You’ve got a scorecard. You look at it every week in your Level 10. And you still can’t say, with any real confidence, whether the business is winning.
If that sounds familiar, you’re in good company. We recently hosted a 60-minute “data clarity break” with Mark Stanley and Angela Kalemis — Expert EOS Implementers and two of the co-authors of Data, the data component book in the EOS Mastery Series. Mark framed the whole problem in one line: “most companies aren’t short on data — they’re short on clarity.”
That gap is what the session set out to close. The format is a clarity break you can run with your own leadership team: seven questions, scored on a 1-to-8 scale, with one nugget to act on for each. The goal isn’t an 8 across the board. It’s progress — pick one question, move it from a 4 to a 6 this quarter, then go work on the next one.
Here’s the full replay, followed by a walkthrough of the seven questions.
Watch the full data clarity break with Mark Stanley and Angela Kalemis.
Table of Contents
- Question 1: Is your leadership team leading with data?
- Question 2: Are your numbers activity-based, simple, and predictive?
- Question 3: Do your weekly goals connect to your annual targets?
- Question 4: Signal or noise? Meet the 20% rule
- Question 5: When a number goes red, what happens next?
- Question 6: Does everyone know what winning looks like?
- Question 7: Do you know your top cash flow drivers?
- Bonus: the “Getting What You Want” tool
- Where this lives day to day
- Want to go deeper?
- FAQ
- Start with one question
Question 1: Is your leadership team leading with data?
Most entrepreneurial businesses start on gut feel, and that instinct gets you a long way. The shift is treating data as the force multiplier for every other part of the EOS Model.
Data sharpens the vision in your V/TO. It makes the People Analyzer objective. It helps you dig for root-cause issues instead of trading opinions. It gives your L10 and quarterly sessions their pulse. As Mark put it, when a room only has opinions to work with, the loudest title usually wins the argument. Facts first, then opinions, is the habit you’re building toward.
Question 2: Are your numbers activity-based, simple, and predictive?
Scorecards bloat over time. A clean one has 5 to 15 measures. Plenty of teams quietly creep to 30 or 40, and at that point the scorecard becomes a report instead of a trigger for action.
Run each measure through three questions. Is it activity-based — can you actually see a person doing the number? Angela’s version of this stuck with us: “whose belly button can I poke for this?” Is it simple enough that anyone can explain it in a sentence? And is it predictive — does this week’s number help you call next week’s result? A rolling 13 weeks shows the game in motion, which is far more useful than one snapshot at a time.
Question 3: Do your weekly goals connect to your annual targets?
The point of a weekly scorecard is the number of chances it gives you to course-correct. Look once a year and you get one correction. Look weekly and you get 52.
You want to draw a straight line from the V/TO, through your monthly financials, down to the weekly scorecard. Revenue is often both an output and an input — it’s an outcome you want, and an input to profit. The weekly measures sit upstream of that: the sales calls and activities that actually produce the result.
Question 4: Signal or noise? Meet the 20% rule
Think of your scorecard as the check engine light on the dashboard. When it goes red, you pull over and ask what’s going on. The trouble is most teams set their goals on the average — which means the light flashes red half the time, and they start ignoring it.
This is the smoke detector you pull the batteries out of because it goes off every time you cook. Mark’s fix is the 20% rule: set the trigger a little below average so a red shows up about 20% of the time. Green 80% of the time, red 20%, and when it’s red you actually drop it down to IDS. Angela’s fever analogy lands it — 98.6 is normal, 99.2 you watch, 103 you’re heading to the doctor. Set the number where it tells you to act.
Question 5: When a number goes red, what happens next?
A red number should send you to one of two places: people or process. Mark uses a sports frame for it — people are the players on the field, process is the plays you run, and the scorecard is the stats.
So when something goes red, check the process first. Is it being followed? Is it producing the outcome it’s designed to? Then check people. Right person, right seat, doing the work the way the process lays it out? Keep your accountability chart and core process documentation handy in the room where you run your L10, because that’s where the fix usually is — getting the process “followed by all,” not just followed by some.
Question 6: Does everyone know what winning looks like?
High performers want to keep score. They want to know exactly what their number is and whether they’re winning the week.
Angela shared a clean example: a heating-and-cooling company with five salespeople and a proven process that produces a $1,000 average ticket per week. When one rep’s number drops to $600, you don’t ride along in the truck or micromanage. You ask one question — why didn’t you follow the proven process? The numbers do the heavy lifting, so leaders can coach instead of babysit. Look at the roles and responsibilities on your accountability chart and your process steps to find what “winning” should mean for each seat.
Question 7: Do you know your top cash flow drivers?
The last question shifts from scorecard to cash. Mark’s tool here is the five-number income statement — revenue, cost of goods, gross profit, fixed expense, net operating income. Their candy bar example keeps it concrete: $10,000 in, $5,000 to buy the candy, $5,000 gross profit, $4,000 to run the business, $1,000 left over.
From there you find the handful of drivers that push gross profit up faster than operating expense climbs — what they call the profit-power ratio. The real move is tying each driver back to a scorecard measure where the activity happens. Do more of the doing, drive more of the cash. Better yet, narrow it to the one driver your whole team can rally around.
Bonus: the “Getting What You Want” tool
The question that drew the most interest in the live Q&A was about a tool Angela called the Swiss Army knife of EOS. You start with the result you want and reverse-engineer backward.
Say you want $50,000 more in monthly revenue. That might take 20 new customers, which takes 50 proposals, which takes 200 qualified leads, which takes 500 site visitors. Now you can see exactly which activities to measure and on whose scorecard they belong. It’s a fast way to turn a big goal into the weekly numbers that will get you there.
Where this lives day to day
A clarity break gets your scorecard right once. Keeping it useful is a weekly habit — and that’s the part software should make easy.
In Strety, your leadership team sets goals, reviews the scorecard, and drops red numbers straight into IDS during the same weekly meeting, with the accountability chart and Docs a click away when you need to check a seat or a process. The discipline stays in one place instead of scattered across spreadsheets. [Internal link: scorecard feature page]
Want to go deeper?
Mark and Angela run the UNSTOPPABLE! Data Workshop — a hands-on, full-day session touring North America where teams build a scorecard live and work through their cash flow drivers. Their book, Data: Harness Your Numbers to Go from Uncertain to Unstoppable, covers all of this in detail, including the six steps for building a great scorecard and the Getting What You Want tool.
FAQ
How many measures should be on an EOS scorecard? Five to fifteen. Past that, the scorecard tends to become a reporting tool instead of an action trigger.
What is the 20% rule for scorecard goals? Set each goal a little below the average so the number shows red about 20% of the time. That keeps red meaningful — a real signal to take action rather than background noise you learn to ignore.
Should every person have a measurable? Yes. Mark and Angela are firm on this — every person should have one to three measurables so they know what their role is and what success looks like each week.
What does it mean for a measure to be activity-based? You can see a person doing the number. “Sales calls made” is activity-based; “manufacturing efficiency” usually isn’t, because no one can point to the specific behavior behind it.
What are cash flow drivers in EOS? The activities that push gross profit up faster than operating expense rises. Tie each one to a scorecard measure, and you can drive cash by driving the activity.
Start with one question
Don’t try to fix everything at once. Pick the question where your team scored lowest, move it up two points over the next 90 days, then choose the next one.
Watch the full replay above for the examples and the live Q&A, and if you want a single place to run your scorecard, L10s, and accountability chart together, you can try Strety free for 30 days — no credit card required.