Are Your Metrics Lying to You? A Guide to KPIs That Actually Drive Decisions

The Problem: You're Drowning in Reports But Starving for Answers

You run a $12M professional services firm. Your controller sends you monthly financials. Your practice management system generates utilization reports. Your CRM tracks pipeline. You've got spreadsheets for everything.

But when you need to make a decision—Should we expand this practice area? Why is cash tight when revenue is up? Which clients are actually profitable?—you can't get a straight answer.

Someone has to "pull the numbers." That takes days. By the time you get them, they're already outdated. And half the time, the reports don't match each other anyway.

This is the metrics trap most mid-size businesses fall into: Lots of data. No clarity. Decisions made on gut feel because the numbers take too long or don't answer the real question.

What Makes a Metric Worth Tracking?

Not all numbers matter. Most are noise.

A metric earns its place on your dashboard if it meets three criteria:

1. It answers a decision you actually make
"Total website visits" is trivia. "Cost per qualified lead" tells you whether marketing is working.

2. You can act on it this week
If a number goes red, what would you do? If the answer is "nothing" or "investigate further," it's not a KPI—it's a curiosity.

3. The data is trustworthy and current
If you don't trust the number, or it's three weeks old, you'll ignore it. Rightfully so.

Insight: Most businesses track 30+ metrics. Most executives use 3-5 to actually run the business.

Your job: figure out which 3-5 matter, and kill the rest.

The Four Categories That Matter for Mid-Size Firms

Every industry is different, but these four buckets cover most of what a $5M-$50M business needs to watch:

1. Financial Health (Cash Flow Reality)

Not profit. Not revenue. Cash flow.

You can be profitable on paper and still miss payroll. Track:

Cash runway (months of operating expenses in the bank)
Collections lag (days between invoice and payment)
Gross margin by service/product line (where you actually make money)

2. Client Economics (Who's Worth Keeping)

Revenue per client is useless. You need:

Client profitability (revenue minus cost to serve)
Retention rate by segment (which client types stay vs. churn)
Lifetime value vs. acquisition cost (are you spending $5K to acquire a $3K client?)

Most firms discover that 20% of their clients generate 80% of their profit—and another 20% actually lose money. You can't fix that if you're only looking at revenue.

3. Operational Efficiency (Where Time Goes)

Your team's time is your inventory. Track:

Utilization rate (billable hours / available hours)
Project margin (estimated vs. actual time/cost)
Bottlenecks (where work piles up or gets redone)

4. Pipeline & Growth (What's Coming)

Lagging indicators (last month's revenue) don't help you steer. Leading indicators do:

Qualified pipeline value (realistic opportunities closing in next 90 days)
Conversion rate by source (which marketing actually works)
Sales cycle length (time from first contact to closed deal)

Stop Here: Is Your Dashboard Helping or Hiding the Truth?

Before you keep reading, take 2 minutes to find out if your current metrics are working for you or against you.

Take the KPI Health Check →
(12 questions. Instant score. Specific recommendations based on your answers.)

Most firms score between 40-65. If you're above 70, you're ahead of your competition. If you're below 40, you're making million-dollar decisions with incomplete information.

Find out where you stand.

How We Build Dashboards That Actually Get Used

Here's the problem with most dashboard projects: they fail.

Someone buys a BI tool. IT spends three months configuring it. The executive team gets a demo with 47 charts. Everyone nods. Two months later, nobody's using it because:

It doesn't answer their actual questions
It takes six clicks to get to the number they need
The data doesn't match their other reports
It's too slow or too complicated

We take a different approach:

1. Start With Decisions, Not Data

What decision are you making this month? This quarter? What number would change your mind?

We map those decisions first. Then we figure out what data answers them.

2. Build the Pipeline, Not Just the Dashboard

Your data lives in multiple places: accounting system, CRM, project management, spreadsheets.

We use DAZL—our data pipeline language—to pull it all together, clean it, calculate the metrics that matter, and deliver them in one place. Automatically.

No more "someone has to update the spreadsheet." The dashboard updates itself.

3. Design for Speed

Your dashboard should answer your top 5 questions in 10 seconds. If you have to click through three menus or export to Excel, we failed.

Example: Law Firm Dashboard

Client profitability (sorted by margin, color-coded red/yellow/green)
Collections aging (who owes what, overdue by how many days)
Matter performance (budget vs. actual, by attorney)
Pipeline forecast (next 90 days of expected closings)
Utilization by practice area (who's overloaded, who has capacity)

Five metrics. One screen. Updated daily.

4. Prove It Works, Then Expand

We don't build the whole thing at once. We start with one decision and the metrics that inform it.

Get that working. Use it for a month. Prove it changes how you operate.

Then add the next one.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Here's a scenario I see constantly with healthcare practices (and law firms, and professional services firms):

The Blind Spot:
Managing partner knows total revenue by service line. That's easy—it's in the accounting system. But ask "Which services are actually profitable?" and you get: "Let me have our controller look into that."

A week later, you get a spreadsheet. Maybe. If they had time.

Meanwhile, you're making expansion decisions based on revenue growth, not margin.

What a Service Line Profitability Dashboard Shows:
Pull data from practice management and accounting systems. Calculate:

Revenue per service
Direct costs (provider time, supplies)
Indirect costs (allocated overhead)
Net margin per service

Display it sorted by margin, color-coded red/yellow/green.

What Typically Happens:
You discover your fastest-growing service has 12% margin. Another service—half the revenue—has 38% margin.

Suddenly the decision is obvious: shift marketing dollars, stop hiring for the low-margin service, double down on the high-margin one.

The ROI:
Dashboard might cost $6K to build. But the decision it enables—redirecting resources from 12% margin to 38% margin work—can easily add $100K+ to annual profit.

That's what happens when you can see the truth instead of guessing.

What Makes This Different from Excel or BI Tools?

Excel:
Someone has to update it. Formulas break. Version control is a nightmare. No one trusts last month's numbers.

Enterprise BI Tools (Tableau, Power BI, etc.):
Overkill for a $10M firm. Expensive. Requires dedicated analyst. Six-month implementation. Most features go unused.

Our Approach (nollejBase + DAZL):

Built for mid-size businesses ($5M-$50M revenue)
Connects to your existing systems (accounting, CRM, spreadsheets)
Automated data pipelines—no manual updates
Custom dashboards designed around your actual decisions
Deployed in 4-6 weeks, not months
Fixed-price projects ($3K-$8K typical range)

You don't need an enterprise solution. You need metrics that answer real questions, delivered fast, and built to last.

Three Ways This Goes Wrong (And How to Avoid Them)

1. Tracking Vanity Metrics

The trap: Metrics that look impressive but don't inform decisions.

Examples:

Total revenue (without margin or cash flow context)
Website traffic (without conversion data)
"Busy-ness" metrics (emails sent, meetings held)

The fix: For every metric, ask: "If this number changes, what action would I take?" If you can't answer, delete the metric.

2. Too Many Metrics

The trap: 30-metric dashboards that take 20 minutes to review. Nobody looks at them.

The fix: Start with 5 metrics. Force yourself to pick the most important ones. Add more only when you've mastered the first five.

3. Stale or Untrustworthy Data

The trap: Dashboards that show last month's numbers, or numbers that don't match your accounting system.

The fix: Automate the pipeline. If it requires manual updates, it will fail. And always validate against a trusted source until everyone believes the numbers.

Your Next Step

You have two options:

Option 1: Keep doing what you're doing
Spreadsheets. Email requests. Waiting days for reports. Making decisions when the data finally arrives—or making them anyway because you can't wait.

Option 2: Build a dashboard that answers your top 5 questions automatically

If you're serious about Option 2, start here:

Take the KPI Health Check (2 minutes)
Find out if your current metrics are helping or hiding the truth. You'll get a score, specific recommendations, and a clear path forward.

Then book a 20-minute dashboard assessment call. I'll review your current setup and show you exactly what's possible—no sales pitch, just a real conversation about what would actually work for your business.

Most firms discover they're closer than they think. The data already exists. You just need someone to connect it, calculate it, and present it in a way that actually drives decisions.

About HBG Consulting

We build custom analytics solutions for mid-size businesses—law firms, healthcare practices, professional services, and membership organizations.

If you're making decisions with incomplete information, we fix that.

Take the KPI Health Check →
Or email directly: [your email]

P.S. — That question you're trying to answer right now? The one where you wish you just had the numbers? That's exactly what we build dashboards to solve. Let's talk.