Six numbers a service business should check every Monday

Ask most founders how the business is doing and the answer comes from last month's revenue or last year's profit. Both are useful, and both are late. By the time they are known, the things that produced them (a slow payer, a stretched team, a contract nobody renewed) have been building for weeks.

The cure is modest: a fixed slot every Monday and six numbers written into the same table. You are not after accuracy to the dirham. You are after the direction of travel, spotted while there is still time to steer. The six below fit any business that sells its people's time, whether a consultancy, a studio or an agency, and if you hire an agency, they are fair things to expect it to watch on your account.

Is the team's time going on paid work?

The first number is utilisation: hours spent on client work last week, divided by the hours your people were really available once leave and public holidays come out. Calculate it for everyone together and for each individual.

Say five people had 180 available hours between them and logged 117 on client work. That is 65%. There is no universal right answer, because it depends on how you price and who does what. Nobody should expect a creative director to hit the same figure as a junior designer, and another firm's benchmark tells you little.

Read it as a trend. If it climbs for several weeks in a row, you are heading towards slipping quality or an exhausted team, and the choice is to recruit or to say no to work. If it drops, you have spare capacity, and that should be visible in your pipeline. No time tracking? Ask each person for a rough weekly estimate. It will be imperfect, and still far better than nothing.

What might be coming in

The second number is a weighted pipeline. Take each open lead and proposal, attach a value and your honest estimate of the chance of winning it, multiply, then total the lot. A AED 40,000 proposal at even odds contributes AED 20,000.

Those percentages are guesses. That is acceptable, provided you make them the same way each week so the total can be compared over time. Hold it up against the new business you need next quarter to cover clients who leave and still grow. A thin figure today means thin revenue three months from now, which is exactly why you look at it on a Monday rather than at quarter end.

Money you are owed

Third, the overdue invoices: everything unpaid past its due date, and how old the oldest one is. Split it into rough bands of up to 30 days, 31 to 60 days, and over 60.

Two patterns deserve attention. When the overdue total rises and revenue does not, you are funding your clients with your own money. And when an invoice drifts into an older band, it is no longer paperwork. It needs a phone call this week, not next month. Anything more than 30 days late should have a person's name beside it, so someone owns the chase.

Is the work matching what was sold?

Fourth, compare scope with reality. For each retainer or ongoing contract, set what was agreed for the month against what has been delivered or used so far. Counting deliverables works (twelve posts in scope, fifteen made) and so do hours, if you record them. For projects, set the budget against the cost of time and spend to date, and against how much of the job is complete.

A single month over is just a busy month. The same client over for three months running has, in effect, a bigger scope that was never priced, and you now hold the evidence to raise it at renewal. A project with 70% of its budget gone and half the work finished needs discussing immediately, while some budget remains to discuss.

A client who is always a little over scope is not so much demanding as unprofitable. Only the weekly numbers will tell you which clients those are.

Early signs a client is drifting

Fifth, client health. It resists a formula, and that is why it tends to be ignored. Decide in advance on a handful of warning signs, then give every client a red, amber or green rating against them each week.

• Sign-offs take longer than they once did.
• The client's messages are becoming shorter, or slower to arrive.
• Someone new has appeared on their side, or your usual contact has gone silent.
• One of their invoices is more than 30 days overdue.
• Their contract ends within 60 days and nobody has raised renewal.
• You have missed something you promised to deliver.

Any one sign turns a client amber. Two turn them red. Whether you use exactly this rule matters less than applying it every week. Departures rarely come out of nowhere. The warning is usually a cluster of minor changes that no one looked at together.

How long the cash would last

Finally, cash. Take the bank balance and divide it by fixed monthly costs (salaries, rent, visas, software). The answer is how many months you could keep going with nothing new coming in. Then check the weeks immediately ahead: expected receipts against payments due.

For instance, AED 450,000 in the bank against AED 150,000 of fixed costs a month means three months of cover. This is the figure that decides whether a late payer is a nuisance or a real danger, and whether the hire your utilisation number is asking for is affordable.

Twenty minutes, every Monday

Keep the six figures in a single table with a row for each week, and spend twenty minutes on them every Monday. Expect the first few weeks to drag, because the data will be spread around. Treat that as information: a figure that takes an hour to assemble is stored in too many places.

Resist adding a seventh or eighth measure until these six are second nature. A short list read without fail is worth more than a comprehensive one read occasionally. And the more of it you can pull straight from your records, such as overdue invoices, renewals due and late projects, the less the habit depends on someone rebuilding a spreadsheet.

If collecting these numbers by hand is what stops the routine from sticking, talk to ALXO about automating the gathering from the systems you already use, so Monday begins with the figures rather than the hunt for them.