I have never seen anyone argue with a dashboard.
That is not praise. A scorecard that produces nodding has failed at the only thing it exists to do, which is to make somebody defend a number in front of a person who can ask a second question. Most franchise scorecards I have inherited had thirty or forty metrics, a colour on every cell, and a monthly call in which everyone agreed the greens were good.
The version I use now has five numbers and no colour. It is not more sophisticated. It is smaller, and smallness is what makes it work.
01
Why five
A scorecard is read in the ninety seconds before a call. Nobody studies it. Past about five numbers the reader stops ranking and starts scanning for the worst cell, and once they have found it the rest of the page is decoration.
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.** Not response rate, not volume. The clock from the enquiry arriving to a person speaking to them. It predicts more of the rest of the funnel than anything else I have measured, and it is almost entirely within a clinic's own control, which makes it fair to hold them to.
**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
This is the part people push back on 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 number, last period's number, and the direction. Let the reader decide whether they are comfortable. A number that is technically inside target and has moved the wrong way for four periods is the most important thing on the page, and every colour scheme I have used hid exactly that case.
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, twelve months of history across. That is the whole artefact.
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
Where this leaves you
You do not control what the numbers say in any given quarter. Markets move, a good surgeon leaves, a competitor opens across the road.
What you control is which five you print, whether they genuinely pull against each other, and whether the page produces a question or a nod. Get that right and a bad quarter shows up early, in a conversation, while it is still small. Get it wrong and you will have a beautiful dashboard, entirely green, right up until the month it is not.
Questions people ask
Why only five numbers on a franchisee scorecard?
Because a scorecard is read in about ninety seconds before a call, not studied. Past five numbers the reader stops ranking and starts skimming, and a skimmed scorecard produces agreement rather than argument. Five also forces you to decide what you actually manage, which is the useful part of building one.
What is wrong with red, amber and green?
Colour answers the question before the reader asks it. Once a cell is green the conversation moves on, and green is set by whoever chose the threshold. Printing the number and the direction of travel makes the reader do the judging, which is the job you wanted them to do.
Should every clinic in a network have the same scorecard?
The five headings should be identical, or you cannot compare and the exercise collapses into special cases. The targets underneath can differ by market and by how long the site has been open. Same questions everywhere, different answers expected.