Monday morning was a sea of spreadsheets.
The PE-backed multi-site services platform had grown by acquisition. Every operating company on it had arrived with its own metrics, its own definitions, and its own way of telling the leadership team how it was doing. The result was familiar to anyone who has worked at a roll-up: three different definitions of EBITDA, four different conversion rates, six different "weekly reports," and a CFO function spending the first half of every month reconciling instead of analyzing.
Operating reviews became debates about which number was right. The investment committee was reading dashboards that didn't match the ones the operators were running on. And the executive team had to take on faith that the next quarter looked the way the presentation said it did. The platform was capable; the performance management system was not.
The CEO and CFO asked us to build them something they could trust. Not a slide layout. A real system — definitions, data, dashboard, cadence — that every operator and every executive ran on.
Co-designing the executive KPI cockpit, end to end.
We embedded inside the leadership team and worked alongside the CFO and FP&A leaders as business and thought partner through the full design and rollout. The work wasn't a research project; it was a build. The KPI cockpit had to land in the operators' hands and survive contact with reality on Day One.
We started with the KPI architecture — what to measure at the platform level, the operating-company level, and the site level, and how those layers connect. We then locked the standard definitions: one EBITDA across the platform, one conversion-rate definition, one labor-utilization formula, written down and signed off. We designed the cockpit itself as a single page the CEO opens Monday morning and the operating partner takes into the IC. We installed the operating cadence — which forum sees what, at what frequency, with what decision rights — so the cockpit had a place to live in the rhythm of the business. And we anchored the data foundation: where each metric comes from, how it's refreshed, who owns it, and what happens when it breaks.
Platform, operating-company, and site metrics — and how they connect
One EBITDA, one conversion rate, one definition of every metric that matters
Single-page view of platform health, refreshed on a known cadence
Forums, frequencies, and decision rights wired to the cockpit
We then ran the first full quarter of operating reviews on the cockpit alongside leadership — sitting in the meetings, watching where the dashboard was being trusted and where it wasn't, debugging definitions in real time, refining the data foundation as edge cases surfaced. By the end of the run-in quarter, the cockpit had earned its place at the table. Operators were preparing for reviews using it, not in spite of it. The CFO and FP&A team took ownership of the system from us with a set of artifacts that were already battle-tested.
Decisions about the business — not about the spreadsheet.
Every operator now opens the same scorecard Monday morning. The CEO and CFO have a real-time view of platform performance that ties cleanly into what the IC sees. Performance conversations stopped being about reconciliation and started being about decisions: where to invest, where to reset leadership, where to accelerate, where to slow down. The CFO function got back the half-month it had been spending on data clean-up and started spending it on analysis instead.
The cockpit is now the artifact every operator references and every exec opens first. It survived the team that built it because it was built to be owned by the company, not by us.