this year, and that conversation is more useful than any report the scorecard later produces.

02

The five, and why these

They are chosen so that no clinic can improve all of them by doing one easy thing. If your five can be moved together by a discount, you have picked five versions of the same number.

Conversion from consultation to procedure. The commercial pulse of the site. On its own it is dangerous, because the fastest way to raise it is to book people who should not be booked.

Deferral rate at the clinical review. The number that pulls against conversion. If a site's conversion is climbing and its deferrals are falling to nothing, somebody has stopped saying no. I want to see a healthy deferral rate. A site running near zero is not being careful, it is being permissive, and it will show up eighteen months later somewhere I cannot fix cheaply.

Attendance at the first follow up. Cheap to collect and it tells you what the patient thought after the room went quiet. A site can hit its numbers on the day and lose people at week two, and this is where that becomes visible before it becomes a review.

Time to first human contact on a new enquiry. Define the start and end of the clock, including staffed hours and attempted contacts. Review the measure alongside completed consultations and failed handovers. Speed should support an appropriate next step rather than replace it.

Complaints and concerns raised, not upheld. Raised. If you score on complaints upheld you have given every manager a reason to keep things informal, and you will get exactly that. Counting raised concerns treats an increase as a sign the reporting channel works, which is usually what it is.

03

No colour

People push back on this part hardest, so let me be plain about the reasoning.

Colour answers the question before the reader has asked it. A green cell says "settled" and the eye moves on. Whether it is green was decided by whoever set the threshold, often a year ago, often by someone who no longer works on this.

Print the current measure, the comparable prior period and the direction of change. State the definition and any important limitation.

The purpose of the page is to produce a question, not a verdict.

04

One page, and what goes on the back

One page, five rows and twelve months of history across, with nothing else on it.

What does not go on it: anything you cannot collect the same way in every clinic. A metric that means one thing in a mature site and another in a site open six months is worse than no metric, because it will be compared anyway.

If a site is having a hard quarter, the explanation goes on a second sheet in words, written by the person running the site, not in a comment box on the scorecard. Keeping narrative off the number page stops the number page becoming a negotiation.

05

What this costs you

You will lose things you liked having. Somebody will ask where their metric went and the answer is that it was true and it was not one of the five. Keep it, collect it, look at it when you are investigating something. It just does not get a seat on the page everyone reads.

You will also lose the comfort of a mostly green board. What replaces it is a call where somebody has to explain why deferrals fell while conversion rose, and that call is worth more than the board ever was.

06

The part you own

What the numbers say in any given quarter is outside your control. Markets move, a good surgeon leaves, a competitor opens across the road.