Ask three people in your business, separately, where the company's heading. If you get three different answers — or three vague ones — you don't have a strategy yet. You have a wish list. Here's how to find your True North, build the dashboard that proves you're on it, and make the whole thing visible enough that your team can recite it from memory.
Most owner-operators have a list of things they hope happen this year. A True North is different — it's a contract you've signed with yourself, your team, and your customers about what must be achieved.
If we don't know where we're going, we'll never get there. True North is a contract, a bond, and exerts a magnetic pull. It is not a wish list.
When Atlas Industries' management team finally drew their honest year-to-date scorecard, eight of nine charts came up red or amber. Only one was green. They were embarrassed. They were also, for the first time, in a position to do something about it.
The owner-operator translation: if your monthly scorecard never goes red, you don't have a scorecard. You have a comfort blanket.
Toyota factories use SQDC — Safety, Quality, Delivery, Cost. Atlas tailored it for their business. Most service-led £2–3m UK firms land cleanly on these four. Pick the version that fits, then commit.
Do your people want to be here on Monday morning? When team morale fails, continuous improvement quietly dies.
Are your customers getting what was promised — first time, on time, in full? This is the one customers feel and tell others about.
The internal mechanics — capacity, lead time, throughput. Where the wheels visibly come off when growth outruns the system.
Revenue, gross margin, EBIT, and — crucially — cash. Standard accounting can mislead. Atlas added cash flow because EBIT alone can hide an inventory problem that eats the business.
Standard cost accounting isn't the best scoreboard. We want to use real numbers — which is why we've included cash flow.
A True North isn't a marketing slogan. It's something your team can feel in their gut. Five questions — answer honestly. Less than four "yes" and you have a wish list, not a strategic direction.
Eight metrics. Two per fundamental. Each one has a target. Each one gets rated red, amber, or green — based on the last full month, not what you wish were true. If everything is green, your targets are too soft.
Type in your metric, your last-month actual, your target, then click R, Y or G honestly. Watch the summary at the bottom.
When a business misses its targets month after month, the cause is almost always instability in one of four places: people, machines (or systems), method, or materials (or inputs). Slide each one to estimate how stable it is in your business right now. Anything below 5 is where your firefighting lives.
Right people, in the right roles, properly trained, turning up and engaged.
Tools, software, and equipment that work reliably and predictably day-to-day.
Documented, repeatable ways of doing the work — not heroics or "ask Dave".
Reliable supply of stock, data, leads, briefs — whatever you need to do the work.
Adjust the sliders. Whichever scores lowest is where your firefighting lives — and the place fixing one or two underlying issues will quietly remove twenty problems downstream.
Don't try to do all of this at once. Pick the smallest version of each that's still honest — then do it.
Three to five words your team can repeat from memory. Pin it to four hard numbers — revenue, profit, cash, and one human metric that matters in your world.
Pressure-test it with a coachTwo metrics per fundamental. Last-month actual. Target. RAG rating. Print it. If everything's green, your targets aren't honest yet — toughen them.
Get a templateWalk through the dashboard with the team. Pick the worst red. Ask: what's actually happening, what should be, what's the gap, what's the one experiment we'll run this month?
Run it with a coach in the roomWhere we lack a target, make an estimate. We can refine it as we learn more. Key point: please make all our problems visible.
Email yourself your four-fundamentals scores and what they say about alignment — so you can give your team a clearer target.
Work with an ActionCOACH to set a clear true north and the handful of measures that track it — so everyone pulls in the same direction. A 30-minute conversation will show you what your team is really aiming at.
Book a 30-Minute Discovery Call
