# Run the business on numbers, not nerves. EOS® gives a leadership team a weekly rhythm. KPIs tell it whether the rhythm is working. This site explains both without a sales pitch: what the system is, what it really costs, and how to find someone who can help. - **10–250** Employees where EOS fits best (EOS Worldwide FAQ) - **$36k–$53k** Typical year-one implementer cost (Reported session-fee ranges, 2026) - **5–15** Weekly numbers on a good Scorecard (EOS Worldwide, Scorecard) ## Six things every company has to get right EOS breaks running a company into six components: vision, people, data, issues, process and traction. Each one gets a simple tool and a habit. The data component is where KPIs live, as a weekly Scorecard of five to fifteen numbers with an owner each. Get all six working together and the business stops depending on the founder's memory. None of the six is a new idea on its own. What EOS adds is the insistence that you work on all of them, in a set order, with the same leadership team in the room every quarter. Most companies are strong on two or three and quietly broken on the rest, and the broken ones are what the founder ends up carrying personally. Nothing in the toolkit is clever. A two-page vision, a chart of who owns what, a weekly table of numbers, a running list of problems, a few written-down processes and a ninety-minute meeting that never changes shape. By the end of a quarter the whole thing fits in your head. _[Chart: The six components, and where KPIs sit]_ - [What EOS is](/what-is-eos): The system in plain English: the six components, the tools that go with each, and who it fits. - [The toolkit](/tools): Six tools, from the two-page vision down to the weekly meeting, with the way teams misuse each one. - [KPIs inside EOS](/kpis/eos-scorecard): How to turn a vague list of metrics into a weekly Scorecard that predicts the quarter. - [Who owns what](/eos/accountability-chart): The Accountability Chart™ names every seat before it names a person, which is why drawing one usually starts an argument worth having. ## What it costs, in numbers nobody else publishes Sessions are billed by the day, and what you pay per day follows the implementer's tier: 2026 reports put the low end near $4,500 and the top near $6,600, with no Certified rate published between them. Eight billable sessions make a standard first year, so $36,000 to $52,800 before software or travel. Going it alone costs a few hundred in books and plenty of discipline. EOS Worldwide publishes no prices, and neither do most implementers until you are on a call with them. The ranges above come from implementer fee schedules and reported engagements in 2026. Treat them as a band, not a quote: a first session is often discounted or free, and travel is usually billed on top. The number that matters more than the fee is what the sessions cost you in leadership time. Eight session days out of the business in year one, for five to seven people, is the real budget line. That is also why picking the right implementer matters more than saving five hundred dollars a day. - [The full cost breakdown](/cost): Session fees by tier, first-90-days totals, year one and year two, software and what is billed extra. - [Choosing an implementer](/how-to-choose-an-implementer): How the tiers differ, what to ask before you book anyone, and the red flags worth walking away from. ## KPIs without the jargon A KPI is a number you check on a schedule because it predicts or proves a result you care about. Most companies track too many, and most of those are lagging: revenue, profit, churn. The useful ones are leading: calls made, proposals sent, on-time deliveries. Fix the mix and the weekly meeting starts changing decisions instead of reporting history. A good test for any number on your list: if it goes red this week, does somebody know what to do on Monday? Revenue failing that test is normal, which is why revenue belongs on the monthly review rather than the weekly one. Proposals sent passes it easily. The other half of the job is ownership. A row with two owners has none, and a number nobody owns gets explained away every week until it disappears from the table. One name per row, and that person reports it whether or not they like the figure. _[Chart: Leading numbers move first; lagging numbers confirm it later]_ - [KPIs, start here](/kpis): What counts as a KPI, how many to track, and how to pick the ones your team will actually use. - [Examples by department](/kpis/examples): Sales, marketing, operations, finance and HR measures, tagged leading or lagging and weekly or monthly. - [Leading vs lagging](/kpis/leading-vs-lagging): How to tell them apart in thirty seconds, and why weekly Scorecards need mostly leading ones. ## Start with the books The whole system is written down. Traction covers the tools, Get a Grip tells the same story as a novel, Rocket Fuel® explains the Visionary™ and Integrator™ split, and the Mastery series goes deep on people, process, data and issues. Two hundred dollars of books beats a year of guessing about whether this fits you. Read Traction first and give a copy to everyone on the leadership team. If three of you finish it and want to start, you have your answer about fit. If nobody finishes it, an implementer is not going to fix that, and you have saved yourself the $36,000 to $52,800 a first year of sessions would have cost. - [The reading order](/books): All thirteen books ranked by who should read what first, plus the adjacent titles worth the time. ## FAQ ### What does EOS stand for? Entrepreneurial Operating System. It is the name of one particular system rather than a category, and what it names is a fixed toolkit plus a weekly leadership meeting. ### How much does an EOS implementer cost? Day rates reported in 2026 run from about $4,500 to about $6,600 depending on tier. A standard first year is eight billable full-day sessions, which puts the fees at $36,000 to $52,800 before software and travel. ### How long does implementation take? Eighteen to 24 months, per EOS Worldwide. Eight billable sessions fall in the first year, six in the second and five in the third, by which point the team should be running the tools alone. ### Can we implement EOS ourselves? Many do. Everything you need is published in the books and the free tools. The part money buys is an outsider who will keep the meeting honest when the conversation gets uncomfortable. ## Not sure what you need yet? Tell us where the business hurts. We'll reply within one business day with a straight answer, whether that's a book, a tool or an implementer. [Ask us](/contact?reason=learn_eos) _Updated 2026-08-27_ --- # What is EOS? A plain-English explanation EOS® is the Entrepreneurial Operating System, created by Gino Wickman and published as Traction in 2007. It is a fixed toolkit plus a meeting rhythm that a leadership team uses to run a company of roughly 10 to 250 people. Here is what it actually involves. ## EOS in one paragraph EOS is a proper noun: the Entrepreneurial Operating System, created by Gino Wickman. It is a complete system of simple tools plus a meeting rhythm, run by the leadership team of a privately held company. EOS Worldwide is firm that it is not a methodology, because it covers the whole business rather than improving one function. The word operating system is doing real work in that name. An operating system is not the applications you run; it is the layer that decides how they get scheduled, what has priority and who owns what. EOS does the same for a leadership team: same tools, same order, same meeting, every week and every quarter. It is deliberately unsophisticated. There is one page of vision, one chart of accountabilities, one table of weekly numbers and one list of issues. Nothing on that list would impress a strategy consultant. The value is in doing all of it, together, for long enough that the habits stick. ## The Six Key Components™ Every company runs on six components: vision, people, data, issues, process and traction. EOS gives each one a tool and asks you to strengthen all six rather than the two you enjoy. Vision without traction is a nice offsite; traction without data is guesswork. The order matters because each component leans on the ones above it. EOS Worldwide scores these six as percentages in its Organizational Checkup, and the pattern in most companies is the same: strong vision, weak data, and issues that have been on the list for two years. That is the diagnosis the first session usually confirms. _[Chart: The six components, and where KPIs sit]_ - **Vision**: The V/TO® puts core values, purpose, targets and the one-year plan on two pages the whole team can repeat. - **People**: The Accountability Chart™ defines seats before names; the People Analyzer® scores fit against your core values. - **Data**: A weekly Scorecard of five to fifteen measurables, one owner each, plus quarterly Rocks with numbers on them. - **Issues**: An Issues List where problems go to be named, and IDS® (identify, discuss, solve) as the way they get closed. - **Process**: Your handful of core processes documented at a level people will read, then followed by everybody. - **Traction**: Rocks each quarter and the Level 10 Meeting™ every week, so priorities survive contact with a busy Tuesday. ## Who EOS fits, and who it doesn't EOS Worldwide puts the sweet spot at 10 to 250 employees in a privately held company with a leader who will commit to the process. It fits teams that are growing faster than their structure. It fits badly for solo founders, for enterprise matrix organizations, and for any leadership team that will not be honest in the room. Under about ten people you are the operating system, and the tools add ceremony to problems you can solve by talking. The Scorecard habit is still worth stealing; the full rollout is not. Past 250 people, or inside a business unit that reports into a corporate parent, the constraint is rarely clarity about the seats. It is capital allocation, portfolio strategy and politics, and EOS has little to say about those. Teams at that size often keep the meeting rhythm and drop the rest. The disqualifier that has nothing to do with size: a leader who will not be held accountable by their own team. EOS Worldwide names lack of commitment from the leader as the most common reason implementations fail, and no implementer can work around it. ## Implementer or self-implement? Both work. Self-implementing means the books, the free tools and EOS Academy, and it costs a few hundred dollars. Hiring an implementer means eight billable sessions in year one and $36,000 to $52,800 in fees. You are paying for a neutral person who runs the session, asks the awkward question and holds you to the calendar. The honest test is whether your team argues productively without a referee. If your quarterly planning already ends with decisions and owners, the books will get you most of the way. If it ends with everyone agreeing and nothing changing, that is exactly what you are hiring an implementer to break. A middle path that works: self-implement for two quarters, then bring in an implementer for the annual planning session. You arrive knowing the language, and the two days are spent on the hard conversations rather than on teaching the tools. - [What it costs](/cost): Session fees by tier, year-one and year-two totals, and the real cost of self-implementing. - [Choosing an implementer](/how-to-choose-an-implementer): Tiers, first-call questions and the red flags that should end the conversation. - [The books](/books): Ten titles in reading order, starting with the one to hand your leadership team this week. ## Where KPIs come in The data component is a weekly Scorecard: five to fifteen measurables, one owner per row, thirteen weeks visible at once so you see a trend rather than a dot. EOS asks for activity-based, leading numbers, because those are the ones this week's work can still move. Anything off-track becomes an issue and gets solved in the same meeting. Thirteen weeks on screen is the detail most teams skip, and it is the one that makes the table useful. A single red week is noise. Three reds in a row is a conversation about capacity, pricing or a person, and it happens two months before the financials would have raised it. Building the first Scorecard is where teams stall, usually because they start from what the accounting system already reports. Start instead from the question each leader would ask on a Monday morning if they could only ask one. _[Chart: A weekly Scorecard: owner, target, thirteen weeks of actuals]_ - [Build your Scorecard](/kpis/eos-scorecard): How to pick 5 to 15 measurables that predict the quarter instead of describing the last one. - [KPI examples](/kpis/examples): Concrete measures by department, tagged leading or lagging and weekly or monthly. ## Terms you will hear in the first quarter EOS arrives with a vocabulary, and most of it turns up in the first ninety days. Six words cover nearly every conversation a new team has: the model itself, the two-page vision document, the chart of seats, the weekly table of numbers, the quarterly priorities and the weekly meeting. Each has a plain definition in the glossary. - [EOS Model®](/glossary/eos-model): The one-page diagram of the six components, and the order a team is meant to strengthen them. - [V/TO](/glossary/vto): The two-page vision document: eight questions, from core values down to this quarter's priorities. - [Accountability Chart](/glossary/accountability-chart): Seats and what each one owns, drawn before any names go into the boxes. - [Scorecard](/glossary/scorecard): Five to fifteen weekly numbers with one owner each and thirteen weeks of history in view. - [Rocks](/glossary/rocks): Three to seven priorities for the next ninety days, each with a name and a finish line. - [Level 10 Meeting](/glossary/level-10-meeting): The ninety-minute weekly meeting with a fixed agenda and an hour spent solving issues. ## What else teams look at EOS is not the only packaged operating system, and most leadership teams shortlist two or three before committing. The others ask for the same weekly discipline and differ mainly in how much structure they hand you and how many people are certified to help. These pages set them side by side on cost, cadence, tools and fit. - [EOS vs Scaling Up](/compare/eos-vs-scaling-up): Verne Harnish's system, its one-page plan and its busier meeting rhythm, against this one. - [EOS vs Pinnacle](/compare/eos-vs-pinnacle): Mentoring and an open toolbox on one side, a fixed toolkit and a deeper bench on the other. - [EOS vs 4DX](/compare/eos-vs-4dx): FranklinCovey's execution method solves one narrow problem well and leaves the rest of the company alone. - [EOS vs System & Soul](/compare/eos-vs-system-and-soul): A newer framework from ex-EOS coaches that puts culture and team energy beside the numbers. - [EOS vs OKRs](/compare/eos-vs-okrs): A way to run a company weighed against a way to word a quarterly goal, which is not the same question. ## FAQ ### What does EOS stand for? Entrepreneurial Operating System. Read it as a name, not a description: it points at one defined toolkit and meeting rhythm rather than at business systems in general. ### Who created EOS? Gino Wickman, who spent years running these tools with owner-led companies before writing them up. Traction put the system in front of a general readership in 2007, and the certification business followed the book. ### Is EOS a methodology? EOS Worldwide rejects that word for it. The distinction they draw is one of coverage: a methodology sharpens a single function, whereas this sets the vision, the seats, the numbers, the quarterly priorities and the meetings all at once. ### What size company is EOS for? The published band is 10 to 250 employees in a privately held firm. Below it the process costs more attention than the problem deserves; above it, teams usually want deeper strategy and finance work than these tools provide. ### How long does implementation take? Eighteen to 24 months is the stated arc. The first year carries eight billable sessions and the second six, on the assumption the team keeps the weekly meeting running unaided between them. ### Can we implement EOS ourselves? Nothing stops you: the books and the free downloads hold the whole method. The reason teams still hire someone is that the material does not make anybody say the difficult thing out loud in the room. ## Think EOS might fit? Tell us the size of your team and what keeps breaking. We'll say whether the books are enough or whether it's worth talking to an implementer. Answer within one business day, from a person. [Get a straight answer](/contact?reason=learn_eos) _Updated 2026-08-27_ --- # Why companies adopt EOS, and what they say a year later EOS® was built to fix five specific frustrations that show up in most growing companies. This page covers what the system changes when it works, what the published evidence is worth, and the situations where the honest answer is that you need something else. - **18–24 mo** To run the full process (EOS Worldwide) - **~800** Professional EOS Implementers® worldwide, all tiers (EOS Worldwide, 2026) - **87%** Of implementer work that comes from referrals (Success.co, State of EOS 2026) ## The five frustrations EOS starts from five complaints that founders make in almost identical words: no control over time or the business, people who don't do what they said, profit that never arrives, growth that has stalled at a ceiling, and a shelf of fixes that never stuck. The tools map onto those five, one at a time. Nothing on that list is a strategy problem. Each one is a symptom of the same thing: decisions that live in the founder's head, so they cannot be delegated, checked or repeated. That is why the first sessions are about seats and numbers rather than about the market. - **Lack of control**: Over time, the market, the business itself. The week runs you rather than the other way round. - **People**: The team doesn't do what you asked, or does it differently every time, and nobody quite knows whose call it was. - **Profit**: Revenue grows and the bank balance doesn't. Nobody can say which jobs or clients actually make money. - **Hitting the ceiling**: Growth flattens. What got the company to this size is the thing now stopping it from getting bigger. - **Nothing works**: You've tried offsites, consultants and three project tools. Each lasted a quarter, then the old habits came back. ## What changes when it works The visible change is meeting quality. Leadership meetings finish on time with decisions and owners, priorities survive the quarter, and the same six numbers get reported every week whether or not they look good. Underneath that, the change is that the company stops routing every decision through the founder, which is the point of the whole exercise. Teams that stick with it describe the second year as quieter rather than faster. The dramatic quarter is usually the first one, when the Accountability Chart™ forces a conversation about a seat that everybody had been avoiding. After that the system mostly removes surprises. - **Meetings get shorter**: A fixed ninety-minute agenda, same order every week, most of it spent solving issues rather than reporting status. - **Priorities are clear**: Three to seven Rocks per quarter with owners and dates, so the answer to 'is this important?' stops being 'yes, everything'. - **Accountability is consistent**: One name per seat and one name per number. Nobody has to guess whose job something was. - **The numbers tell the truth**: Weekly measurables reported whether or not they're good, which is how problems arrive two months earlier than they used to. - **Problems get closed**: Issues go on a list and come off it. The same argument stops resurfacing at every quarterly. - **Leaders act as a team**: The leadership team argues in the session and speaks with one voice outside it, which is what most of these tools are quietly for. ## What the evidence looks like There is no independent study of EOS outcomes. EOS Worldwide reports client examples such as revenue up 68 percent and margins up 41 percent, and those are vendor-reported figures from self-selected clients, not audited results. Success.co's 2026 State of EOS report is the closest thing to survey data, and it surveys implementers rather than the companies they serve. Treat the published numbers as marketing until someone runs a control group. What the survey data does show is a healthy supply side: Success.co found that 87 percent of implementer work arrives through warm referrals, which tells you clients recommend their implementers, and also that the market is opaque if you don't already know someone. The better evidence for your decision is closer to home. Ask an implementer for two clients your size in your industry who stopped working with them a year ago, and call those. Companies that kept running EOS after the engagement ended are the only proof point that means anything. ## When EOS is the wrong tool Skip it if the leader will not be held accountable by their own team, because EOS Worldwide names that as the most common failure mode and no implementer can work around it. Skip it if your real problem is strategy, cash planning or capital allocation. Skip it if you are under about ten people and can still decide things by talking. There are decent alternatives. Scaling Up, from Verne Harnish, suits companies of roughly 30 to 500 people and goes considerably deeper on strategy and cash. Pinnacle and System & Soul cover similar ground to EOS with different vocabulary and a lighter licensing model. Metronomics leans on software and coaching together. It is also worth saying that half of EOS works on its own. A weekly Scorecard and a same-agenda leadership meeting cost nothing and fix a surprising share of the five frustrations. If you want to test whether the team will use the system before committing to a first year of fees between $36,000 and $52,800, start there. - [Common questions](/faq): How EOS compares to Scaling Up, what it costs, and what happens if it isn't working. - [Choosing an implementer](/how-to-choose-an-implementer): If you do hire, this is what to ask and what the tiers actually mean. - [Start with a Scorecard](/kpis/eos-scorecard): The cheapest useful piece of EOS: five to fifteen weekly numbers with an owner each. - [When it stalls](/blog/eos-isnt-working): The ten ways a rollout goes quiet, what is usually underneath each one, and where to start putting it right. - [The honest math](/blog/is-eos-worth-it): Year-one fees set beside the leadership hours nobody budgets, and the situations that argue against starting. ## FAQ ### Does EOS actually work? There is no independent study. EOS Worldwide publishes client-reported results such as revenue up 68 percent, which are vendor-reported and self-selected. The practical test is whether a company still runs the system a year after its implementer left. ### What's the difference between EOS and Scaling Up? EOS is lighter and more prescriptive. Scaling Up goes deeper on strategy, cash and metrics and generally suits companies of roughly 30 to 500 people with a finance function already in place. ### What makes EOS implementations fail? Most often a leader who won't be held accountable by their own team, or a leadership team that will not be honest in the session. Both are visible in the first ninety-minute meeting if you're looking. ## Worth it for your company or not? Give us your team size, your industry and the frustration that made you search for this. You'll get a straight read back, including when the answer is that you don't need an implementer at all. [Get a straight read](/contact?reason=get_started) _Updated 2026-08-27_ --- # The EOS Process®, step by step A full EOS® rollout is a sequence of full-day sessions with your leadership team, spread over 18 to 24 months. This is what happens in each one, what you walk out with, and what the team is expected to do in the weeks between them. 1. **90-Minute Meeting** (Free): An implementer walks the leadership team through the system and answers questions. It is a fit check in both directions, and there is no charge for it. 2. **Focus Day®** (One full day): You build the Accountability Chart™, set the first Rocks, draft the Scorecard and start running the Level 10 Meeting™. The team leaves with work to do this week. 3. **Vision Building® 1 & 2** (Two full days, ~30 days apart): The V/TO® gets filled in: core values, Core Focus™, 10-Year Target™, marketing strategy, 3-Year Picture™ and the 1-Year Plan. 4. **Quarterly sessions** (Every 90 days): Review last quarter's Rocks, refresh the V/TO, solve the issues that survived the weekly meeting, and set the next set of Rocks. 5. **Annual session** (Two days a year): The same work at a larger scale: reset the vision, agree next year's plan and budget, and spend real time on team health. ## How long it takes EOS Worldwide puts a full implementation at 18 to 24 months. Year one is eight billable sessions: a Focus Day, two Vision Building days, three quarterly sessions and a two-day annual. Year two falls to six sessions and year three to five, as the team runs the tools without help. The weekly meeting starts after day one. Sessions are usually spaced 30 to 90 days apart, which is the point rather than a scheduling accident. The work happens between them, and an implementer who offers to compress the whole thing into a fortnight is selling you a workshop rather than an operating system. Most teams describe the first two quarters as the hard part. The tools are unfamiliar, the Accountability Chart has raised a question about somebody's seat, and the Scorecard is half-full of numbers nobody can source yet. Quarter three is usually when it starts feeling like the normal way to run the company. ## What happens between sessions The sessions are not the system. Between them the leadership team runs a Level 10 Meeting every week: the Scorecard reviewed in five minutes, Rocks checked on or off track, customer and employee headlines, to-dos from last week, then the rest of the ninety minutes spent solving issues with IDS®. Same agenda, same day, same time. Two things go wrong here more than anywhere else. The meeting drifts into a status report, so the issues never get time; and the Scorecard goes stale because two of the numbers are painful to collect. Both are visible within a month, and both are what you pay an implementer to catch in the next session. Rocks need a mid-quarter check as well. A Rock that is off track in week six can still be rescued. The same Rock discovered in week twelve is just a miss, and a quarter of leadership attention is gone with it. ## What each stage costs Implementers bill per session day, so the cost of the process is the number of sessions times the rate. Reported 2026 rates run about $4,500 at the Professional tier and around $6,600 for Expert, with no Certified figure published, so we model $5,250. The 90-Minute Meeting is free. Eight billable sessions put year one at $36,000 to $52,800. The first 90 days, meaning the Focus Day, both Vision Building days and the first quarterly, is the biggest single block: four billed sessions, so somewhere between $18,000 and $26,400 depending on tier. Some implementers price that opening block as a package. Travel is normally billed on top, and software is separate again. Virtual sessions remove the travel line entirely, and plenty of implementers now run the whole engagement remotely without much argument about whether it works. - [Full cost breakdown](/cost): Session fees by tier, first-90-days and year-one totals, and what gets billed on top. - [Choosing an implementer](/how-to-choose-an-implementer): What Professional, Certified and Expert mean, and the questions to ask on the first call. - [The tools you'll use](/tools): V/TO, Accountability Chart, Scorecard, Rocks and the Level 10 Meeting, explained before you walk in. ## What each session is called The names above are the ones an implementer will use on a first call, and they are worth knowing before you agree a schedule. Two of them are trademarks of EOS Worldwide and two are ordinary descriptions. Each links to a plain definition, what happens in the room on the day, and what the team is expected to do afterwards. - [Focus Day](/glossary/focus-day): The first paid session: seats, first Rocks, a draft Scorecard and the weekly meeting. - [Vision Building](/glossary/vision-building): The two days, about a month apart, that fill in the vision document. - [Quarterly Session](/glossary/quarterly-session): A full day every ninety days to review, refresh the plan and set the next Rocks. - [Annual Planning](/glossary/annual-planning): Two days once a year on the vision, next year's plan and how the team is working. ## FAQ ### Is the 90-Minute Meeting really free? Yes. Every implementer offers it at no charge, and there is no obligation afterwards. Treat it as your interview of them as much as their pitch to you. ### What is a Focus Day? The first paid session. In one day you build the Accountability Chart, set your first Rocks, draft a Scorecard and learn the Level 10 Meeting agenda. The weekly meeting starts that week. ### Do the sessions have to be in person? No. Many implementers run the whole engagement virtually. In-person tends to work better for the Vision Building days and the annual, where the harder conversations happen. ### What happens after the first two years? Most teams keep the quarterly and annual sessions and drop everything else, either with the same implementer at a lower cadence or by running the sessions themselves. ## Ready to start, or still deciding? Tell us where you are and we'll tell you which stage you'd actually be starting at. You get a written reply, not a calendar link you didn't ask for. [Talk it through](/contact?reason=get_started) _Updated 2026-08-27_ --- # The EOS tools, one page each There are roughly two dozen EOS tools, and five carry most of the weight. Each one below gets its own page: what it does, the way first-year teams get it wrong, and how to tell when yours is working. ## What the EOS tools are EOS® is a set of one-page tools and a meeting rhythm. Five are foundational; the rest are supporting, and you meet those as questions come up. Each is a format, not a product, so a leadership team can rebuild the full set in a spreadsheet over a weekend. The pages below cover one tool at a time. Most of the list is worksheets. You fill in a page, argue about it with the leadership team, and leave it where everyone can see it. Two are meetings: the weekly ninety minutes and the quarterly day. Those are what keep the worksheets from going stale on a shared drive. The format is not what stops a team. A blank two-by-two grid takes a minute to draw. Writing your own name in the wrong quadrant takes a year. So does saying out loud that a manager of nine years is in the wrong seat. ## The five tools that do the work If you only adopt five things, adopt these: the V/TO® for vision, the Accountability Chart™ for seats, the Scorecard for weekly numbers, Rocks for quarterly priorities and the Level 10 Meeting™ to hold the whole lot together. Each is one page or one table. The difficulty is never the format; it's being honest while you fill it in. - [V/TO](/eos/vision-traction-organizer): Two pages answering eight questions: core values, Core Focus™, 10-Year Target™, marketing strategy, 3-Year Picture™, 1-Year Plan, Rocks and issues. Misuse: writing it once at an offsite and never opening it again. It is meant to be read at every quarterly. - [Accountability Chart](/eos/accountability-chart): Seats and the three to five accountabilities that belong in each, drawn before you put names in. Misuse: drawing the current org chart with nicer boxes, which protects exactly the arrangement the tool exists to question. - [Scorecard](/kpis/eos-scorecard): Five to fifteen weekly numbers, one owner per row, thirteen weeks visible. Misuse: filling it with whatever the accounting system already reports, so every number is lagging and nobody can act on a red week. - [Rocks](/glossary/rocks): Three to seven priorities per person per quarter, each with an owner and a done-or-not definition. Misuse: nine Rocks that are really a to-do list, or Rocks with no measurable finish, so the quarterly review becomes an argument about wording. - [Level 10 Meeting](/eos/level-10-meeting): Ninety minutes, same agenda, same time each week, most of it spent solving issues. Misuse: letting the reporting section swallow an hour, which leaves the issues where they were and teaches the team the meeting is theatre. ## The supporting tools Around the core five sits a longer list you'll meet as questions come up. Most are one-page worksheets: the People Analyzer® and GWC™ for whether someone fits, Delegate and Elevate™ for what a leader should stop doing, IDS® for closing issues, Clarity Break™ time for the founder, the Quarterly Conversation™, a process documenter and an organizational checkup. The People Analyzer scores a person against your core values, plus GWC: do they get it, do they want it, do they have the capacity to do it. It sounds harsh written down. In practice it is the tool that turns a vague sense that somebody is struggling into a specific, fair conversation. Delegate and Elevate is a two-by-two of what you love and are good at against what you don't and aren't. Nearly every founder who fills it in honestly finds a quadrant's worth of work that should have moved to somebody else a year ago. The Three-Step Process Documenter™ is the antidote to a hundred-page operations manual. Name your handful of core processes, write the major steps of each on a page or two, then get everybody following them. Twenty percent of the detail covers eighty percent of the outcome. - [People Analyzer](/eos/people-analyzer): The grid that rates people against your core values, with a bar the team agrees first. - [GWC](/glossary/gwc): Gets it, wants it, has the capacity: the three-question test for whether somebody fits a seat. - [Delegate and Elevate](/glossary/delegate-and-elevate): The four boxes that sort your week by what you are good at and what you enjoy. - [IDS](/glossary/ids): Identify, discuss, solve: how an issue gets closed in the meeting rather than next week. - [Issues List](/glossary/issues-list): Three lists, one for the week, one per department, one long-term, worked in order. - [Three-Step Process Documenter](/glossary/three-step-process-documenter): How to write a core process down at the level people will actually read it. The official worksheets live in the EOS Toolbox on eosworldwide.com/eos-tools, where most downloads sit behind an email form. We describe the tools here so you can decide which ones you actually want before handing over an address. ## Which tool to start with Draw the Accountability Chart and build a Scorecard in the first working session. Start the weekly meeting seven days later, so the numbers have somewhere to land. The V/TO can take two more sessions, and it goes better once the team has practiced disagreeing in public. Save the People Analyzer for after core values exist. That order is about feedback speed. Seats and numbers change what happens next Monday, so the team feels something working within two weeks. Vision work pays back over a year. A room that has not learned to disagree out loud will write the soft version of all eight answers. None of it needs a hired facilitator. A leadership team can run the first three months with a spreadsheet and a recurring calendar invite. What you buy later is somebody with no stake in the outcome, who has watched forty companies do this, and who will not let the room change the subject when the hard question arrives. - [Build a Scorecard in five minutes](/tools/scorecard-builder): Four questions about your company, then weekly rows you can edit, each with an owner and a target. - [Two seats at the top](/blog/integrator-vs-visionary): The founder role and the person who runs the week, how they pair up, and what a part-time hire buys. - [The rollout, session by session](/eos-process): See where each tool gets introduced across the first year, and roughly how long each stage runs. ## FAQ ### Are the EOS tools free? The worksheets are free to download from EOS Worldwide, though most sit behind an email form. Traction describes all of them, and nothing stops you rebuilding the templates in a spreadsheet. ### How many Rocks should each person have? Three to seven per quarter, company-wide and individually. More than seven means nothing is a priority, and the quarterly review turns into a list of excuses. ### Do you need an implementer to use the tools? No. Traction describes every tool, and a leadership team can build all of them in a spreadsheet. A hired facilitator adds the awkward question nobody in the room wants to ask. They also keep the weekly meeting at ninety minutes in month seven, when two people would rather skip it. ### Can you use one tool without the rest? The weekly meeting and the Scorecard stand alone. Plenty of teams run those two for a year with nothing else. The V/TO does not. It feeds the quarterly priorities, which feed the meeting. Alone, it turns into a document somebody wrote once. If you take two things, take the meeting and the numbers. ## Not sure which tool your team needs first? Send the size of your leadership team and what keeps going wrong. We reply inside a business day with the one tool worth starting on, plus the ones you can ignore this quarter. [Tell us what's breaking](/contact?reason=get_started) _Updated 2026-09-06_ --- # Free EOS tools you can run in the browser Use each tool on this page, from a Scorecard builder to a timer for the weekly leadership meeting. Nothing you enter leaves your browser unless you ask for a copy. The EOS tools pages explain what each EOS® tool actually does. ## A tool you can run right now Each tool runs in the browser. Most take under ten minutes. The starting Scorecard, readiness check, implementer route, and printable checklist for the first call each have their own page here. The rest live on the page that explains the tool they belong to, starting with the meeting timer that runs alongside the weekly meeting itself. Nothing you type is stored unless you send it through the form under the result. - [Scorecard Builder](/tools/scorecard-builder): Answer four questions about your company and get 5 to 15 weekly measurables with an owner seat, a cadence and a starting goal. Copy the result as a CSV. - [Ready for EOS?](/tools/ready-for-eos): Fifteen statements across the Six Key Components™, scored Never to Always. Get a band, your two weakest components, and a first move for each. - [Implementer Fit](/tools/implementer-fit): Ten questions on size, budget and team stability route you to one of six outcomes, from an implementer tier to self-implementing. - [Interview checklist](/tools/implementer-interview-checklist): The seven questions to ask on the first call and six red flags to raise directly, laid out to print or save as a PDF. - [Weekly meeting timer](/eos/level-10-meeting#run-it): Runs the seven fixed-length segments, shows overruns in red, counts issues raised and solved, and sums up the meeting at the end. It lives on the Level 10 Meeting™ page. - [Core values grid](/eos/people-analyzer#try-the-grid): Score up to twelve people against up to seven values. Set the bar first, then see who falls below it. Copies as CSV. It lives on the People Analyzer® page. - [Seats and roles chart](/eos/accountability-chart#draw-it): Sketch the seats the business needs first, then put names in. Each seat takes up to five roles, and anyone holding two gets flagged. Copy the result as indented text or CSV. It lives on the Accountability Chart™ page. - [Vision and plan worksheet](/eos/vision-traction-organizer#fill-it-in): Work through the eight questions behind the two-page plan. Word limits keep the answers short, and a tick box records where the room settled for something nobody believes. Copy the result as markdown. It lives on the V/TO® page. ## The Scorecard is where most teams fail The Scorecard is the tool teams most often build wrong, and it goes wrong the same way every time: too many rows, mostly lagging numbers, two owners on the rows nobody wants, and a couple of measures that take an hour to collect, so they quietly stop being collected. All four are fixable in a single session. Start from the question rather than the data. Each leader picks the one number they would want on a Monday morning if they could only have one, and that is their row. You will get five to eight rows out of a leadership team that way, which is a working Scorecard, and you can add to it later. Then check each row against two rules. Can the owner change it this week through their own actions? If not, it is a monthly review number, not a weekly one. And can somebody pull the figure in under five minutes? If not, either automate the collection or pick a proxy you can actually get. _[Chart: A weekly Scorecard: owner, target, thirteen weeks of actuals]_ - [Build your Scorecard](/kpis/eos-scorecard): The full walkthrough: picking measurables, setting targets, and what to do with a row that goes red three weeks running. - [Leading vs lagging](/kpis/leading-vs-lagging): How to tell the two apart quickly, with examples from sales, operations and finance. - [KPI examples](/kpis/examples): Measures by department you can lift straight into a first draft. - [Build one in five days](/blog/scorecard-in-a-week): The week-long version: name the rows on Monday, define them, find the data, and read the board on Friday. ## Software that runs these tools You do not need software in year one; a shared spreadsheet and a calendar invite run EOS perfectly well. What software adds is that the Scorecard updates itself, the Issues List survives the week, and nobody arrives at the meeting with a different version of the V/TO. Five products cover the market, and the differences are small. Ninety.io is the largest, organized around the six components. Its pricing page lists a free tier and paid plans at $8.40, $9.80 and $11.20 per user per month (2026). Ninety is licensed by EOS Worldwide but has broadened to support other frameworks, and its public glossary is the best free EOS reference online. Success.co is also licensed by EOS Worldwide and stays closer to EOS as written, with a Free Forever tier covering the V/TO, Accountability Chart and Organizational Checkup, plus a 30-day trial of the paid plan. EOS One™ is EOS Worldwide's own product, so it tracks the official tools exactly, and it offers a 30-day trial as well. Bloom Growth and Strety are the independent options. Bloom Growth ran for years under its earlier name, Traction Tools; Strety puts the meeting and the Scorecard where a Microsoft shop already works: a native Teams app carrying single sign-on, with Slack listed only among its integrations (checked August 2026). That suits a company that will not adopt another tab. Pick on two things: whether your team already lives in Slack or Teams, and whether you want the software to stay strictly EOS-shaped. Everything else on the feature grids is close enough that the decision will not be the thing that makes your implementation work. - [Ninety or Success.co](/compare/ninety-vs-success-co): Both hold a license. One has widened to serve several systems, the other refuses to, and their free tiers differ in shape. - [Ninety or Bloom Growth](/compare/ninety-vs-bloom-growth): Paying by the head against a flat monthly membership, and the headcount at which the cheaper choice swaps over. - [Every option, side by side](/compare/best-eos-software): Prices, free tiers and the fit for each of the five, plus the case for keeping a spreadsheet a while longer. Vendor sites: Ninety.io · Success.co · Bloom Growth · Strety · EOS One. Some of our links to these vendors earn us a referral fee; how we make money has the arrangement in full. ## FAQ ### Do these tools store my answers? No. Your answers stay in your browser until you send results through the contact form; we save nothing before that, and reloading the page clears whatever you typed. ### Where are the EOS tools themselves explained? On the EOS tools pages at /eos: one page per tool, showing what each one does, the mistake first-year teams make with it, and how to tell when it's working. ### Do we need EOS software? Not in year one. A spreadsheet and a recurring calendar invite are enough. Software earns its place once the Scorecard has more than ten rows or the leadership team is spread across locations. ## Stuck on your Scorecard? Send us the rows you have and the ones you can't figure out. We'll suggest measurables that fit your industry and tell you which of your current numbers are doing nothing. Expect an answer inside a business day. [Send us your Scorecard](/contact?reason=kpi_help) _Updated 2026-09-07_ --- # Build a starting Scorecard in five minutes Answer four quick questions about your company and get 5 to 15 weekly measurables with an owner seat, a cadence and a starting goal, drawn from the same library that runs our EOS® Scorecard guide. Nothing is emailed anywhere unless you ask for a copy. ## How the picks get made Pick your industry, the departments in the room, roughly how many people you employ and what hurts most right now. The builder pulls weekly-heavy measurables from our department library, keeps leading numbers ahead of lagging ones, and floats anything tied to the pain you flagged to the top of the list. Edit any row, drop what does not fit, then copy the table as a CSV. Answer four questions (industry, departments, company size, what hurts most) and get a 5 to 15 row starting Scorecard with an owner seat, a cadence and a starting goal per row. Example for a 10 to 49 person company, leadership team only: | Measurable | Owner | Type | Cadence | Goal to start with | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Cash in bank vs 13-week forecast | Integrator | leading | weekly | Within 5% of forecast | | Rocks on track % | Integrator | leading | weekly | ≥ 90% | | Scorecard rows on track % | Integrator | leading | weekly | ≥ 80% | | Issues closed this week | Integrator | leading | weekly | ≥ 3 | | Pipeline coverage vs quarterly target | Integrator | leading | weekly | ≥ 3x | | Open seats with a candidate in process % | Integrator | leading | monthly | 100% | | Revenue vs plan % | Integrator | lagging | weekly | ≥ 100% | | Cash collected this week ($) | Integrator | lagging | weekly | ≥ weekly target | | Net profit % (trailing 3 months) | Integrator | lagging | monthly | ≥ 12% | ## Running it for the first four weeks The rows this tool hands you are a draft, not a finished Scorecard. What decides whether it sticks is what your team does with it across the first month: who owns each number, whether the goal is honest, and whether a hard-to-collect row gets fixed or quietly dropped. Week one, hand every row to a real owner and set the goal at a number the team already believes it can hit this month. A soft target teaches the group the Scorecard is decoration; an impossible one does the same thing from the other direction. Weeks two and three are for collection, not judgment. Some rows will be hard to pull inside five minutes. If a number takes an hour to gather, either automate the pull or swap in a proxy that is close enough and actually gets collected. By week four you should know which rows earn their place. Cut anything nobody looks at when it goes red, and add a row only after the team has agreed what it would do differently on a bad week. ## FAQ ### How many rows should my Scorecard have? Between five and fifteen. Fewer than five and you are probably missing a department; more than fifteen and the weekly review runs long enough that people stop reading closely. ### Who should own each row? Whoever can change the number through their own actions that week, named by seat rather than by person. A row with two owners tends to get explained twice and fixed never. ### Should most rows be weekly or monthly? Weekly, if you can manage it. A monthly figure on a weekly board sits blank three weeks out of four, so the builder favors weekly measurables and treats monthly ones as a fallback. ### Does the tool save what I build? No. Nothing leaves your browser unless you use the email form below the table, which sends a copy to your inbox and lets us follow up if you want help with it. ## Want a second opinion on your Scorecard? Send us the rows you built, or the ones you are stuck on, and we will point out the lagging numbers that snuck in and the departments you have not covered yet. [Get help with your Scorecard](/contact?reason=kpi_help) _Updated 2026-09-01_ --- # Ready for EOS? A 15-question honesty check Fifteen statements across the Six Key Components™, answered Never to Always, score how close your company is to getting real value from EOS® right now. It takes about three minutes, and nothing leaves the page unless you ask for a copy. ## What this checks, and what it does not This is our own instrument, not the official EOS Organizational Checkup, and it will not match one if you have taken both. It scores fifteen statements across vision, people, data, issues, process and traction, then names the two components dragging your score down and a first move for each, so you leave with something to do rather than just a number. Fifteen statements across the Six Key Components (vision, people, data, issues, process, traction), each answered Never to Always. The score lands you in one of four bands (Not yet, Getting there, Ready, Overdue) and names your two weakest components with a first move for each. The statements: 1. (Vision) Everyone on the leadership team can say where the company is going in one sentence, and it is the same sentence. 2. (Vision) This year's goals are written down, and the team looks at them more often than once a year. 3. (Vision) Leadership agrees on what the company will not do, not just what it will. 4. (People) Every seat has one owner, and everyone knows who owns what. 5. (People) You would rehire, with relief, everyone who reports to you. 6. (People) Underperformance gets dealt with inside a quarter rather than tolerated for years. 7. (Data) The leadership team sees the same handful of numbers every week. 8. (Data) Most of those numbers tell you what is about to happen, not what already did. 9. (Issues) Problems get named out loud in meetings, including the awkward ones. 10. (Issues) When you solve a problem, it stays solved. 11. (Process) Your core ways of working are written down somewhere a new hire could actually find. 12. (Process) The company would run for two weeks without the owner answering questions. 13. (Traction) Quarterly priorities exist, each has an owner, and most get done. 14. (Traction) The leadership team meets weekly at the same time, and the meeting is worth attending. 15. (Traction) Meetings end with to-dos that are done by the next meeting. ## Reading your result honestly A low score is not a verdict on the company; it is a description of this week. The number moves fastest when a leader answers about the team as it actually behaves rather than how the team is supposed to behave, so a candid low score is more useful here than an optimistic high one. Watch for the gap between your own answer and how a colleague would answer the same statement. If the leadership team scores this separately and compares, the spread between the highest and lowest answer on any one statement usually says more than the total does. The two weakest components are not a ranking of what matters most to the business; they are just the two furthest from where the rest of your answers sit. Fixing one often moves the other, since Data and Traction in particular tend to rise together. ## FAQ ### Is this the official EOS assessment? No. This is our own fifteen-question instrument, written to match the Six Key Components. EOS Worldwide's own Organizational Checkup is a separate twenty-question survey run through a Professional EOS Implementer® or the official materials. ### How long does it take? About three minutes if you answer honestly and quickly. Slowing down to debate any single statement is a sign the statement is worth a real conversation later. ### What happens with my answers? Nothing leaves your browser unless you use the email form below the result, which sends your answers and score to your inbox and lets us follow up if you want help acting on it. ## Not sure what your result means for you? Send us your score and your two weakest components. We will tell you honestly whether self-implementing, an implementer, or fixing the basics first is the right next move. [Talk it through](/contact?reason=get_started) _Updated 2026-09-01_ --- # Which EOS route fits you? Ten questions about your company point to the right next move for EOS®: implementer, software, or do it yourself. Get a route, plain reasons, and a runner-up worth a second look. Nothing is emailed anywhere unless you ask for a copy. ## How this report routes you Ten quick questions about your company size, budget, timeline and leadership stability route you to one of six outcomes: a Professional, Certified or Expert EOS Implementer®, a fractional Integrator™, EOS-style software, or self-implementing with the books. Each recommendation comes with plain reasons and, for the implementer routes, the year-one cost pulled from the same numbers behind our cost calculator. Ten questions about company size, budget, timeline, prior experience with a business operating system, session preference, leadership stability, whether an Integrator seat is filled, appetite for outside accountability, urgency and whether anyone has read Traction. The answers route to one of six outcomes: 1. How many people work at the company? 2. What could you spend on outside help this year without wincing twice? 3. When do you want to start? 4. Have you run a business operating system before? 5. Session days in person, remote, or either? 6. Will this leadership team still be the leadership team in a year? 7. Is there someone running day-to-day operations who is not the owner? 8. Do you want an outsider holding the team to its commitments? 9. How much is the current chaos costing you? 10. Has anyone on the team actually read Traction cover to cover? The six possible routes: - Professional EOS Implementer: a right-size fit for a smaller budget or an early rollout. - Certified EOS Implementer: our default pick for a funded, mid-size team with no unusual wrinkle. - Expert EOS Implementer: for larger teams with the budget to match. - Self-implement with the books: the budget is tight, or the team wants to run this itself and nothing is on fire. - Hire a fractional Integrator first: the team knows EOS already; the gap is an empty Integrator seat, not knowledge. - Start with EOS-style software: the budget is tight and nobody has read the books yet, so structure comes before a fee. Year-one cost for an implementer route is the per-session fee times 8 sessions (a Focus Day, two Vision Building days, three quarterly sessions and a two-day annual). ## Why we can say this without a conflict of interest This report routes you to a tier, not to a specific implementer. Our directory of implementers is not live yet, so nothing here earns us a referral fee today. If that changes, the affected pages will say so, the same rule we hold everywhere else on this site. ## FAQ ### Do you sell my answers? No. Your answers stay on the page unless you use the email form under the result, and even then they go to your inbox and to us for a follow-up, never to a third party. ### Why should I trust the tier prices? Professional and Expert are reported 2026 fees, dated because implementers set their own rates and nobody publishes a rate card. Certified has no published rate, so $5,250 is our own midpoint between the two, labelled as such wherever it appears. ### Can I skip hiring an implementer entirely? Yes. Two of the six routes, self-implementing and starting with EOS-style software, involve no implementer at all, and the report will say so plainly when your answers point that way. ## Want a person to sanity-check your route? Send us your answers or your result. We will tell you honestly whether the recommendation still holds once you explain the part a form cannot capture. [Talk to us](/contact?reason=find_implementer) _Updated 2026-09-01_ --- # The implementer interview checklist Ask seven things on a first call with an EOS® implementer, among them what they have run for teams your size, how they handle a leadership team that dodges the hard conversation, and what they change if it stalls by quarter two. The sheet also carries six red flags. The one that ends the meeting is a refusal to put you in touch with a past client. Print it and tick as you go. ## What's on the checklist This is the printable version of our guide to choosing an implementer: the seven questions worth asking on the first call, grouped by what they cover, plus six red flags to raise directly rather than quietly noting. Print it, tick items off as you go, and use the same sheet on every call so the answers are easy to compare afterward. Bring these to every first call with an EOS implementer, and raise the red flags directly if you see them rather than waiting to decide later. ## Questions to ask on the first call - **Which industries and company sizes do you serve?** You want someone who has sat with a team your size in a business with your kind of margins. A 12-person agency and a 200-person manufacturer need different things from the same tools. - **How many sessions a year do you run, and how many clients do you hold?** This is the honest version of the tier question. It tells you whether this is a full practice or a retirement project, and whether they have time for you. - **How do you handle a leadership team that won't be honest?** The single most useful question on the list. Listen for a concrete story rather than a philosophy. Every implementer meets this; the good ones remember exactly what they did. - **Can I speak to a client who stopped working with you?** References who are still clients are easy. A client who finished or quit will tell you what the engagement felt like in month nine, and how the implementer behaved when it ended. - **What happens if it isn't working at quarter two?** Ask what they change and how the conversation starts. An implementer with a clear answer here has had it before and will not simply keep billing. - **What is your fee, and how do you charge travel?** Get the day rate, the expected number of days a year, the expenses policy and the notice period in writing. Vagueness at this stage rarely improves later. - **Virtual, in person, or both?** Ask which sessions they insist on running in the room. Most will hold out for the annual planning days, which is reasonable, and run quarterlies remotely if you prefer. ## Red flags to raise directly - **Won't share pricing** A day rate is not a trade secret. Someone who will only discuss fees after a discovery process is managing your commitment rather than answering the question. - **Pushes a long contract on the first call** Standard practice is to work session by session or a year at a time. A two-year commitment demanded before your first working day shifts all the risk onto you. - **No client references** A practice with real clients can produce two who will take a call. If nobody is available, ask why, and be careful with any answer that involves confidentiality alone. - **Sells their own software in session one** A tool recommendation is fine. A paid product of theirs, pushed before your first Scorecard exists, means you are buying two things and evaluating neither. - **Talks more than your team** The job is facilitation. If you leave the intro meeting having heard mostly about their career, picture the same balance across a two-day annual session. - **Won't say when you're done** Ask what the end of the engagement looks like. Anyone who cannot describe a team running the system without them has an incentive you should know about. ## FAQ ### How many implementers should I interview? Two or three before deciding. Meeting only one leaves you with nothing to compare the answers against, and chemistry matters as much as the answers themselves. ### Is a PDF version available? Use the print button above and choose Save as PDF in your browser's print dialog. There's no separate download; the printed page is built to work as one. ### May I share this with my leadership team? Yes. Print a copy for everyone on the call, or send them the link back to this page so they can print their own. ## Want us to sanity-check what you heard? Send us the answers you got on a call, and we'll tell you honestly what stood out and what to ask next time. [Get a shortlist](/contact?reason=find_implementer) _Updated 2026-09-08_ --- # KPIs: what they are, how many to track, and which ones matter Plenty of companies measure a lot and act on very little of it. This is the short version: what counts as a KPI, how many a small leadership team can carry, and how to choose numbers that tell you something before the quarter is over. ## What a KPI actually is A KPI is a number you check on a schedule and act on. That's the whole definition. A metric is any measurement your systems produce; a KPI is the handful you have decided to run the business by, each with an owner, a goal, and a place on the agenda every week. The test is not whether a number is interesting. It's whether anything changes when the number moves. Website sessions are interesting. Sessions become a KPI the moment somebody owns them, has a weekly target, and is expected to explain a bad week and do something about it. That's also why exports from your accounting system rarely make good KPIs on their own. They are accurate, they arrive late, and by the time you read them the week that produced them is gone. ## How many KPIs to track Five to fifteen for a leadership team, checked weekly, one owner per row. Below five you can't see the business. Above fifteen the review becomes a reading exercise and the team stops arguing about any single number. Departments can keep their own longer lists; the leadership set is a summary rather than a merge of everything underneath. The one-owner rule does more work than it looks. A row owned by two people is owned by nobody, and the week it goes red you get an explanation from each of them and a decision from neither. If you can't get under fifteen, the usual cause is that several rows measure the same outcome at different stages. Keep the earliest one you can act on and let the rest live in a department view. ## How to pick one Forget the acronym. A number earns a place on the weekly list if it passes five tests: it is specific enough to argue about, someone can collect it in minutes, one person owns it, it has a goal written next to it, and it moves early enough that this week's effort shows up in it. 1. **Specific** (One thing, defined once): "Proposals sent" beats "sales activity". Write the definition down, including what does not count, so a red week is about the business and not about the formula. 2. **Cheap to collect** (Under five minutes): If a row takes an hour to assemble, it will be missing by week four. Pick the version of the number you can pull from a report you already have. 3. **Owned** (One name): The owner is whoever can change the number, rather than whoever happens to have access to the dashboard. 4. **Goal attached** (A number, not a direction): "More demos" is not a goal. Twelve is a goal. Set it at what a good week looks like today, then raise it once the team hits it three weeks running. 5. **Early where possible** (Leading over lagging): Keep enough lagging rows to prove results, but fill most of the list with numbers that respond to what your team does this week. ## Examples by department The fastest way to a first draft is to steal one. Each department below has a list of measurables that small companies actually run, tagged leading or lagging and weekly or monthly, with a starting goal you can adjust once you see two months of real numbers on the board. - [Sales and marketing](/kpis/examples): Calls, proposals, pipeline created, qualified leads passed, cost per lead, win rate. - [Operations and finance](/kpis/examples): On-time delivery, rework hours, utilization, cash on hand, receivables over 60 days, margin. - [People and customers](/kpis/examples): Interviews held, one-on-ones held, onboarding milestones on time, retention, satisfaction. ## Why weekly beats monthly A monthly number tells you about a month you can no longer influence. A weekly number gives you four chances to fix the same problem in the same period. The rhythm matters more than the precision: a rough figure every Monday changes behavior, and a perfect figure on the fifteenth of next month does not. Company goals sit at the top, department KPIs sit under them, and weekly measurables sit at the bottom where the work happens. Each level should roll up to the one above it. If a weekly row cannot be traced to something the company is trying to achieve this year, it's a habit rather than a KPI. _[Chart: Company goals, department KPIs, weekly measurables]_ ## Go deeper on one question at a time This page is the overview. Each article below takes one question and answers it at length: what the letters mean, how KPIs sit beside OKRs, the test that separates a KPI from an ordinary metric, and five department guides that give you twelve fully defined rows apiece with owners, target sources and the way each one gets gamed. - [What KPI stands for](/blog/what-kpi-stands-for): The three words, the three tests a number has to pass, and how many rows a leadership team can carry. - [OKRs vs KPIs](/blog/okr-vs-kpi): One sets goals for a quarter, the other watches the health of the business every week. Where they overlap. - [KPI vs metric](/blog/kpi-vs-metric): The single question that decides whether a number earns a weekly slot or stays in the reporting tool. - [Marketing KPIs](/blog/marketing-kpis): Accepted leads, cost per lead and the cohort view, with the money rows kept off the weekly board. - [Sales KPIs](/blog/sales-kpis): Activity rows that predict the quarter, quality rows that explain it, and the arithmetic behind a target. - [Finance KPIs](/blog/finance-kpis): Cash, collections and billing habits weekly, with margin and profit left where the close can support them. - [HR KPIs](/blog/hr-kpis): Hiring steps and manager habits you can watch weekly, with turnover read over a trailing year. - [Operations KPIs](/blog/operations-kpis): Promised dates, cycle time and hours spent twice, plus the cost rows that need a closed month. - [Build one in a week](/blog/scorecard-in-a-week): A Monday to Friday plan that ends with a weekly board on the wall and a first reading already done. - [Dashboards](/blog/kpi-dashboards): When a screen is the right answer, when the weekly table is, and the five ways dashboards go quiet. ## Words that get misused in KPI meetings Half the arguments in a KPI review are about vocabulary rather than about the business. One person says KPI and means any number in the report; another says target and means a direction. The six entries below settle the words that cause the most trouble, each in plain English with the way the term usually gets used badly. - [KPI](/glossary/kpi): A number with an owner, a goal and a place on the agenda. Everything else is a metric. - [Metric](/glossary/metric): Any measurement your systems produce. Most will never earn a row on the weekly board. - [Vanity metric](/glossary/vanity-metric): Goes up reliably, reads well, changes no decision. Usually a cumulative total. - [Target](/glossary/target): The number beside a measure that says what a good week looks like. A direction is not a target. - [Cadence](/glossary/cadence): How often a row gets read out and answered for. Weekly, monthly or quarterly, decided row by row. - [Metric owner](/glossary/metric-owner): One name per row. A number owned by two people produces explanations and no decisions. ## FAQ ### What is the difference between a KPI and a metric? A metric is any measurement. A KPI is a metric you have chosen to manage by: it has an owner, a goal, and a slot in a meeting where somebody has to account for it. ### How many KPIs should a small business track? Five to fifteen at the leadership level, reviewed weekly. Departments can hold more detail, but the leadership list should fit on one screen without scrolling. ### Should KPIs be leading or lagging? Mostly leading, with a few lagging rows to prove the leading ones are working. If every row is lagging, your weekly meeting is a history lesson. ### How do KPIs fit with EOS®? In EOS the weekly KPI list is called the Scorecard, and it sits in the Data component. Five to fifteen numbers, one owner each, reviewed in the weekly leadership meeting. ### What if we cannot get the number every week? Then either find a cheaper version of it or move it to a monthly review. A row that shows up half the time trains the team to ignore the whole board. ## Not sure which numbers to start with? Tell us your industry, the team you are building the list for, and what you measure today. We will send back a first draft of seven measurables with goals to argue about, and say which of your current numbers are not earning their place. [Get a first draft](/contact?reason=kpi_help) _Updated 2026-08-27_ --- # Leading vs lagging indicators, with examples you can use Lagging indicators tell you what happened. Leading indicators tell you what's about to. Both belong on a Scorecard, but only one of them gives your team something to do on a Tuesday morning. ## The difference in one line each A lagging indicator reports a result after it is settled: revenue, profit, turnover, satisfaction scores. A leading indicator measures the activity that produces the result, early enough to change it: calls booked, proposals sent, jobs started on schedule, one-on-ones held. Lagging numbers are easier to trust. Leading numbers are the ones you can still do something about. Both types are honest. The trouble starts when a weekly meeting contains nothing but lagging rows, because every conversation then turns into an explanation of a month that has already closed. A quick test: if the number went red this morning, could your team change it before Friday? If yes, it is leading. If the only honest answer is "not this week", it is lagging, and it belongs on the board as proof rather than as a lever. ## Why weekly Scorecards run on leading numbers A weekly list of results is a report. A weekly list of activities is a management tool. When most rows are leading, a red week produces a decision inside the meeting: who is making the calls, which job slipped, what we stop doing to catch up. That's the whole point of meeting weekly. Keep a few lagging rows anyway. They're how you find out your leading numbers were the wrong ones. If calls, proposals and pipeline were all green for eight weeks and revenue never moved, the activity is fine and the targeting is not. A workable ratio is roughly two-thirds leading and one-third lagging on a leadership list. Departments that own delivery usually run heavier on leading than that. _[Chart: Activity this week on the left, results it produces on the right]_ ## Eight pairs to copy The practical way to build a leading list is to start from the result you want and walk backwards one step. What has to happen this week for that number to move next month? Pair each lagging row you already track with the activity that feeds it, then put the activity on the weekly board. - **Discovery calls held → revenue**: Calls booked and held this week set the ceiling on what can close in six weeks. Count the ones that happened. - **Proposals sent → bookings**: If proposals dry up on a Wednesday, bookings dry up a month later. This is the earliest row most sales teams can act on. - **On-time delivery % → customer satisfaction**: Satisfaction scores arrive quarterly and slowly. Deliveries either hit the date or they did not, and you know by Friday. - **Interviews held → seats filled**: Hiring stalls at the top of the funnel far more often than at the offer. Count interviews held per open seat. - **13-week cash forecast → cash in bank**: The forecast is the leading version of the bank balance. Update it weekly and the surprises stop being surprises. - **Defect rate → warranty cost**: Defects caught in the shop are cheap. The same defects found by a customer arrive as warranty claims two quarters later. - **Content published → organic leads**: Publishing is entirely within your control this week. The leads it produces are not, and they take months to show up. - **One-on-ones held → retention**: Turnover is a lagging number you can only explain. Scheduled conversations actually held is a number you can fix on Monday. ## The four words behind those pairs The pairs above are worth more when the four words underneath them mean the same thing to everybody in the room. Leading and lagging describe when a number arrives. Input and output describe where it sits in the process. The two distinctions overlap without being identical, and confusing them is how a board ends up all results and no levers. - [Leading indicator](/glossary/leading-indicator): Measures activity early enough that this week's effort still shows up in the number. - [Lagging indicator](/glossary/lagging-indicator): Reports a result after the period that produced it closed. Evidence rather than a lever. - [Input metric](/glossary/input-metric): Counts the work a team puts in. Controllable, cheap to collect and easy to inflate. - [Output metric](/glossary/output-metric): Counts what came out the other end. Read it next to the input row that feeds it. ## FAQ ### Can a number be both leading and lagging? Yes, depending on where you stand. Qualified leads are lagging for marketing and leading for sales. Pick the perspective of the person who owns the row and tag it from there. ### Are financial numbers always lagging? Most are, but not all. A 13-week cash forecast and receivables over 60 days both move before the bank balance does, which makes them usable weekly. ### How many leading indicators should a Scorecard have? Roughly two-thirds of the rows. Enough lagging rows remain to prove the activity is producing results, which is the check that stops a busy team from measuring motion. ### What if our leading numbers are green and results are flat? Then you picked the wrong activity, or the goals are set too low. Change one thing at a time: first the target, then the measure itself if the target was already ambitious. ## Send us your current numbers Paste in the rows you track today and we will tag each one leading or lagging and suggest the activity measure that sits in front of it. No sales sequence, just a marked-up list back within a business day. [Have your list reviewed](/contact?reason=kpi_help) _Updated 2026-08-27_ --- # KPI examples by department you can lift into a first draft 70 measurables across 7 departments, each tagged leading or lagging, weekly or monthly, with the role that should own it, a line on why it earns a slot, and a starting goal. Take the five or six that fit your business, put a name against each, then change the goals once you have watched them for a month. ## How to use this page Pick the department you are building a board for and read its list. Choose five to seven rows, weighted toward the leading ones, and give each an owner and a goal in the same sitting. Goals here are rules of thumb from small companies rather than benchmarks: yours should reflect a good week as your team runs today. Two rows measuring the same outcome at different stages is the most common way these lists get bloated. Keep the earlier one, the one you can still act on, and let the later one sit in a monthly review. The owner named against each row is a role rather than a rule. In a company of twenty, one person holds four of these titles, and the point of naming a role at all is to stop a number being owned by the leadership team in general, which means nobody. ## Where the numbers sit, department by department Every department produces work you control this week and results that arrive later. The map below shows which is which before you start picking rows, because a list built entirely from the right-hand side reports history accurately and gives a Monday meeting nothing to act on. Aim for roughly two controllable rows for every result. _[Chart: Controllable work and arriving results, by department]_ ## Leadership team KPI examples The leadership list is a summary of the company, not a merge of every department board. Cash against the 13-week forecast, quarterly priorities on track, pipeline coverage and a couple of results rows are usually enough. If a number would not change a decision this leadership team makes, it belongs on somebody else's board. - **Cash in bank vs 13-week forecast**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Finance lead. The one number that decides whether every other decision this quarter is affordable. Goal to start with: Within 5% of forecast. - **Rocks on track %**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: CEO. Tells you in week three whether the quarter is drifting, while there is still quarter left. Goal to start with: ≥ 90%. - **Scorecard rows on track %**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: CEO. A board that is always fully green has targets set too low, and this row shows it. Goal to start with: ≥ 80%. - **Issues closed this week**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: CEO. Proves the weekly meeting is producing decisions rather than a tour of the numbers. Goal to start with: ≥ 3. - **Pipeline coverage vs quarterly target**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Sales lead. Thin coverage now is a revenue miss two quarters out, long before the revenue row moves. Goal to start with: ≥ 3x. - **Open seats with a candidate in process %**: Leading · Monthly · Owner: People lead. An empty seat with no candidates is a capacity problem nobody has started solving. Goal to start with: 100%. - **Revenue vs plan %**: Lagging · Weekly · Owner: CEO. The result everything else is aimed at, kept on the board as the honesty check. Goal to start with: ≥ 100%. - **Cash collected this week ($)**: Lagging · Weekly · Owner: Finance lead. Revenue you have not collected is a loan you did not agree to make. Goal to start with: ≥ weekly target. - **Net profit % (trailing 3 months)**: Lagging · Monthly · Owner: Finance lead. Three months smooths out one odd month and still reacts inside a quarter. Goal to start with: ≥ 12%. - **Customer net promoter score**: Lagging · Monthly · Owner: Customer success lead. The cheapest early warning that delivery quality has slipped while revenue still looks fine. Goal to start with: ≥ 40. ## Sales KPI examples Sales is the easiest department to measure early, because almost everything that produces revenue is an activity somebody controls this week. Count what was held rather than booked, keep one row for money so the activity stays honest, and set goals at what a good week looks like now rather than what you wish it looked like. - [Read the sales guide](/blog/sales-kpis): Twelve sales rows written out in full, with the arithmetic that turns a revenue gap into a meeting count. - **Discovery calls held**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Sales lead. Held, not booked. Booked calls flatter the number and no-shows hide inside it. Goal to start with: ≥ 12. - **New leads worked within 24 hours %**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Sales lead. Response time predicts win rate more reliably than almost anything else a rep controls. Goal to start with: 100%. - **Proposals sent**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Account executive. The last controllable step before a decision that belongs to somebody else. Goal to start with: ≥ 5. - **Pipeline created ($)**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Sales lead. A quiet week here is a quiet month twelve weeks from now, at your sales cycle length. Goal to start with: ≥ 3x weekly quota. - **Follow-ups past due**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Account executive. The only row on this list where the right number is zero and everyone knows why. Goal to start with: 0. - **Referral asks made**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Account executive. Cheapest source of qualified work, and the first activity to disappear in a busy week. Goal to start with: ≥ 5. - **Deals stalled more than 30 days**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Sales lead. Stalled deals inflate the forecast and cost more attention than they return. Goal to start with: ≤ 3. - **Closed-won ($)**: Lagging · Weekly · Owner: Sales lead. One money row keeps the activity rows honest about whether they are aimed correctly. Goal to start with: ≥ weekly quota. - **Win rate %**: Lagging · Monthly · Owner: Sales lead. Rises whenever a team quietly stops bidding on hard work, so read it beside pipeline created. Goal to start with: ≥ 25%. - **Average deal size ($)**: Lagging · Monthly · Owner: Sales lead. A falling average is usually discounting under pressure rather than a change in the market. Goal to start with: Flat or rising. ## Marketing KPI examples Marketing rows split into work you control and results you wait for. Publishing, sending and testing happen on your schedule. Leads, cost per lead and sourced revenue arrive later and are worth reviewing monthly. Put the controllable work on the weekly board so a quiet month is visible while there is still time to fix it. - [Read the marketing guide](/blog/marketing-kpis): Twelve marketing rows with owners and formulas, split into what to read weekly and what needs a cohort. - **Content pieces published**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Content lead. Publishing is the part of the work that happens on your schedule rather than the market's. Goal to start with: ≥ 2. - **Emails sent to the target list**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Marketing lead. Sends are controllable, and a quiet fortnight here shows up in leads a month later. Goal to start with: ≥ 250. - **Qualified leads passed to sales**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Marketing lead. Passed and accepted, not captured. The two numbers differ and only one of them matters. Goal to start with: ≥ 15. - **Website sessions**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Marketing lead. Weak on its own, useful as the denominator when conversion suddenly looks brilliant. Goal to start with: ≥ 2,000. - **Tests running on a landing page**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Marketing lead. Counts whether anyone is trying to improve conversion, which nobody does by accident. Goal to start with: ≥ 1. - **Events or webinars booked for the next 60 days**: Leading · Monthly · Owner: Marketing lead. Booked ahead, so an empty calendar is visible while there is still time to fill it. Goal to start with: ≥ 2. - **Customer stories collected**: Leading · Monthly · Owner: Content lead. The asset sales asks for constantly and nobody schedules time to produce. Goal to start with: ≥ 1. - **Cost per qualified lead ($)**: Lagging · Monthly · Owner: Marketing lead. Keeps a rising lead count honest about what it cost to buy. Goal to start with: ≤ $250. - **Leads from organic search**: Lagging · Monthly · Owner: Content lead. Slow to move and hard to fake, which makes it a good proof row for content work. Goal to start with: Rising quarter over quarter. - **Marketing-sourced closed-won ($)**: Lagging · Monthly · Owner: Marketing lead. Settles the annual argument about whether marketing produces revenue or only activity. Goal to start with: ≥ 30% of new revenue. ## Operations KPI examples Operations numbers should answer one question every week: did the work go out on time, and at what quality. On-time delivery, capacity booked ahead and rework hours cover most of it. Reported near misses belong here too, because a week with none reported usually means nobody is reporting rather than nothing happened. - [Read the operations guide](/blog/operations-kpis): Twelve operations rows built around the promised date, the days taken and the hours spent twice. - **Jobs delivered on schedule %**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Operations lead. The promise the customer actually remembers, and the one most often measured after the fact. Goal to start with: ≥ 95%. - **Capacity booked for the next 4 weeks %**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Scheduler. Booked too low means idle people, too high means late jobs. Both cost money. Goal to start with: 70–85%. - **Rework hours**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Operations lead. Hours you paid for twice. The cheapest quality measure a small company can keep. Goal to start with: ≤ 5. - **Open tickets older than 7 days**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Service manager. Age catches the work that quietly stops moving without ever being refused. Goal to start with: 0. - **Billable utilization %**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Operations lead. Read beside rework hours, or a team hits the target by redoing its own work. Goal to start with: ≥ 75%. - **Near misses reported**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Safety lead. A week with none reported almost always means nobody reported, not that nothing happened. Goal to start with: ≥ 1. - **Change orders raised on live jobs**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Project manager. Frequent changes point at scoping problems upstream rather than at the crew on site. Goal to start with: ≤ 2. - **Customer complaints**: Lagging · Weekly · Owner: Operations lead. Late and undercounted, which is exactly why a rising trend deserves attention. Goal to start with: ≤ 2. - **Gross margin on delivered work %**: Lagging · Monthly · Owner: Operations lead. Where scoping errors surface, one job at a time, about a month after they were made. Goal to start with: ≥ 45%. - **Cost per unit delivered ($)**: Lagging · Monthly · Owner: Operations lead. Rising cost with flat prices is a margin problem you can still fix this quarter. Goal to start with: Flat or falling. ## Finance KPI examples Finance owns the numbers everyone assumes are lagging, and several of them are not. Cash on hand, invoices sent on time, receivables over 60 days and collection calls all move weekly and all respond to effort. Keep margin, profit and days sales outstanding on a monthly review where the accounting close can support them. - [Read the finance guide](/blog/finance-kpis): Twelve finance rows, with the cash and billing ones separated from everything the close has to settle. - **Cash on hand (weeks of payroll)**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Finance lead. Stated in weeks of payroll because that is the unit a leadership team feels. Goal to start with: ≥ 8 weeks. - **Invoices sent within one day of delivery %**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Bookkeeper. Slow invoicing is a self-inflicted cash problem and the easiest one on this page to fix. Goal to start with: 100%. - **Receivables over 60 days ($)**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Bookkeeper. Money already earned and increasingly unlikely to arrive without a phone call. Goal to start with: ≤ 5% of receivables. - **Collection calls made**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Bookkeeper. The activity behind the receivables row, and the one that responds to effort this week. Goal to start with: ≥ 10. - **Forecast variance vs actual %**: Lagging · Monthly · Owner: Finance lead. Measures the forecast rather than the business, which is worth knowing before you plan on it. Goal to start with: Within 5%. - **Working days to close the month**: Leading · Monthly · Owner: Controller. A long close means every monthly number arrives too late to act on. Goal to start with: ≤ 5. - **Supplier bills approved within 3 days %**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Bookkeeper. Late approvals hide real costs and make every forecast worse than it needed to be. Goal to start with: 100%. - **Company gross margin %**: Lagging · Monthly · Owner: Finance lead. The whole-company version of the operations row, useful for pricing decisions. Goal to start with: ≥ 45%. - **Net profit %**: Lagging · Monthly · Owner: Finance lead. The result the other finance rows are trying to protect, reviewed monthly. Goal to start with: ≥ 10%. - **Days sales outstanding**: Lagging · Monthly · Owner: Controller. Mostly a measure of your own billing habits rather than your customers' manners. Goal to start with: ≤ 40. ## People/HR KPI examples Hiring and retention both fail early and show up late, so the weekly rows are about process: candidates in the pipeline for every open seat, interviews held, scheduled one-on-ones actually held, new hires with a written plan. Turnover and engagement scores stay monthly, as the proof that the weekly habits are working. - [Read the HR guide](/blog/hr-kpis): Twelve people rows, from candidates in process to turnover over a trailing year, each with an owner. - **Open seats with candidates in the pipeline %**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: People lead. An open seat with an empty pipeline is a hiring plan that has not started. Goal to start with: 100%. - **Interviews held**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Recruiter. The controllable activity behind every hiring outcome, and the first thing a busy month eats. Goal to start with: ≥ 4. - **Scheduled one-on-ones actually held %**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Department manager. Canceled one-on-ones predict resignations better than any survey score. Goal to start with: 100%. - **New hires with a written 90-day plan %**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Department manager. Early turnover is usually an onboarding failure rather than a hiring failure. Goal to start with: 100%. - **Quarterly reviews completed on time %**: Leading · Monthly · Owner: People lead. Reviews that slip are reviews that stop happening, and nobody announces the decision. Goal to start with: 100%. - **Training hours delivered per person**: Leading · Monthly · Owner: People lead. The one development number small companies can collect without a system. Goal to start with: ≥ 4. - **Applications received per open seat**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Recruiter. Thin applications point at the job posting or the pay band, not at the market. Goal to start with: ≥ 8. - **Open seats filled %**: Lagging · Monthly · Owner: People lead. The hiring result, read beside interviews held so a bad month has an explanation. Goal to start with: ≥ 90%. - **Voluntary turnover % (trailing 12 months)**: Lagging · Monthly · Owner: People lead. Trailing twelve months, because a single quarter of it is too noisy to act on. Goal to start with: ≤ 15%. - **Engagement survey score**: Lagging · Monthly · Owner: People lead. Watch participation as closely as the score. A falling response rate is the earlier signal. Goal to start with: ≥ 8 out of 10. ## Customer success KPI examples Customer success is the department where a slow leak stays invisible for a quarter. Weekly rows should surface risk while it is still cheap: onboarding milestones on time, check-in calls held, accounts flagged at risk, escalations left open. Retention and revenue retention then confirm monthly whether the early warnings were being acted on. - **Onboarding milestones hit on time %**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Onboarding manager. A late start predicts a cancellation more reliably than anything that happens later. Goal to start with: ≥ 95%. - **Check-in calls held with top accounts**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Customer success lead. The activity that finds problems while they are still cheap to fix. Goal to start with: ≥ 10. - **Accounts flagged at risk**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Customer success lead. A week with zero flags usually means nobody looked, not that every account is healthy. Goal to start with: ≤ 3. - **First response inside one hour %**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Support lead. Response speed sets the impression of your service more than resolution time does. Goal to start with: ≥ 90%. - **Escalations open longer than 3 days**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Support lead. Old escalations are where renewals quietly go to die, one account at a time. Goal to start with: 0. - **Renewal conversations started 90 days out %**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Customer success lead. Renewals discussed in the last fortnight are renewals negotiated from a weak position. Goal to start with: 100%. - **Feature requests logged from customer calls**: Leading · Weekly · Owner: Customer success lead. Turns hundreds of customer conversations into something the product side can read. Goal to start with: ≥ 5. - **Logo retention % (trailing 12 months)**: Lagging · Monthly · Owner: Customer success lead. Counts customers rather than money, so one large account cannot hide ten small departures. Goal to start with: ≥ 90%. - **Net revenue retention %**: Lagging · Monthly · Owner: Customer success lead. The money version of the same question, and the one an investor asks first. Goal to start with: ≥ 100%. - **Support satisfaction score**: Lagging · Monthly · Owner: Support lead. Confirms monthly whether the weekly response rows are producing anything a customer notices. Goal to start with: ≥ 4.6 out of 5. ## Six of these measures, defined properly A handful of the measures above cause more definition arguments than all the others put together, usually because two people in the room are calculating them differently and neither has said so. Each entry below gives the formula in words, says where the number belongs in the meeting rhythm, and names the way it most often gets gamed. - [Churn rate](/glossary/churn-rate): Customers or revenue lost in a period. Say which of the two you mean. - [Win rate](/glossary/win-rate): Deals won over deals decided. It climbs whenever a team stops bidding on hard work. - [Gross margin](/glossary/gross-margin): Revenue less the direct cost of delivering it. What counts as direct is a choice. - [On-time delivery](/glossary/on-time-delivery): Jobs that met their promised date, and an argument about whose date that was. - [eNPS](/glossary/enps): The recommend question asked of your own staff. Watch participation as well as the score. - [Days sales outstanding](/glossary/days-sales-outstanding): Average days to collect an invoice. Mostly a measure of your own billing. ## What to do once you have picked your rows Write the definition of each row down, including what does not count, and put a name and a number beside it before anyone leaves the room. Then leave the list alone for six to eight weeks, which is roughly how long it takes before the target argument can be had from real numbers rather than from a guess. Expect the first month to be about the formulas rather than the business. That is normal and it is worth sitting through, because every argument settled in week two is one you are not having in month six with a customer waiting. - [KPI vs metric](/blog/kpi-vs-metric): The one-question test for deciding which of these rows earns a weekly slot. - [Build a Scorecard](/kpis/eos-scorecard): How the weekly list gets assembled, with a picker that drafts one by industry. ## FAQ ### How many of these should we use? Five to seven per team, and five to fifteen at the leadership level. Treat the list as a menu rather than a checklist. Rows nobody will collect on a Monday morning cost you more than the information they carry. ### Where do the starting goals come from? They're rules of thumb from small companies running weekly boards, offered so you have something to react to. Set your own from your last three months of actual numbers as soon as you have them. ### Our industry is not listed. Does that matter? Not much. Most of these rows work in any business that sells, delivers and employs people. The Scorecard picker adds the industry-specific rows for construction and software companies. ### The owner we would pick is not the role you named. Is that a problem? No. The role is a suggestion for a company big enough to have one of each. What matters is that a single person can change the number and knows they are answering for it every week. If two people would both claim a row, split the row rather than the ownership. ## Want the version for your industry? Tell us the trade and the team and we will send seven measurables with goals, plus the two or three rows we would drop from your current list. One reply from a person, inside a business day. [Ask for a tailored list](/contact?reason=kpi_help) _Updated 2026-08-29_ --- # KPIs and EOS: the Scorecard that makes both work In EOS®, your KPIs have a name, a format and a meeting: five to fifteen weekly numbers, one owner each, thirteen weeks visible, reviewed in five minutes and turned into issues when they go red. Here is how to build one that predicts instead of reports. ## Where KPIs live inside EOS KPIs sit in the Data component, one of the Six Key Components™, and take the form of a Scorecard: five to fifteen weekly measurables, one owner per row, thirteen weeks of history on screen. The team reviews it near the top of the Level 10 Meeting™, and any number that misses its goal becomes an item on the Issues List. The thirteen weeks matter. A single red week is noise. A row that has missed four times in a quarter is a pattern, and the pattern is visible without anyone having to remember it, which is the entire reason the format insists on a trailing view rather than a single current figure. The review is deliberately fast: five minutes for the whole board. Each owner reads their number and says on track or off track, nothing more. Discussion of a red row happens later in the meeting, once every number has been read and the team can see which issues are worth the time. ## Five rules for a Scorecard that predicts A Scorecard that works looks boring. It's short, weekly, mostly activity measures, a name against every row and a number next to every name. Teams that struggle have almost always broken one of five rules, and fixing the format is quicker than arguing about whether measurement is worth it at all. 1. **Weekly** (Same day, same time): Every row must be collectible each week. A monthly figure on a weekly board is blank three weeks out of four, which teaches the team to skim the whole thing. 2. **Mostly leading** (Two-thirds is a good ratio): Activity measures give the team something to change before Friday. Keep a few results rows to prove the activity is producing something. 3. **One owner** (One name on the row): The owner is whoever can change the number. Two names on a row means the red week gets explained twice and fixed never. 4. **A goal on every row** (A figure to hit): Without a target there is no on track or off track, and the review turns into interpretation. Set the goal at a good week today and raise it once it is met three weeks running. 5. **Reviewed, not discussed** (Five minutes for the whole board): Read the number, say on track or off track, move on. Off-track rows drop to the Issues List and get solved in the part of the meeting built for it. ## Mistakes we see most The same five problems account for nearly every Scorecard a leadership team abandons in its first year. All five are format problems rather than discipline problems, which is good news: you can fix them in one sitting without asking anyone to care harder about measurement. - **Every row is lagging**: Revenue, margin, profit, churn. All true, all settled. The team spends the meeting explaining a month it can no longer influence. - **Thirty rows**: Built by merging every department board. Nobody reads past row twelve, and the rows that matter get the same eight seconds as the rows that do not. - **No goals**: A column of numbers with nothing to compare them against. On track becomes a matter of opinion, and the loudest opinion wins. - **Numbers nobody owns**: A row owned by the team, by a department, or by two people. When it goes red, the meeting produces sympathy rather than a decision. - **Monthly data on a weekly board**: Rows that only update at month end sit blank for three weeks. The blanks train everyone to stop looking at the board at all. ## Build a first draft in two clicks Pick your industry and the team you are building the board for, and this gives you seven measurables weighted toward leading numbers, with a starting goal on each. It's a draft to react to: change the goals to figures your team believes, add a name to every row, and cut anything nobody will collect on a Monday. **Scorecard starter: Any · Leadership team** | Measurable | Type | Cadence | Goal | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Cash in bank vs 13-week forecast | leading | weekly | Within 5% of forecast | | Rocks on track % | leading | weekly | ≥ 90% | | Scorecard rows on track % | leading | weekly | ≥ 80% | | Issues closed this week | leading | weekly | ≥ 3 | | Pipeline coverage vs quarterly target | leading | weekly | ≥ 3x | | Revenue vs plan % | lagging | weekly | ≥ 100% | | Cash collected this week ($) | lagging | weekly | ≥ weekly target | _[Chart: A weekly Scorecard: owner, goal, and thirteen weeks of actuals]_ ## The words on this page Three of the terms above have a specific meaning inside EOS, and teams trip over them in the first month. Each one has a glossary entry with the plain definition, how the system uses it, why it earns its own word, and a worked example. Start with the Scorecard if you are building your first weekly board. - [Scorecard](/glossary/scorecard): The weekly table itself: five to fifteen numbers, one owner and one goal per row, thirteen weeks in view. - [Rocks](/glossary/rocks): The three to seven priorities the team commits to finishing in the next ninety days, one owner each. - [Level 10 Meeting](/glossary/level-10-meeting): The weekly leadership meeting where the board is read and every red row turns into an issue. ## FAQ ### What is a Scorecard in EOS? A weekly table of five to fifteen measurables with one owner and one goal per row, showing the last thirteen weeks. It's the Data component in practice, and it is reviewed at the start of the weekly leadership meeting. ### How is a Scorecard different from a dashboard? A dashboard shows everything the systems can report, usually as charts. A Scorecard is a short list somebody chose, with owners and goals, that a team reads aloud every week and acts on. ### How many measurables should a Scorecard have? Five to fifteen. Fewer than five and you cannot see the business; more than fifteen and the review stops being a review. Departments keep their own longer boards underneath. ### What if a number is off track two weeks running? It becomes an issue on the Issues List and gets solved in the meeting rather than reported again. If it stays red for a quarter, either the goal was never realistic or the row measures something nobody controls. ### Do we need software to run a Scorecard? No. A shared spreadsheet with thirteen columns works for years. Software helps once the numbers update themselves or the leadership team is spread across sites. ## Send us the Scorecard you have Paste in your rows, tell us your industry, and we will mark up which numbers are lagging, which have no owner, and which two we would swap in. One reply from a person who has built these before, inside a business day. [Get help building yours](/contact?reason=kpi_help) _Updated 2026-08-27_ --- # The EOS books, in the order to read them EOS® runs on thirteen books: six core titles that lay out the system, four Mastery books that go deep on one component each, and three adjacent reads for specific situations. Start with Traction, work down the list, and you'll cover the whole system for about two hundred dollars. ## The reading order Read the core six in order: Traction, then Get a Grip, What the Heck is EOS?, Rocket Fuel® (the Visionary™ and Integrator™ split), How to Be a Great Boss and The EOS Life. Once the system is running, the four Mastery titles dig into one component each. The three adjacent books suit specific situations rather than every reader, so pick from those as they come up. ## Core - [Traction](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Traction&tag=kpi05f-20): Gino Wickman - [Get a Grip](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Get%20a%20Grip&tag=kpi05f-20): Gino Wickman, Mike Paton - [What the Heck is EOS?](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=What%20the%20Heck%20is%20EOS%3F&tag=kpi05f-20): Gino Wickman, Tom Bouwer - [Rocket Fuel](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Rocket%20Fuel&tag=kpi05f-20): Gino Wickman, Mark C. Winters - [How to Be a Great Boss](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=How%20to%20Be%20a%20Great%20Boss&tag=kpi05f-20): Gino Wickman, René Boer - [The EOS Life](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=The%20EOS%20Life&tag=kpi05f-20): Gino Wickman ## Mastery series - [People](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=People&tag=kpi05f-20): Mark O'Donnell, Kelly Knight, CJ DuBe' - [Data](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Data&tag=kpi05f-20): Mark O'Donnell, Angela Kalemis, Mark Stanley - [Issues](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Issues&tag=kpi05f-20): Mark O'Donnell, Sue Hawkes, Jill Young - [Process!](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Process!&tag=kpi05f-20): Mike Paton, Lisa González ## Adjacent - [Entrepreneurial Leap](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Entrepreneurial%20Leap&tag=kpi05f-20): Gino Wickman - [Shine](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Shine&tag=kpi05f-20): Gino Wickman, Rob Dube - [Visionary](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Visionary&tag=kpi05f-20): Mark C. Winters ## Which book first? Give Traction to anyone new to the system, no exceptions. Hand a supervisor or new hire What the Heck is EOS? instead, since it skips the leadership-level detail they don't need yet. Visionaries and Integrators get more from Rocket Fuel once the basics have clicked, and a founder weighing whether to keep building at all should start with The EOS Life. - **New to EOS**: Traction first, always. It's the one book every title on this page assumes you've read. - **Visionary or Integrator**: Rocket Fuel, once Traction is done, to work out whether you're playing Visionary or Integrator on your team. - **Supervisors and new hires**: What the Heck is EOS? gives the shared vocabulary in under a hundred pages. - **Founders questioning fit**: The EOS Life asks whether the business you're building is buying back the life you actually want. ## Buying for a team Buying a copy of Traction for the whole leadership team is the cheapest test of fit there is: if three people finish it and want to start, that's your answer. EOS Worldwide sells its own titles at a bulk discount once you're past the first few copies, which is worth checking before you order thirteen separate copies through the ordinary retail links on this page. EOS Worldwide offers roughly 50% off list price on orders of 20 or more copies of the same title, sold through its own store rather than Amazon. See eosworldwide.com/books for current bulk pricing. ## FAQ ### Do I need to read all 13 books? No. Read the six core titles; the Mastery series and the three adjacent books are for specific roles and specific problems, not required reading for everyone on the team. ### What order should the leadership team read them in? Traction first, together, before anything else. After that, let each person's role pull them toward Rocket Fuel, a Mastery title, or one of the adjacent books, rather than assigning the same list to everyone. ### Are the links on this page affiliate links? Yes. Buying through an Amazon link on this page can earn us a small commission at no extra cost to you. See our disclosure page for the full policy. ### Where do the reviews and summaries on this page come from? They're ours: two sentences per book written after reading it, not copied from Amazon listings or EOS Worldwide's own descriptions. ### Can I skip the books and just hire an implementer? You can, but most implementers expect the leadership team to have read at least Traction before the first session, since it sets the shared vocabulary the sessions run on. ## Still not sure which book fits your role? Tell us where you sit on the team and what you're trying to fix. We'll point you at the two or three books worth reading first. [Ask us](/contact?reason=learn_eos) _Updated 2026-08-27_ --- # EOS and the alternatives, side by side Nobody runs two operating systems at once to find out which is better, so the comparison has to be done on paper first. These pages put EOS® next to the systems and the software teams weigh against it, with the same questions asked of each one and the sources named. ## How we compare things here We ask the same questions of every system: what it asks of the leadership team each week, what it costs, who it fits, and where it falls down. Facts come from the published books and the vendor's own live pages, named and dated in the text. We give no scores and pick no winner, because the right answer depends on your company. A score out of ten would be easier to read and would tell you nothing. A system that suits a 40 person manufacturer is wrong for a 12 person agency, and a five star average hides that. So each page ends with who it fits rather than a rank. Where a price is published, we quote it and say when we checked. Where it is only shown inside the product or on a sales call, we say that instead of guessing. If a vendor changes a number and we have not caught up, tell us and we will fix the page. Money: we take a referral fee from some software vendors, and pages carrying those links say so above the fold. We have never been paid to change a sentence, and no vendor sees a page before it goes up. The disclosure page has the full arrangement. - [How we make money](/disclosure): Affiliate links, listings and what none of it buys. - [Who writes this](/about): The people behind the site and how to report a mistake. ## EOS against other operating systems These pages set EOS beside the other systems a leadership team shortlists: Scaling Up, Pinnacle, 4DX, System and Soul, and the goal frameworks people reach for instead. Each one covers what the system asks of you every week, what it costs to run, the size of company it suits, and the kind of team that walks away from it. - [EOS vs Scaling Up: which system fits your company](/compare/eos-vs-scaling-up): EOS and Scaling Up compared on origin, cadence, tools, cost and coaches, with the size of company each one suits and where teams blend the two. - [EOS vs Pinnacle: how the two compare](/compare/eos-vs-pinnacle): EOS and Pinnacle set side by side on tools, cadence, cost and the size of each network, using only what the two organizations publish themselves. - [EOS vs 4DX: a full system against one discipline](/compare/eos-vs-4dx): EOS and the 4 Disciplines of Execution compared on scope, cadence, cost and what each one leaves out, using only what FranklinCovey publishes. - [EOS vs System & Soul: how the two differ](/compare/eos-vs-system-and-soul): System & Soul set beside EOS on origin, tools, coach network and cost, using only what the company publishes on its own site, with the gaps named. - [EOS vs OKRs: a system or a goal format](/compare/eos-vs-okrs): An operating system and a goal-setting format are not rivals. Where each one belongs, what OKRs leave unanswered, and how teams run the two together. ## Software teams run it on The meeting works on a spreadsheet, and plenty of teams keep it there for a year. These pages cover the tools built for the weekly rhythm, what each one charges per person, which parts of the system it actually models, and the point at which paying for software beats the spreadsheet you already have. - [Ninety vs Success.co: which EOS app fits](/compare/ninety-vs-success-co): Ninety and Success.co set side by side on price, free tiers, how closely each one follows the method, and what the two publish about themselves. - [Ninety vs Bloom Growth: seats or flat fee](/compare/ninety-vs-bloom-growth): Per-user pricing set against a flat monthly membership, with the headcount where the cost crosses over and what else separates the two products. - [Best EOS software: five products compared](/compare/best-eos-software): Ninety, Success.co, Bloom Growth, Strety and the publisher's own product on price, free tiers and fit, with no scores and the sources dated. ## FAQ ### Do you recommend one system over the others? Not in general. We recommend the one that fits the company in front of us, and that changes with size, industry and how much the founder wants to hand over. If you tell us what the leadership team is stuck on, we will say which of these is worth reading first and which you can skip. ### Where do the facts on these pages come from? The published books for each system, and the vendor's own live pricing and feature pages for software. Every number carries the date we checked it. We do not copy anyone's text, and we do not repeat a figure from a blog post that has no source behind it. Anything we could not verify is written as not published. ### Are you paid by any of these vendors? By some of the software companies, through a referral fee if you sign up from one of our links. Pages with those links carry a disclosure under the headline. No implementer, coach or software vendor pays for a better write-up, and none of them sees a page in advance. Our disclosure page lists every arrangement we have. ## Still torn between two of these? Tell us the size of the team, the thing that keeps breaking, and what you have already tried. A person reads it and replies within one business day with a straight recommendation, including when the answer is to change nothing. [Ask us](/contact?reason=general) _Updated 2026-08-30_ --- # Running the company by the numbers Long pieces on EOS®, Scorecards and the measures that change what next Monday looks like. Written for the leadership team that has to make the thing work, not for the person selling the system. - [EOS isn't working: ten patterns and the fix](/blog/eos-isnt-working.md) (2026-08-30): Meetings that drift, Rocks that slip, numbers nobody trusts. Ten failure patterns behind a stalled rollout, the usual cause of each, and what to try first. - [Integrator vs Visionary: which seat do you need?](/blog/integrator-vs-visionary.md) (2026-08-30): One seat invents the future, the other runs the week. What separates the roles, how the pairing works, and what a part-time operator really costs. - [Is EOS worth it? The honest math](/blog/is-eos-worth-it.md) (2026-08-30): Year-one fees, the thousand hours of leadership time nobody budgets, what a yes would have to look like in your own numbers, and when the answer is no. - [KPI dashboards: when a screen earns its place](/blog/kpi-dashboards.md) (2026-08-30): A dashboard shows numbers, a weekly Scorecard makes someone answer for them. When each one helps, whether to build or buy, and the five ways they fail. - [Build a KPI Scorecard in a week: a five-day plan](/blog/scorecard-in-a-week.md) (2026-08-30): A Monday to Friday plan for a weekly KPI Scorecard: name the numbers, define them, find the data, set rough targets, and read the board on Friday. - [Finance KPIs a leadership team should see weekly](/blog/finance-kpis.md) (2026-08-29): Cash, collections and billing move weekly and respond to effort. Five finance rows for the weekly meeting, seven for the monthly review, with owners. - [HR KPIs: the five people numbers worth a weekly look](/blog/hr-kpis.md) (2026-08-29): Five people measures a manager can act on this week and seven to review monthly, each with a definition, an owner, a target source and how it gets gamed. - [KPI vs metric: the one-question test](/blog/kpi-vs-metric.md) (2026-08-29): Every KPI is a metric and almost no metric is a KPI. The question that settles it, how to spot a vanity metric, and how to promote a number properly. - [Marketing KPIs for a 10 to 250 person company](/blog/marketing-kpis.md) (2026-08-29): Twelve marketing measures with definitions, formulas, owners and the way each one gets gamed: five for the weekly board, seven for the monthly review. - [OKRs vs KPIs: which one a leadership team needs](/blog/okr-vs-kpi.md) (2026-08-29): OKRs set goals for a quarter, KPIs watch the health of the business every week. What each is for, where they overlap, and how EOS does the same job. - [Operations KPIs: on-time, cycle time, and rework](/blog/operations-kpis.md) (2026-08-29): Dates kept, days taken and hours spent twice. Five operations rows for the weekly meeting and seven for the monthly review, with owners and gaming notes. - [Sales KPIs that predict the quarter, not report it](/blog/sales-kpis.md) (2026-08-29): Five sales numbers to read weekly and seven to review monthly, each with a definition, a formula, an owner, a target source and how it gets gamed. - [What KPI stands for, and what it does not mean](/blog/what-kpi-stands-for.md) (2026-08-29): KPI stands for key performance indicator. What each word is doing, the three tests a number has to pass, and how many a leadership team can carry. ## How these articles are written Every article here is written by the people who run this site, not by a coach selling seats. We read the books, we ask leadership teams what actually happened, and we say plainly when a tool is not worth the trouble. Nothing is republished from anyone else, and when we get something wrong we fix the page and change the date on it. Each piece carries the date it went up and the date it last changed, and both sit under the headline where you can see them. If a number in an article comes from somewhere else, the sentence says where from. We make money from book links and, later, from listings in the implementer directory. That never decides what an article says. The disclosure page spells out the arrangement in full. - [More on how we work](/about): Who is on the team, how research gets done, and how to report a mistake. ## Want an answer sooner than we can write one? Send the question. A person reads it and replies within one business day, whether the answer is a book, a Scorecard row or the name of someone worth calling. [Ask us](/contact?reason=learn_eos) _Updated 2026-08-29_ --- # How much does EOS cost? Running EOS® with an implementer costs about $4,500 a session at the Professional tier and about $6,600 at Expert, going by fees reported in 2026. No Certified rate is published, so we model the midpoint at $5,250. A standard first year is eight billable days, which puts year one between $36,000 and $52,800 before software and travel. Self-implementing costs under $200 in books, plus everyone's time. ## What implementers charge per session There is no published rate card. EOS Worldwide trains and certifies implementers but does not set their fees, so pricing comes from what implementers and clients report. The two figures we can source are about $4,500 a session for a Professional EOS Implementer® and about $6,600 for an Expert. Nobody publishes a Certified rate, so we use $5,250, our midpoint between the two. A session is a full day with your leadership team, up to seven or eight people, and the fee covers preparation and follow-up as well as the day itself. Half-day work, board facilitation and one-off workshops are priced separately, and plenty of implementers quote a flat annual figure instead of a per-day rate. Fees move with demand, not just tier. An implementer with a full roster in a major metro charges more than one building a practice, and the same person may quote differently for a six-person team than for a fifteen-person one. Fees checked 26 August 2026 against figures reported by implementers and clients; the Certified rate is our midpoint, not a published price. _[Chart: Per-session fees by tier, 2026. Professional and Expert are reported fees; Certified is our midpoint between them. Your quote will vary by region, team size and calendar pressure.]_ ## What year one adds up to Year one is eight billable sessions: a Focus Day, two Vision Building days, three quarterly sessions and a two-day annual. At the fees above that comes to $36,000 at Professional, $42,000 at our Certified midpoint and $52,800 at Expert. The 90-minute introductory meeting is free, which is why every implementer will happily book one. EOS Worldwide's own blog puts the first 90 days at $18,000 to $26,400. That is exactly four sessions at $4,500 and four at $6,600, so the early bills are front-loaded rather than discounted. Two things change the total more than the tier does. Pace is the first: teams that run the Focus Day® and the two Vision Building® days close together spend the same money faster. Team size is the second, because a large leadership team often needs a longer annual session and more work between quarters. ## The full engagement Most implementers describe an 18 to 24 month arc before a team runs the system without help. Session count drops after year one, from eight days to six and then to five, so the bill falls each year. The reported range for a two-year engagement is $18,000 to $50,000 a year; year one runs higher, year two lower, and an Expert implementer can land above it. The drop is the point. You are paying for someone to make the tools stick, not for a permanent facilitator, and an implementer who cannot describe how the engagement winds down is worth a second look. ## Self-implementing: the real cost The cash cost of self-implementing is small: under $200 for the books, and $0 to about $11 per user a month for the software with published prices. The real bill is time. A leadership team running the system properly gives up about 90 minutes a week for the Level 10 Meeting™, plus a day a quarter and two days a year for planning. That time is not optional in a paid engagement either. Hiring an implementer buys you a neutral person who will say the uncomfortable thing, keep the annual session on the agenda, and stop the same issue from being deferred four quarters running. Self-implementing fails on commitment rather than knowledge. The books explain the tools clearly enough. What goes missing is the meeting that stays booked in a busy quarter and the person willing to tell the founder that a Rock did not get done. ## Costs people forget Three line items catch teams out: travel, software and hiring. An implementer traveling to you bills expenses on top of the fee, often several hundred dollars a session. Software runs $0 to about $11 per user a month on published plans. And a company that discovers it has no Integrator™ may end up funding a senior hire it had not planned for. - **Travel and expenses**: Flights, hotel and mileage are usually billed at cost on top of the session fee. Meeting virtually removes it, and many implementers now run quarterlies remotely and reserve travel for the annual planning session. - **Software**: Ninety has a free tier and paid plans at about $8.40, $9.80 and $11.20 per user a month. Success.co prices per user by tier and EOS One™ offers a free trial, though neither publishes a figure we could verify. A spreadsheet costs nothing and works fine for a first quarter. - **The leadership days**: Eight days out of the calendar for the whole leadership team in year one, on top of the weekly meeting, is the largest real cost most teams miss. Price it at your own loaded hourly rates before deciding the implementer fee is the expensive part. - **A senior hire**: Teams often find the Integrator seat empty. Filling it means either promoting someone and backfilling their old seat, or hiring a fractional or full-time operations leader. That decision dwarfs the implementer fee. ## Build your own estimate Set the tier, how many years you are budgeting for, the size of your leadership team, whether you want software and whether your implementer travels. The calculator uses 2026 fees, our Certified midpoint and the standard session count for each year, then hands you a budget band you can put in front of an implementer. | Tier | Per session | Year one (8 sessions) | | --- | --- | --- | | Professional EOS Implementer | $4,500 | $36,000 | | Certified EOS Implementer | $5,250 | $42,000 | | Expert EOS Implementer | $6,600 | $52,800 | Reported figures, 2026. Excludes software and travel; your implementer sets their own fee. Fees checked 26 August 2026 against figures reported by implementers and clients; the Certified rate is our midpoint, not a published price. ## Is it worth it? Decide in advance what you will measure, then check at quarter two. Three numbers tell you most of it: the average meeting rating your team gives at the end of each week, the percentage of Rocks finished on time, and revenue against the plan you wrote in the annual session. Two quarters of movement is a fair test. Be careful with case studies. The growth figures published by vendors and implementers are self-reported and not audited, and companies that hire an implementer are already the kind of companies that invest in getting better. Treat them as marketing, and judge the engagement on your own numbers. - [The honest math](/blog/is-eos-worth-it): Fees against leadership hours, the two-quarter test, and the four cases where the answer is no. - [When it stalls](/blog/eos-isnt-working): Ten patterns behind a rollout that has gone flat, the cause behind each, and the first fix to try. ## FAQ ### How much does an EOS implementer cost? About $4,500 a session at the Professional tier and about $6,600 at Expert, going by fees reported in 2026. No Certified rate is published; we model $5,250, the midpoint. Year one is eight billable days, so $36,000 to $52,800 in fees before software and travel. ### Are prices negotiable? Sometimes. Implementers set their own fees, so there is room to discuss the shape of the engagement: fewer days in year one, virtual quarterlies, or a flat annual figure. Asking for a discount on the day rate alone tends to work less well than asking for a smaller scope. ### Do implementers charge for travel? Usually yes, at cost, on top of the session fee. Ask how they handle it before the first session and whether they are willing to run quarterly sessions remotely. Working with someone local, or virtually, is the simplest way to remove the line item. ### Is there a cheaper tier? Professional implementers charge the least because they have completed training but have fewer sessions behind them. The cheapest option is self-implementing: books, software and your own discipline. Between the two sit fractional coaches and peer groups who use the same tools without the certification. ### What does EOS One or Ninety cost? Ninety has a free tier and paid plans between about $8.40 and $11.20 per user a month. Success.co prices per user by tier. EOS One offers a free trial and does not publish a per-user price we could verify, so ask for a quote. None of it is required: a spreadsheet holds a Scorecard and a Rock list perfectly well. ## Get options in your budget Tell us your team size, your location and what you can spend. We'll come back with implementers who fit, or tell you honestly if books and software are the better first step. [Get options in your budget](/contact?reason=find_implementer) _Updated 2026-09-07_ --- # How to choose an EOS implementer Choose on fit and calendar, not tier. Professional, Certified and Expert grade how many sessions someone has run and what they charge; every EOS® implementer uses the same training material. On the first call, ask how many teams your size they hold and what the day rate covers. If they will not name a client you can phone, move on. ## Professional vs Certified vs Expert The three tiers of EOS Implementer® measure experience, not method. Everyone teaches the same tools from the same training. A Professional EOS Implementer® has finished Boot Camp. Certification requires ten or more clients and 48 or more sessions a year. Expert means around 500 sessions delivered. Price rises with the tier. What changes in practice is pace and recognition. Someone who has run hundreds of sessions has met your problem before and will name it faster, cut a circular discussion shorter, and be harder to talk out of an uncomfortable observation. That is worth real money to a team that avoids conflict. What does not change is the material. A newer implementer running the same Focus Day® can be the better choice if they are hungry, local, know your industry, and have room in their calendar to answer a call between sessions. - **Professional**: Completed Boot Camp and working toward certification, typically with a young practice and fewer sessions behind them. Lowest fees, usually the most availability, and often the most attentive between sessions. - **Certified**: Ten or more clients and 48 or more sessions a year, which means a full-time practice rather than a side business. The middle of the market on price and where most teams land. - **Expert**: Around 500 sessions delivered. You are paying for speed of recognition and for someone who will not be intimidated by a strong-willed founder. Expect the highest fees and the tightest calendar. ## What to ask in the first call The introductory 90-minute meeting is free, and implementers want it: Success.co's State of EOS 2026 reports 87% of their work arrives by referral and 43% say winning clients is the hardest part of the job. So use the call properly. Ask about their book of business, their process and their terms before anyone talks about vision. 1. **Which industries and company sizes do you serve?**: You want someone who has sat with a team your size in a business with your kind of margins. A 12-person agency and a 200-person manufacturer need different things from the same tools. 2. **How many sessions a year do you run, and how many clients do you hold?**: This is the honest version of the tier question. It tells you whether this is a full practice or a retirement project, and whether they have time for you. 3. **How do you handle a leadership team that won't be honest?**: The single most useful question on the list. Listen for a concrete story rather than a philosophy. Every implementer meets this; the good ones remember exactly what they did. 4. **Can I speak to a client who stopped working with you?**: References who are still clients are easy. A client who finished or quit will tell you what the engagement felt like in month nine, and how the implementer behaved when it ended. 5. **What happens if it isn't working at quarter two?**: Ask what they change and how the conversation starts. An implementer with a clear answer here has had it before and will not simply keep billing. 6. **What is your fee, and how do you charge travel?**: Get the day rate, the expected number of days a year, the expenses policy and the notice period in writing. Vagueness at this stage rarely improves later. 7. **Virtual, in person, or both?**: Ask which sessions they insist on running in the room. Most will hold out for the annual planning days, which is reasonable, and run quarterlies remotely if you prefer. ## Red flags None of these prove someone is bad at the job, and every one of them is worth asking about directly before you sign. Treat them as prompts rather than verdicts. The pattern that should genuinely worry you is any implementer who treats reasonable questions about money, references or exit as an obstacle to get past. - **Won't share pricing**: A day rate is not a trade secret. Someone who will only discuss fees after a discovery process is managing your commitment rather than answering the question. - **Pushes a long contract on the first call**: Standard practice is to work session by session or a year at a time. A two-year commitment demanded before your first working day shifts all the risk onto you. - **No client references**: A practice with real clients can produce two who will take a call. If nobody is available, ask why, and be careful with any answer that involves confidentiality alone. - **Sells their own software in session one**: A tool recommendation is fine. A paid product of theirs, pushed before your first Scorecard exists, means you are buying two things and evaluating neither. - **Talks more than your team**: The job is facilitation. If you leave the intro meeting having heard mostly about their career, picture the same balance across a two-day annual session. - **Won't say when you're done**: Ask what the end of the engagement looks like. Anyone who cannot describe a team running the system without them has an incentive you should know about. ## Chemistry matters more than tier The implementer's job is to say the thing your leadership team has been avoiding, and then hold the room while it gets sorted out. That takes trust in both directions. A team that quietly dislikes the facilitator will nod through sessions and change nothing, which is a more expensive failure than paying an extra thousand a day. Meet two or three before deciding, and take the intro meeting with the whole leadership team rather than the founder alone. The person who irritates your operations lead in the first hour will still be irritating them at the annual session. Watch what happens when someone in your team pushes back during the call. You are looking for a person who stays calm, asks another question, and does not need to win the exchange. ## When you don't need one Skip the hire in three situations. Under about ten employees, one honest weekly meeting and a short list of numbers will do more than a facilitator. If the founder is not willing to be challenged, no implementer will survive the engagement. And if the budget is under $10,000, the money is better spent elsewhere. The low-budget version works: buy the books, pick software or a spreadsheet, run a 90-minute weekly meeting on the same agenda every week, and find an accountability partner outside the company who will ask each quarter whether you actually did it. That covers most of what an engagement gives you, at a fraction of the price. Revisit the decision after two quarters. Teams that self-implement usually stall at the same point, which is the first genuinely hard conversation about a person or a seat. Hiring someone for that one stretch is a legitimate way to buy an implementer. ## How we help Tell us your location, team size, industry and budget, and we'll come back with a shortlist of implementers who fit, along with what we know about their pricing and availability. We are independent of EOS Worldwide, and we will tell you when books and software are the better answer than a hire. We plan to earn money from referral arrangements with some implementers, and we disclose every one of them. Our disclosure page explains what we take, from whom, and how it affects what you see on this site. - [What we match on](/contact): Location and travel willingness, leadership team size, industry experience, virtual or in person, and the budget you tell us about. Nothing gets recommended because it pays us more. - [How we make money](/disclosure): Referral arrangements, affiliate links on books, and listings. All of it is written down on our disclosure page, including the arrangements we have not signed yet. ## FAQ ### What is the difference between a Professional and Certified EOS Implementer? Experience, not method. Professional implementers have completed Boot Camp; certification requires ten or more clients and 48 or more sessions a year. Both teach the same tools. Certified implementers charge more, though no Certified rate is published: our cost model uses $5,250 a session against a reported $4,500 at Professional. ### How many EOS implementers are there? Around 800 worldwide, spread across the three tiers and concentrated in North America. That is a small enough pool that in some regions your realistic shortlist is three or four people, which is one reason implementers often work remotely. ### Should I hire a local implementer? Local removes travel expenses and makes it easy to run sessions in the room, which helps in the first year. It is not worth accepting a poor fit for. Plenty of teams work with someone two time zones away and only fly them in for the annual session. ### Can I switch implementers partway through? Yes. Engagements are typically session by session or annual, and switching between quarters is normal enough that implementers have a process for it. Say what wasn't working when you brief the next one, otherwise you will buy the same problem twice. ### Do I have to use a certified implementer at all? No. Nothing stops a team from running the tools with an outside facilitator, a peer group, or nobody. Certification tells you someone was trained and stays active, which lowers your risk. It is not a license requirement for your business. ## Get a shortlist Send us your location, team size, industry and budget. We'll come back with implementers worth your first call, and tell you plainly if you'd be better off self-implementing for a couple of quarters. [Get a shortlist](/contact?reason=find_implementer) _Updated 2026-09-08_ --- # EOS and KPI questions, answered straight Twenty questions people ask about EOS®, what it costs, who implements it, and how the numbers work. No answer here is longer than it needs to be, and none of them end in a sales call. ## About EOS EOS packages the running of a company into a small, fixed set of documents and one recurring meeting, then asks a leadership team to use them without variation for long enough that the habits hold. Nothing in it is novel on its own. The discipline comes from the fact that the toolkit does not bend to suit the quarter. ## FAQ ### What does EOS stand for? Entrepreneurial Operating System. The capital letters matter: EOS Worldwide uses it as the name of one specific system, not as shorthand for whatever operating rhythm a company happens to have. What you get for the name is a defined toolkit and a meeting cadence for the leadership team. ### Who created EOS? Gino Wickman, out of years of hands-on work with owner-run companies in Michigan. The book that carried it to a wide audience, Traction, went out in 2007. The training and certification business, EOS Worldwide, grew up afterward and now runs under CEO Mark O'Donnell. ### Is EOS a methodology? EOS Worldwide says no. Their wording is that EOS is a complete operating system, not a methodology. The practical difference is scope: a methodology usually improves one function, while EOS sets vision, structure, numbers, priorities and meetings for the whole leadership team at once. ### What size company is EOS for? Ten to 250 employees, privately held, is the band EOS Worldwide names. Smaller than that and you are carrying process for a problem you could solve in a conversation. Larger and the strategy and finance questions outgrow what the toolkit answers, so teams start bolting other frameworks on. ### How long does implementation take? Plan on 18 to 24 months, which is the figure EOS Worldwide gives. The first year is the heavy one at eight billable sessions: a Focus Day, two Vision Building days, three quarterly sessions and a two-day annual. The Focus Day® opens the sequence and the two Vision Building® days follow inside the first ninety days. After that the calendar thins to six sessions, then five. ### Can we implement EOS ourselves? Yes. The material is all published, between the books, the downloadable tools and EOS Academy, and many teams work through it unaided. What you are really deciding is not whether you can learn it. It is whether anyone in your own leadership team will run the awkward part of the meeting. ### What's the difference between EOS and Scaling Up? EOS is lighter and more prescriptive: six components, a fixed toolkit, one page of vision. Scaling Up, from Verne Harnish, goes deeper on strategy, cash and metrics and tends to suit companies of roughly 30 to 500 people that already have a finance function. ### Which software runs EOS? Ninety.io and Success.co are both licensed by EOS Worldwide; EOS One™ is EOS Worldwide's own product. Bloom Growth and Strety cover the same ground independently. All of them hold a V/TO®, Scorecard, Rocks, an Issues List and a Level 10 Meeting™ agenda. A spreadsheet works for year one. ## Cost Implementers bill per full-day session rather than by retainer, so the cost of EOS is mostly a question of how many days you buy. A standard first year is eight of them. Tier drives the rate more than anything else does, and nobody publishes these numbers, which is why we do. ## FAQ ### How much does an EOS implementer cost? The unit is a full-day session, and the rate tracks certification tier: 2026 reports put Professional near $4,500 and Expert around $6,600, with nothing published for Certified, so we model the $5,250 midpoint. Multiply by the eight billable sessions of a standard first year and the fee line lands at $36,000 to $52,800, with software and travel on top. ### What's the difference between Professional, Certified and Expert implementers? Tier tracks volume, not a different curriculum. Everyone starts as a Professional EOS Implementer®. Certified generally means at least ten clients and 48 or more sessions a year. Expert means 500 or more sessions delivered. Higher tiers charge more; a busy Professional often suits a first-time team fine. ## Implementers and Integrators Implementers are independent business owners certified by EOS Worldwide to teach and facilitate the system. They are not your Integrator™. The Integrator is an internal seat, held by someone who runs the company week to week, and some companies rent that seat part-time before they hire for it. ## FAQ ### What is an Integrator? The Integrator is the person who runs the day-to-day business: owns the plan, holds the leadership team accountable and settles the arguments between departments. Often a COO or president by title. The Visionary™ generates ideas and relationships; the Integrator turns them into a working week. ### What is a fractional Integrator? An experienced operator who plays the Integrator role part-time, usually one to one and a half days a week on a nine to eighteen month engagement. Founders use one when the company needs the seat filled but cannot yet fund or find a full-time hire. ### How do you pick implementers to recommend? We match on fit, not on who pays us: company size, industry, location or virtual, and what you told us the problem is. Nobody can buy a recommendation or a search position. When money changes hands we label it on the page. ## KPIs and Scorecards The data component of EOS is a weekly Scorecard: five to fifteen numbers, one owner per row, reviewed at the top of the leadership meeting. Most of those numbers should be leading indicators, because a number you can still change this week is worth more than a number that reports last quarter. ## FAQ ### What is a Scorecard? A short table of weekly numbers with an owner and a target on each row, reviewed in the first five minutes of the leadership meeting. EOS calls the rows measurables. The point is to see a problem in week two rather than in the month-end financials. ### How many KPIs should we track? Five to fifteen on a weekly Scorecard, one owner each. Fewer than five and you are missing whole parts of the business. More than fifteen and nobody reads the table, so off-track numbers stop getting discussed. Departments can keep their own longer lists. ### What's the difference between leading and lagging indicators? Lagging indicators report what already happened: revenue, gross margin, churn. Leading indicators measure the activity that causes it: proposals sent, first appointments booked, jobs finished on time. A weekly Scorecard needs mostly leading numbers, because those are the only ones this week's decisions can still move. ## This site We publish what EOS Worldwide and its software partners will not: session fees, comparisons and, soon, implementer reviews. We are independent of all of them. The money side is simple, so here it is in full, along with what happens to anything you send us through a form. ## FAQ ### Is this site affiliated with EOS Worldwide? No. We are an independent publisher with no commercial relationship to EOS Worldwide, and we are not certified or licensed by them. EOS and the related marks belong to EOS Worldwide; we use them to describe the system accurately. See our trademark page. ### How does this site make money? Affiliate links on books and software, and in future, paid listings in the implementer directory. Paid placement never changes ranking or what we recommend, and anything sponsored is labeled as such on the page. The full detail is on our disclosure page. ### Do you share my form details? Only with an implementer you have asked us to introduce you to, and only after you ask. We do not sell contact details, we do not run a lead auction, and we do not add you to a newsletter you did not sign up for. ### Can I list my practice here? Soon. The implementer directory opens in the next phase of the site, with free listings for verified implementers and paid options that are labeled as paid. Email us now and we will add you when listings go live. ## Question we didn't answer? Send it over. If it's a good one it ends up on this page, and either way a person who has read the books writes back, usually the same day. [Ask a question](/contact?reason=general) _Updated 2026-08-27_ --- # Who writes this site, and how keyperformanceindicators.com is an independent guide to EOS® and the KPIs that run a business. Here is who is behind it, how the research gets done, how the site earns money, and what to do if something on it is wrong. ## Who writes this This site is written and edited by a small team rather than one named author. Pages carry no byline because the standard is the same no matter who wrote a page, and what matters is whether a claim holds up rather than who typed it. Every page shows the date it was last reviewed, so you can judge how current it is before you rely on it. Nobody on the team is a certified implementer, and none of us sells EOS services. That distance is deliberate. It means a page can say a tool is not worth the money without weighing a client relationship against the sentence. ## How we research a page Most pages start with the books the system is built from, then move to EOS Worldwide's own public pages for anything we quote or restate. Costs come from implementer fee schedules and vendor pricing pages we check directly, dated so you can see when we last looked. We never copy another site's writing and we never publish a price we have not verified ourselves. Where a number cannot be pinned down, such as how many companies actually finish a rollout, we say that plainly instead of inventing a figure that sounds precise. A range beats a false average. The worked examples on this site are composites of situations we have seen at companies of that size, not named client engagements, and the figures in them are illustrative. ## How we make money We earn a small commission on some of the books we link to, and later we expect to earn referral fees from software partners and from paid listings in our implementer directory. None of it changes what a page recommends. The full breakdown of every source of income, and the rule that keeps money from buying a ranking, is on the disclosure page. The short version of the rule: a payment can buy a label, such as Sponsored on a directory listing, and it can never buy a position, a rating or a recommendation. The disclosure page and the how listings work page spell out exactly where that line sits. - [How this site makes money](/disclosure): Every source of income on this site, written out in full. - [How listings work](/how-listings-work): What Verified, Preferred Partner and Sponsored mean, and what they cannot buy. ## Corrections If a page gets something wrong, tell us at consultant@keyperformanceindicators.com and say which page and what you think is off. A person reads every message and checks it against the source before changing anything. When we correct a page, we update the last-reviewed date on it so the change is visible, not quietly buried. We would rather hear about a mistake from a reader than leave it standing because nobody flagged it. That applies just as much to a stale price as to an outdated claim about how the system works. Write to consultant@keyperformanceindicators.com. Name the page and quote the line you think is wrong, and say what you think it should say if you know. ## Our relationship with EOS Worldwide keyperformanceindicators.com is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to EOS Worldwide, LLC in any way. We write about EOS because it is the system a lot of our readers are evaluating, using the same nominative fair use a book reviewer relies on to name the book. Full detail on how we use the marks and why is on the trademarks page. If a page ever reads like it was written by the company that sells the system rather than by an outside reviewer, that is a bug. Tell us and we will fix it. ## FAQ ### Do you take money from EOS Worldwide? No. We have no commercial relationship with EOS Worldwide, LLC. Our income comes from book affiliate links and, in the future, from software referrals and directory listings, all disclosed on the disclosure page. ### Who actually writes the articles? A small in-house team, not one named author and not a certified implementer. We keep bylines off pages because the standard is the same regardless of who wrote it. ### How do I report a mistake? Email consultant@keyperformanceindicators.com with the page and what looks wrong. We check it against the source and, if it needs a fix, update the page and its last-reviewed date. ## Found something that needs a second look? Whether it is a price that has moved, a claim you think is off, or a question this page did not answer, send it over. A person reads every message. [Get in touch](/contact?reason=general) _Updated 2026-08-29_ --- # What KPI stands for, and what it does not mean KPI stands for key performance indicator: a number a team has chosen to run the business by, with one owner, a written goal and a fixed slot in a meeting. The letters are easy. The part people get wrong is treating every figure a report can produce as a KPI, which is how a leadership team ends up with forty of them and reads none. ## What do the letters in KPI stand for? K is for key, meaning few and chosen on purpose. P is for performance, meaning something your team can affect rather than something the market hands you. I is for indicator, meaning a sign of where the business is heading. Put together: a small set of numbers that point at how the work is going while you can still change it. Every word in the phrase is doing a job, and dropping any one of them produces the version of KPIs most companies actually run. Drop key and you get a report with sixty rows. Drop performance and you get figures that move with the weather. Drop indicator and you get a scoreboard read out after the game is over. Nobody owns the coinage. The phrase spread through management reporting as business software made it cheap to produce numbers in bulk, which most accounts put somewhere in the 1990s. That is the irony worth noticing: the term exists because measurement got easy, and the discipline it names is mostly about refusing to measure things. - [KPI](/glossary/kpi): The full definition, plus how a KPI differs from the report it comes out of. - [Metric](/glossary/metric): Any measurement your systems can produce. Most will never earn a weekly slot. ## Why is indicator the important word? An indicator points at something. It is not the thing itself and it is not proof. Proposals sent is an indicator of revenue in six weeks. Revenue is the result. Teams that forget this argue about whether a number is accurate when the useful question is whether it moves before the outcome does and whether anyone acts on it. Once you accept that a KPI is a pointer rather than a verdict, a lot of arguments get shorter. A row that is roughly right every Monday beats a row that is exactly right on the twelfth of the following month, because only one of them gives you time to do anything. This is also the difference between leading and lagging measures. Cash collected last month is settled. Collection calls made this week is a number somebody can change this afternoon. A weekly list built entirely from settled numbers is a history lesson with a spreadsheet attached. - [Leading indicator](/glossary/leading-indicator): Moves before the result does, which is why most weekly rows should be one. - [Lagging indicator](/glossary/lagging-indicator): Confirms what already happened. Keep a few as proof, not as the whole board. - [Leading vs lagging, worked through](/kpis/leading-vs-lagging): How to tell them apart on your own list, with examples by department. ## What three tests does a number have to pass? It has to have an owner, a goal and a cadence. One name against the row, a number written next to it that says what good looks like, and a fixed day when somebody reads it out. A figure missing any of the three is a metric. It might be interesting, it might even be true, but nobody is accountable for it. The owner test is the one that fails quietly. Assign a row to the leadership team and nobody is really carrying it. The first red week brings three accounts of what happened and no decision. Give the row to the person who can move it, not the person who can pull the report. The goal test catches another common failure: a direction dressed up as a target. Grow the pipeline is not a target. Forty qualified calls a week is. Set the figure at what the team already manages in a decent week. Move it up once they have cleared it three weeks in a row. Cadence costs the least of the three to get right, and it slips first. A row that needs an hour of assembly every Monday quietly stops appearing around week four, and a board with gaps in it teaches the team to skim all of it. _[Chart: What separates a KPI from the metrics around it]_ - [Metric owner](/glossary/metric-owner): One name per row, chosen for what they can change rather than what they can see. - [Target](/glossary/target): The number beside the measure. A direction is not a target. - [Cadence](/glossary/cadence): How often the row gets read out and answered for, decided row by row. ## Why is "how many KPIs" the wrong first question? The count is a symptom. When a team starts with how many, it usually has a board full of measurables that have not passed the three tests, and no tidy number will fix that. Put each candidate through owner, goal and cadence. Then count what survives. Teams that work in that order rarely spend the meeting arguing over list size. Our KPI guide gives the working range, a leadership list of five to fifteen rows, plus the reasoning behind it. The range comes from EOS® practice, where the weekly list is called the Scorecard, and EOS Worldwide's own Scorecard material still gave that range when checked in August 2026. Treat it as a rule of thumb, not a finding: five to fifteen is about what a small leadership team can hold in its head for an hour. The failed rows are where the exercise starts paying off. If nobody will put a name against a row, it is usually somebody's reporting habit. Drop it and see who asks where it went. A row with an owner but no honest goal gets a month of watching, until a normal reading becomes clear. When two rows are the same outcome caught early and late, keep the early signal and move the other to a monthly review. - [The KPI guide](/kpis): The working range, how to choose the rows, and the case for reading weekly. - [Examples by department](/kpis/examples): Ten measurables each for the leadership team, sales, marketing, operations, finance, people and customers. ## How are KPIs different from goals and targets? A goal is what you are trying to achieve, usually over a quarter or a year. A target is the number written beside a measure that says what good looks like. A KPI is the measure itself, checked on a rhythm. Grow revenue by a fifth is a goal. Twelve proposals a week is a target sitting on a KPI. Mixing the three up produces the meeting where somebody reports on a goal every week and nothing changes, because a goal does not move week to week and there is nothing to react to. Goals belong in a quarterly conversation. KPIs belong on Monday. The other direction fails too. A weekly row that cannot be traced back to something the company is trying to do this year is a habit, not a KPI. Ask what decision changes when it goes red. If the honest answer is none, take it off the board and stop collecting it. - [SMART goal](/glossary/smart-goal): The acronym, and which parts of it are worth keeping for a weekly measure. - [Vanity metric](/glossary/vanity-metric): A number that flatters the report and settles nothing. Ask what a bad reading would look like. ## Where do KPIs live in a weekly meeting? Near the front, and briefly. The list gets read row by row, each owner says on track or off track, and every off-track row becomes an issue to solve later in the same meeting. Five minutes for the numbers, then the rest of the hour on the two or three problems the numbers just found. The read is deliberately mechanical. No commentary, no explanation, no apology. Explanations are how a five-minute scan turns into forty minutes of storytelling, and the team leaves without having decided anything. What makes this work is that the off-track rows are not the point of the meeting. They are the intake for it. A weekly list nobody discusses is decoration, and a weekly list that consumes the whole meeting has crowded out the work of fixing what it found. - [KPIs inside EOS](/kpis/eos-scorecard): How the weekly Scorecard is built, who owns each row and how it gets read. - [Scorecard](/glossary/scorecard): The EOS name for the weekly number list, defined without the sales pitch. ## FAQ ### Does KPI stand for anything other than key performance indicator? Not in a business context. You will occasionally see key process indicator or key progress indicator used inside a single company's reporting, usually to draw a distinction between measures of how work is done and measures of what it produced. The distinction is real and worth making, but the standard term is key performance indicator, and inventing a local acronym mostly costs you clarity when a new hire arrives. ### Is every number on a dashboard a KPI? No, and treating them that way is the fastest route to a board nobody reads. A dashboard shows whatever your systems can produce cheaply. A KPI is a deliberate choice from that pile: one owner, a written goal, and a fixed place on the agenda where that owner answers for the reading. Every company we have looked at produces far more measurements than anybody reads, and should be managing by five to fifteen of them. ### What is a KPI called in EOS? The weekly list is the Scorecard and each row on it is a measurable. The vocabulary differs but the idea is the same: a small set of numbers, one owner per row, read at the top of the weekly leadership meeting. If you already run a Scorecard, you already run KPIs, and nothing in this article asks you to rename anything. ### How long before a new KPI tells us anything? Give it six to eight weeks before you judge either the number or the goal, and expect the first fortnight to be about whether the row can be collected at all. What to watch in the meantime is whether anyone reaches for it between meetings. A row people look up on a Wednesday because they want to know is already earning its place, whatever the target says. A row nobody has thought about since Monday will not survive the quarter no matter how good the definition is. ## Not sure which of your numbers are actually KPIs? Send us the list you read every week and what your business does. We will say which rows earn their place, which two or three are measuring the same thing twice, and what is missing. One reply from a person, inside a business day. [Talk to us](/contact?reason=kpi_help) _Updated 2026-09-08_ --- # OKRs vs KPIs: which one a leadership team needs OKRs are a way to set goals for a quarter. KPIs are the numbers you watch every week whether or not you set a goal. They answer different questions, so the choice is rarely one or the other. Most leadership teams that pick a side end up rebuilding the other half within a year, under a different name. ## What is an OKR and what is a KPI? An OKR pairs an objective, written in words, with three to five key results that say how you will know it happened. A KPI is a single measure with an owner, a goal and a fixed review slot. One is a container for ambition over a quarter. The other is an instrument you read on a schedule. The OKR format came out of Intel under Andy Grove and reached most of the software industry through John Doerr's Measure What Matters, which is also where the habit of scoring key results from zero to one comes from. Doerr describes seven tenths as a respectable score on a stretch objective, which tells you a lot about what the format is for. KPIs have no single author. The phrase comes out of management reporting, and its whole discipline is choosing few numbers rather than many. Nobody scores a KPI at seven tenths. A row is on track or it is not, and next Monday you look again. - [OKR](/glossary/okr): Objectives and key results: the format, the scoring, and where it tends to break. - [KPI](/glossary/kpi): A measure with an owner, a goal and a slot in a meeting. Everything else is a metric. ## What is each one actually for? OKRs are for change. They exist to point a team at something it is not doing yet, and they expire. KPIs are for health. They exist to tell you whether the ordinary work of the business is holding up, and they never expire. A company with only OKRs stops noticing the roof leaking while it builds the extension. This is why an OKR that reads keep churn under three percent is a sign the format is being misused. Nothing about that is a change, and holding it steady is exactly the job a KPI does. If churn is already where you want it, it belongs on the weekly list rather than in a quarterly plan. The reverse mistake is quieter. A KPI called new market entered is not a measure of anything. It is a project with a checkbox, and putting it on a weekly board gives you eleven weeks of no followed by one yes. _[Chart: Where OKRs and KPIs each do their work]_ ## Where do OKRs and KPIs overlap? At the key result. A well-written key result is a number with a target and a date, which is a KPI wearing a quarterly deadline. That overlap is real and it is where most of the confusion comes from. The difference is that a key result retires at the end of the quarter and a KPI keeps being read afterwards. A practical way through it: if a number matters only because of this quarter's plan, track it as a key result and let it go in thirteen weeks. If you would still want to know the number next year, it is a KPI and the quarterly plan is just changing its target for a while. The teams that get tangled here are usually running both systems in two different tools, with two different owners and two different review meetings. That is a tooling problem dressed up as a philosophy problem. One list, one meeting, two columns solves most of it. - [Target](/glossary/target): The number beside a measure that says what good looks like this period. - [North star metric](/glossary/north-star-metric): The single measure some companies put above everything else, and the cost of that. ## How does EOS® handle the same job? It splits the work in two and gives each half a plain name. Rocks are the three to seven priorities a person commits to for a quarter, which is the job OKRs do. The Scorecard is the weekly list of five to fifteen numbers, which is the job KPIs do. Both get reviewed in the same meeting each week. EOS keeps the two deliberately separate on the agenda. Rocks are read as on track or off track, not scored, and the Scorecard is read row by row before them. Anything off track in either list becomes an issue the team solves later in the same hour, which is the mechanism most OKR rollouts are missing. The three to seven range for Rocks comes from EOS Worldwide's own guidance, checked in August 2026. It exists for the same reason the five to fifteen range exists for Scorecard rows: a leadership team that commits to twelve priorities has not prioritized anything, it has made a list. - [Rocks](/glossary/rocks): Quarterly priorities with one owner and a finish line agreed before the quarter starts. - [Scorecard](/glossary/scorecard): The weekly number list, five to fifteen rows, one owner each. - [Building a Scorecard](/kpis/eos-scorecard): How the weekly list gets built, and a picker to draft one by industry. ## When should a team run both? Almost always, once the company is past its first few people. Run a short weekly number list for health and a small quarterly set of priorities for change, and review them in the same meeting. What you should not run is two parallel systems with separate owners, separate tools and separate reviews, which is how both end up ignored. Start with the weekly numbers if you have neither. They are cheaper to build, they teach the team what a target argument feels like, and they usually surface the two problems your first quarter of priorities should be aimed at anyway. Add quarterly priorities once the weekly read is boring, which is the correct state for it. A five-minute scan where everything is on track is not a waste of time. It is the whole point, and it frees the rest of the meeting for the work that changes something. - [Metric owner](/glossary/metric-owner): One name per row, whether the row is a key result or a permanent measure. - [Examples by department](/kpis/examples): Ten weekly measurables each for the leadership team, sales, marketing, operations, finance, people and customers. ## What does one quarter look like with both? Take a services firm losing money on delivery. The quarterly priority is to rebuild how jobs are scoped, owned by the operations lead, finished when every new job uses the new template. The weekly numbers underneath it are jobs scoped the new way, rework hours and gross margin, and only the first of those moves quickly. Weeks one to three look like failure. Rework hours are unchanged, margin is unchanged, and the only row moving is the count of jobs scoped the new way. That is the leading measure doing its job, and a team without one would spend those three weeks arguing about whether the priority was working. By week eight the rework hours start dropping, because the jobs scoped in week two are now being delivered. Margin follows in the month after that. When the quarter closes, the priority retires and two of the three numbers stay on the weekly board permanently, with the targets reset to the new normal. None of that requires scoring anything out of one. It requires knowing which number was supposed to move first, and being honest in week three when it did not. - [Leading indicator](/glossary/leading-indicator): The row that moves in week two rather than week ten, which is what makes the plan reviewable. - [Free tools](/tools): Calculators and pickers for drafting a weekly list and costing an implementer. ## FAQ ### Can a key result be a KPI? Yes, and that is usually the tidiest arrangement. Write the key result as a number with a target and a date, then put the same number on the weekly list so nobody waits until the quarter ends to find out. The only thing to decide is what happens in week fourteen: a key result retires, while a KPI stays on the board with a new target. Say which one it is when you write it. ### Do OKRs work in a company of thirty people? They can, but the format tends to cost more than it returns at that size. The scoring, the grading conversations and the tooling were designed for organizations large enough that leadership cannot see the work directly. In a company of thirty, three to five written priorities with one owner each and a finish line does the same job with far less ceremony. Use the machinery when the company outgrows the room. ### Should KPI targets change every quarter? Some should and most should not. Raise a target when the team has cleared it three weeks running, because a row that is always green stops carrying information. Leave it alone when the number is bouncing around the line, since that is the row doing exactly what you want. Changing every target each quarter turns the weekly board into a planning artifact and you lose the ability to compare across the year. ### We already run Rocks and a Scorecard. Do we need OKRs too? No. You are running both halves already under different names, and adding a third vocabulary buys you nothing except a migration. The one thing worth borrowing from the OKR literature is the discipline of writing down how you will know a priority is finished, in a number or a testable condition, before the quarter starts. If your Rocks already say that, you have the whole system. ## Running both and getting value from neither? Send us your current quarterly priorities and the numbers you read each week. We will say which of them are duplicating each other, which priority has no leading measure underneath it, and what we would cut. One reply from a person, inside a business day. [Talk to us](/contact?reason=kpi_help) _Updated 2026-08-29_ --- # KPI vs metric: the one-question test Every KPI is a metric. Almost no metric is a KPI. The line between them is not about the number itself, which is why arguing about definitions never settles it. Ask one question instead: if this figure went the wrong way for three weeks, whose diary would change? A name and an action makes it a KPI. Silence makes it a metric. ## Is every KPI a metric? Yes, and the relationship only runs one way. A metric is any measurement your systems can produce, and most companies have more of them sitting in reports nobody opens than anyone in the room could name. A KPI is a metric somebody has picked out of that pile on purpose and attached three things to: a name, a goal and a day of the week. Nothing about the underlying number changes when it gets promoted. Support tickets closed is the same figure whether it lives in a monthly export or at the top of your weekly board. What changes is that one of those versions has a person who has to explain a bad run of it. This is why buying a reporting tool almost never produces KPIs. The tool makes metrics cheaper, and cheap metrics multiply. Choosing which handful to be accountable for is a decision a leadership team has to make in a room, and no dashboard makes it for you. - [Metric](/glossary/metric): Any measurement your systems produce, whether or not anyone reads it. - [KPI](/glossary/kpi): The handful you have chosen to manage by, each with an owner and a goal. ## What is the one-question test? If this number went the wrong way for three weeks running, what would change? A real answer names a person and something they would do differently. If the honest answer is that somebody would mention it and the meeting would move on, you are looking at a metric. Interesting, possibly true, and not worth a weekly slot. Three weeks is deliberate. One bad week is noise in almost any small business, and demanding a reaction to it teaches your team to explain rather than to act. A run of three is a pattern, and a pattern that produces no action is the clearest evidence a row does not belong on the board. The test cuts both ways, which is what makes it useful. It kills rows nobody would act on, and it rescues unglamorous ones people forget to include. Invoices sent on time looks like an administrative detail until you notice that three slow weeks of it puts a real hole in next month's cash. - [Metric owner](/glossary/metric-owner): The person who can change the number, not the person with dashboard access. - [Cadence](/glossary/cadence): How often a row is read out and answered for. Decided row by row, not for the whole board. ## How do you spot a vanity metric? Look for a number that only goes up. Total customers ever, cumulative downloads, followers, hours logged since launch: these read well in a board pack and change no decision, because a figure that cannot fall carries no information about this week. The giveaway is that nobody can describe what a bad reading would look like. The fix is usually a rate or a ratio rather than a total. Customers gained this month against customers lost is a number that can go the wrong way, which is exactly why it is worth reading. Cumulative signups since founding is a decoration you can safely put on the website instead. Vanity metrics are not lies. That is what makes them durable. They are true numbers selected because they flatter, and they survive in weekly meetings for years because no one wants to be the person who removes the one row that is always green. - [Vanity metric](/glossary/vanity-metric): Goes up reliably, reads well, changes no decision. Usually a cumulative total. - [Ratio metric](/glossary/ratio-metric): Two numbers divided, which is often the honest version of a flattering total. ## What is the difference between an input and an output? An input is work your team does. An output is what that work produced. Discovery calls held is an input, closed revenue is an output, and the gap between them is however long your sales cycle runs. A weekly list needs both, weighted toward inputs, because only one of the two is still changeable on Monday. Teams that measure only outputs get a board that reports history accurately and offers nothing to do about it. Teams that measure only inputs get a busy, cheerful board and a bad quarter nobody saw coming, usually because the activity was real and the targeting was wrong. The useful pairing is one input and one output per outcome you care about, sitting next to each other. When the input is at target and the output is not, you have learned something specific: the work is happening and it is not working, which is a far better problem to bring to a meeting than a red number on its own. _[Chart: Where the inputs and outputs sit, department by department]_ - [Input metric](/glossary/input-metric): Work your team controls this week. Most of a weekly list should be these. - [Output metric](/glossary/output-metric): What the work produced. Fewer of these, kept as proof rather than as the whole board. - [Leading vs lagging](/kpis/leading-vs-lagging): The same split told through timing, with examples you can lift. ## How many metrics should a dashboard carry? As many as are useful to look at when you go looking. The constraint is not on the dashboard, it is on the weekly read: five to fifteen rows at the leadership level, one owner each. Keep the rest available for the week somebody needs to dig, and stop treating a wide report as if it were a management tool. Separating the two surfaces settles most of the arguments. Nobody has to fight to keep their favorite number when it stays a click away in the detail view. What they cannot do is claim a slot in the weekly read for it, and that is the only scarce thing in the system. In EOS® the weekly surface has a name, the Scorecard, and EOS Worldwide's own material still puts it at five to fifteen rows, checked in August 2026. You do not need the vocabulary to get the benefit. You need one short list somebody is accountable for and one wide report they can open when the short list raises a question. - [Dashboard](/glossary/dashboard): The wide surface. Useful for digging, not for running a weekly meeting from. - [Examples by department](/kpis/examples): Ten weekly measurables each for the leadership team, sales, marketing, operations, finance, people and customers. ## How do you turn a metric into a KPI? Write down three things beside it and stop. One owner, chosen for what they can change. One goal, a number rather than a direction, set at what a good week looks like as the team runs today. One cadence, the day it gets read out. A number carrying all three is a KPI. A number missing any of them is not. Write the definition down too, including what does not count. Half the red weeks in a young board turn out to be arguments about the formula, and each one costs you the meeting time you were trying to save. Proposals sent should say whether a resend counts, and it should say it once, in writing. Then leave it alone for six to eight weeks. The first fortnight tells you only whether the number can be collected at all, which is a different question from whether it is worth collecting. After two months you can argue about the target from a baseline instead of from whatever somebody guessed in the meeting where the row was added. ## FAQ ### Is revenue a KPI or a metric? It depends entirely on what sits beside it. Revenue with a weekly target, an owner and a slot in the meeting is a KPI. Revenue reported monthly because the accounting system produces it is a metric, and a lagging one. Most leadership teams should carry a revenue row, but it should not be the only money number on the board, because by the time it moves the work that caused it happened weeks ago. ### Can a metric be a KPI for one team and not another? Yes, and that is normal rather than a problem. Rework hours is a KPI for the operations lead who can change it and a metric for the marketing manager who cannot. The test is about accountability, not about the figure. The mistake is putting a number on a team's weekly list when nobody on that team can move it, which produces polite reporting and no decisions. ### How many KPIs should one person own? One or two on the leadership list, three or four inside their own department. Past that the ownership becomes nominal: the person reads out numbers they have not thought about since last week, and a red row gets an explanation rather than a plan. If one name appears against half your board, you have a reporting arrangement rather than a set of owners. ### What do we do with the metrics we stop tracking weekly? Leave them in the reporting tool and take them off the board. Nothing has to be deleted, and framing it as deletion is what makes people fight to keep rows. Say plainly that the weekly read holds five to fifteen numbers, that the rest stay one click away, and that any row can come back next quarter if it turns out somebody was acting on it after all. ## Half your board probably is not earning its slot Send us the list you read every week. We will mark which rows pass the three-week test, which are totals dressed up as measures, and which outcome you are watching with no early number underneath it. One reply from a person, inside a business day. [Talk to us](/contact?reason=kpi_help) _Updated 2026-08-29_ --- # Marketing KPIs for a 10 to 250 person company A marketing team in a company this size is accountable for two things a leadership team can see: how much qualified work reaches sales, and what it cost to get there. Everything else is craft. Twelve numbers cover it, five read weekly and seven reviewed monthly, and every one of them has an obvious way to look better without the work being better. ## What is marketing accountable for? Two outcomes, and neither of them is traffic. Marketing is accountable for the volume of qualified work handed to sales and for the cost of producing it. A team that doubles sessions while accepted leads stay flat has done work that did not land. A team that halves cost per accepted lead has done the job even if the site looks quiet. That framing settles most arguments a marketing manager has with a leadership team, because it names a numerator and a denominator instead of a mood. It also puts the awkward number on the board early: if leads are cheap and sales will not take them, the qualification rule is wrong. It also separates work from results. Publishing and testing happen on your calendar. Accepted leads and sourced revenue arrive on the market's calendar, weeks later, so a weekly board made only of the second kind gives a marketing manager nothing to change on Monday. _[Chart: Marketing among the departments on a weekly Scorecard: controllable inputs first, money later]_ ## Which five marketing numbers belong on the weekly board? The ones a marketing manager can still change before Friday. Accepted leads, cost per accepted lead, published pieces, sends to the named list and landing page conversion rate cover the week without turning the meeting into a channel report. Each has an owner who can act on a bad reading rather than explain it. Read them as a group. Published pieces at target with accepted leads at zero is a targeting problem. Accepted leads at target with cost per lead climbing is a bidding problem. Neither reading comes from a single row, which is the argument for keeping all five. - [Qualified leads accepted by sales](/glossary/leading-indicator): Leads sales agreed to work, counted after acceptance rather than at capture. No formula. Leading, weekly, owned by the marketing lead. Set the band from your own trailing 13 weeks. Gamed by loosening the qualification rule until everything qualifies, which shows up two months later as a falling win rate. - [Cost per accepted lead](/glossary/ratio-metric): All marketing spend in the period divided by accepted leads. Include salaries, contractors and tools, not just ad spend. Lagging, weekly, owned by the marketing lead. Band from your own trailing 13 weeks. Gamed by quietly redefining spend, which is why the definition should be written down once. - [Pieces published](/glossary/input-metric): Finished work that went live: an article, a case study, a video, a landing page. Leading, weekly, owned by the content lead. Take the band off your own trailing 13 weeks. Gamed by chopping one piece into three, so count finished assets and agree what finished means before the first red week. - **Sends to the named account list**: Emails delivered to people you deliberately chose, not to everyone who ever downloaded a file. Leading, weekly, owned by the marketing lead. Band from your trailing 13 weeks. Gamed by padding the list to hit the send count, so read it beside the unsubscribe rate. - [Landing page conversion rate](/glossary/target): Conversions divided by sessions on the same page, one page at a time. Leading, weekly, owned by the marketing lead. Set the band at the median of your trailing 13 weeks on that page. Gamed by narrowing the traffic mix, since sending only branded search to a page lifts the rate and produces no new customers. ## What belongs in the monthly marketing review? The money and the cohorts. Seven numbers need a full month to mean anything: acquisition cost, the ratio of lifetime value to it, sourced revenue, non-brand organic leads, lead to customer conversion by cohort, unsubscribe rate and pipeline created. Reading any of them weekly produces noise and a meeting spent explaining a sample size. Give the monthly review a different shape from the weekly meeting. Weekly is a read of rows against targets and a decision on the red ones. Monthly is one hour with a cohort table open, asking whether the leads you bought in June became customers by September. - [Customer acquisition cost](/glossary/customer-acquisition-cost): Sales and marketing spend in a period divided by new customers won in it. Lagging, monthly, owned by the marketing lead with finance agreeing the inputs. Derive the band from your own trailing 13 weeks. Gamed by leaving sales salaries out, which halves the number and changes no decision anybody makes. - [Lifetime value to acquisition cost](/glossary/customer-lifetime-value): Gross margin expected from an average customer divided by what it cost to win them. Lagging, monthly, owned by the marketing lead. Band from your own trailing 13 weeks rather than a published multiple. Gamed by stretching the assumed customer lifetime, so state the lifetime you used every time you show the ratio. - [Marketing-sourced closed-won revenue](/glossary/lagging-indicator): Revenue from deals whose first touch was a marketing channel. Lagging, monthly, owned by the marketing lead. Band from your trailing 13 weeks. Gamed by the attribution rule itself, so write the rule down, date it, and change it at a quarter boundary rather than in the month it makes you look bad. - [Non-brand organic leads](/glossary/benchmark): Leads from search visits that did not include your company name. No formula beyond the filter. Lagging, monthly, owned by the content lead. The band comes from your own trailing 13 weeks. Gamed by leaving brand searches in, which turns a sales team's own prospecting into a content result. - [Lead to customer conversion by cohort](/glossary/cohort): Of the leads accepted in one month, the share that had become customers by a fixed later date. Lagging, monthly, owned by the marketing lead. Use the median of your trailing 13 weeks. Gamed by measuring recent cohorts too early, since a young cohort always looks worse than a mature one. - [Unsubscribe rate per send](/glossary/ratio-metric): Unsubscribes divided by delivered emails for one send. Lagging, monthly, owned by the marketing lead. Band from your trailing 13 weeks. Gamed by sending less often, which fixes the rate and starves the pipeline, so it only means anything read next to sends. - **Pipeline created from marketing**: Value of opportunities opened this month whose source was marketing. Lagging, monthly, owned jointly by the marketing and sales leads. Set the band from your trailing 13 weeks. Gamed by opening opportunities early at optimistic values, which inflates the row and the sales forecast at the same time. ## Where do marketing targets come from? Your own last thirteen weeks, in almost every case. Published benchmarks come from companies with different prices, channels and sales cycles, and a target lifted from one is a number nobody in the room can defend. Take the median of your last thirteen weeks, set the goal a little above it, and revisit at the quarter. There are two honest exceptions. Some rows have a structural target: follow-ups past due should be zero, and a page with no conversion tracking has no rate at all. Some have an arithmetic one, like the leads a channel must produce to cover its own cost at your current win rate. Everything else is your own history. Set a band rather than a line. A single number makes every ordinary week a win or a failure, and teams respond by managing the number. A band says what normal looks like and what is worth talking about. - [Trailing 13 weeks](/glossary/trailing-13-weeks): A quarter of history, long enough to average out two bad weeks and short enough to still describe the business you run now. - [Goal band](/glossary/goal-band): A range instead of a line, so a normal week reads as normal and only a genuine miss takes meeting time. ## Which marketing numbers should you drop? Anything cumulative, anything nobody would act on, and anything a platform reports about itself. Total followers, impressions, cumulative downloads and email open rates all pass the test of being true and fail the test of being useful. None of them tells a marketing manager what to do differently next week. Open rates deserve a specific mention. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, offered as a prompt since iOS 15 in September 2021, loads tracking images for anyone who turned it on whether or not they read the email, still true when we checked in August 2026. Clicks and replies survive that; opens do not. Keep opens as a rough comparison between two of your own sends, never as a target. Dropping a row is not deleting the data. Leave it in the reporting tool and take back the weekly slot. That framing removes most of the resistance, since nobody is told their work does not count. - [Vanity metric](/glossary/vanity-metric): Impressions, followers, cumulative downloads: true numbers chosen because they flatter the report. - [Examples by department](/kpis/examples): Seventy measurables with owners and starting goals, ten for each department in a small company. - [Leading vs lagging](/kpis/leading-vs-lagging): How to tell which of your rows moves first, and why a weekly board should lean heavily toward the ones that do. ## What does the accepted-leads row look like written out? Take accepted leads. The row reads: name, owner, definition, band, source. Written out it is one line in a spreadsheet and about four lines in the document behind it, and the document is the part that stops the weekly meeting turning into an argument about the formula every time the number goes red. Name: qualified leads accepted by sales. Owner: marketing lead, because they control targeting and spend. Definition: a lead the sales lead has marked accepted in the CRM by Friday noon, counted once, with a resubmitted lead counting on its original date. Band: 18 to 24, the median of our last thirteen weeks plus a little. Source: the CRM accepted-lead report, pulled by the marketing lead each Friday. In EOS® this row lives on the weekly Scorecard and gets read out in about ten seconds, with anything outside the band dropped into the issues list rather than debated on the spot. You do not need the vocabulary to run it that way. You need one owner, one written definition and one place the number comes from. - [Scorecard](/glossary/scorecard): Where the marketing rows sit once a leadership team reads numbers on a fixed weekly rhythm. - [Building a Scorecard](/kpis/eos-scorecard): How a weekly list gets assembled from scratch, plus a picker that drafts one by industry. - [Metric owner](/glossary/metric-owner): Why the marketing lead owns spend rows and the content lead owns publishing rows. ## FAQ ### How many marketing KPIs should a 30-person company track? Five on the weekly board and about seven in the monthly review, which is what this guide lays out. A marketing team of one or two people can run on three weekly rows without losing anything: accepted leads, pieces published and cost per accepted lead. The constraint is not the tooling, it is how many numbers one person can genuinely act on between Monday and Friday, and past five that number stops rising. ### Is website traffic ever worth a weekly slot? Rarely on its own, and usefully as a denominator. Sessions tell you nothing you would act on, because a good week and a bad week look identical until you know what the visitors did. Conversion rate needs sessions to exist, so keep the traffic number available in the same view and put the rate on the board. The exception is a site that has just launched or just been rebuilt, where a traffic collapse is a real problem worth catching in a week. ### How do we measure marketing when the sales cycle is nine months? Weight the weekly board almost entirely toward inputs and move every money number to a cohort view. With a nine-month cycle, revenue you book in March came from work done last summer, so judging this quarter's marketing by this quarter's revenue measures the wrong team. Track accepted leads and cost per accepted lead weekly, then review each monthly cohort at three, six and nine months so the comparison is always cohort against cohort rather than month against month. ### Who should own customer acquisition cost, marketing or finance? Marketing owns the row, finance owns the inputs. That split works because the two disagreements are different: whether the number is moving in the right direction is a marketing question, and what counts as spend is an accounting one. Agree the definition with finance once, in writing, including salaries, contractor fees, tooling and whether sales compensation is in scope. After that the marketing lead reads it out and answers for it, and nobody reopens the formula in a meeting. ## Not sure your marketing board is measuring the right things? Send us the numbers your marketing team reads every week. We will tell you which rows are inputs, which are results wearing an input's clothes, and which of your outcomes has no early number underneath it at all. One reply from a person, inside a business day. [Talk to us](/contact?reason=kpi_help) _Updated 2026-08-29_ --- # Sales KPIs that predict the quarter, not report it Most sales boards are a revenue number and a pipeline number, both of which describe decisions somebody else already made. A board that predicts the quarter looks different: five activity rows read every week, seven quality rows reviewed monthly, and a written definition beside each one so a red week produces a plan instead of a debate about the formula. ## What is a sales team accountable for? Enough qualified conversations to fill the quarter after this one, and a defensible reason for every deal that did not close. Revenue is the receipt, not the responsibility. A team that hits its number on two lucky deals and held nine meetings all quarter has a problem the revenue row will not show until about April. Splitting it that way makes the weekly meeting useful. Conversations held is answerable on Friday. Revenue booked is answerable next quarter, by which point the only available response is an explanation rather than a plan. The second half matters as much. A loss reason field that says price on nine deals in ten is not data, it is a habit, and it costs you the one thing a lost deal was worth. _[Chart: Sales among the departments on a weekly Scorecard: activity moves first, money confirms later]_ ## Which five sales numbers belong on the weekly board? Meetings held, new pipeline created, pipeline coverage, speed to first touch and follow-ups past due. All five are answerable on Friday afternoon by the person who owns them, and four of the five will move if somebody decides to work differently on Tuesday. That is the whole test for a weekly slot. Notice what is missing. No revenue row, no forecast, no quota attainment. Those belong in the monthly review, where a month of data can carry them. Revenue on a weekly board in a business with a sixty-day cycle is flat for three weeks and then jumps, which teaches a team to stop reading it. - [Discovery meetings held](/glossary/leading-indicator): Meetings that actually happened with a qualified buyer, counted after the fact. Held divided by booked is worth watching separately. Leading, weekly, owned by each account executive. Target: your own last thirteen weeks. Gamed by counting a five-minute no-show, so agree a minimum length in writing. - **New pipeline created**: Value of opportunities opened this week at their stated deal value. Leading, weekly, owned by the account executive who opened them. Set the target off your trailing 13 weeks. Gamed by opening deals at optimistic values, which inflates this row and the forecast together, so review new deal values monthly. - [Pipeline coverage](/glossary/pipeline-coverage): Open pipeline value divided by the revenue still needed this quarter. Leading, weekly, owned by the sales lead. Derive the target from your own win rate rather than a published multiple: at a 25 percent win rate you need four times coverage. Gamed by leaving dead deals open, which is why it needs a stale-deal rule. - **Median minutes to first touch**: Median time between an inbound lead arriving and a human contacting it. Leading, weekly, owned by the sales lead. Target: the median of your last thirteen weeks, driven down deliberately. Gamed by counting the automatic acknowledgment email as a touch, which makes the row perfect and changes nothing for the buyer. - [Follow-ups past due](/glossary/input-metric): Commitments in the CRM whose promised date has passed. No formula, just a count. Leading, weekly, owned by each account executive. Target is structural: zero, every week. Gamed by pushing due dates forward on Friday afternoon, so read the count of dates moved beside it at first. ## What belongs in the monthly sales review? The seven numbers that describe quality rather than volume. Win rate, cycle length, average deal size, quota attainment spread, forecast error, no-decision losses and net revenue retention all need a month of closed deals underneath them. Read weekly they are noise; read monthly they tell you whether the activity is aimed correctly. Run the review off closed deals only, and close the month before you look. A review that includes open deals invites everyone to argue about which of them will land, which is the forecast conversation. That is a different meeting, and merging the two tends to lose this one. - [Win rate](/glossary/win-rate): Deals won divided by deals decided, so open deals stay out of both halves. Lagging, monthly, owned by the sales lead. Take the target from your trailing 13 weeks. Gamed by never marking a deal lost, which parks failures in the pipeline and makes the rate look better than the bank balance does. - [Sales cycle length](/glossary/sales-cycle-length): Median days from first meeting to signature on won deals. Use the median, since one enterprise deal will drag a mean anywhere. Lagging, monthly, owned by the sales lead. Target: your own last thirteen weeks. Gamed by re-dating the start when a stalled deal restarts. - **Average deal size**: Won revenue divided by deals won, on a consistent contract term. Lagging, monthly, owned by the sales lead. Derive the target from your trailing 13 weeks. Gamed by quoting a three-year total as one deal, so state the term in the definition and column multi-year deals separately. - **Quota attainment spread**: The share of sellers at or above target, not the team average. Lagging, monthly, owned by the sales lead. Target: the median of your last thirteen weeks. Gamed by lowering quotas after a bad month, which turns a coaching problem into a paperwork exercise and hides it from the leadership team. - [Forecast error](/glossary/variance): Absolute difference between the forecast and the actual, divided by the actual, so lower is better. Lagging, monthly, owned by the sales lead. Set the target off your own trailing 13 weeks. Gamed by sandbagging, which buys a comfortable beat every month and a capacity plan nobody trusts. - **Losses to no decision**: Share of decided deals that ended with the buyer doing nothing. Lagging, monthly, owned by the sales lead. Target: your own last thirteen weeks. Gamed by recording no-decision losses as competitor losses, which flatters the team and removes the one signal that qualification is too loose. - [Net revenue retention](/glossary/net-revenue-retention): Revenue from last year's customers this year, including expansion and losses, divided by what they paid last year. Lagging, reviewed monthly and properly each quarter, owned by the sales lead. Target: your own trailing four quarters, since thirteen weeks will not contain a renewal cycle. Gamed by excluding fully churned accounts from the base, which turns a retention number into an expansion number. ## How do you set sales targets that are not guesses? Work backward from the revenue gap through your own conversion rates, then sanity-check the answer against the last thirteen weeks. If you need 400,000 dollars, your average deal is 20,000 and your win rate is a quarter, that is 20 wins, 80 decided deals and however many meetings your history says produces 80 decisions. Doing the arithmetic in public is the point. It turns the target into something a team can inspect, and it usually surfaces the real problem: the required meeting count is triple what anybody has ever held. Better to find that in the planning session than in week nine. Then check the answer against reality and hold it there for a quarter. If the arithmetic demands a number nobody has hit, the gap gets closed by changing deal size, win rate or headcount, not by writing an ambitious figure on the board and hoping. A target the team knows is fictional stops being read within two weeks. - [Trailing 13 weeks](/glossary/trailing-13-weeks): The quarter of history you check the arithmetic against, long enough to survive one strange week. - [Goal band](/glossary/goal-band): A range rather than a line, so an ordinary week reads as ordinary and only a real miss takes meeting time. ## Which sales numbers should you drop? Dials, emails sent, total pipeline value and any activity count nobody would act on. Activity numbers are only worth a slot when they convert to something you can trace. Dials made is the classic case: it rises the moment it goes on a board, it says nothing about whether the calls were worth making, and it teaches a team to do the cheap version of the work. Total pipeline value has the same problem in a smarter suit. It grows every time somebody opens a deal and shrinks only when somebody closes one out as lost, so it drifts upward for years. Coverage against the remaining gap is the honest version, and it needs a rule that closes stale deals. None of this has to be deleted. Leave the counts in the CRM and take the weekly slot back. A team that fights to keep dials on the board is usually telling you something about how its targets were set, and that is the more useful conversation. - [Vanity metric](/glossary/vanity-metric): Goes up reliably, reads well in a board pack, and settles no argument anybody is actually having. - [Examples by department](/kpis/examples): Ten measurables for sales and ten for each of the other six departments, with owners attached. - [Leading vs lagging](/kpis/leading-vs-lagging): Which of your rows moves first, worked through with examples you can put straight on a board. ## How is the pipeline coverage row written out? Pipeline coverage is the row worth writing out properly, because it is the one people define three different ways in the same meeting. Five fields settle it: name, owner, definition, band and source. The definition is where the work is, and it takes about four lines. Name: pipeline coverage against the remaining quarter. Owner: sales lead. Definition: total value of open opportunities with a close date inside this quarter, excluding anything with no activity for 30 days, divided by revenue still needed to hit the quarterly number. Band: 3.5 to 4.5, from our own win rate of roughly a quarter. Source: the CRM pipeline report, pulled Friday morning by the sales lead. Read out in a weekly leadership meeting, that row takes ten seconds and either passes or turns into an issue somebody owns. Teams running EOS® put it on the Scorecard and drop anything outside the band into the issues list. The mechanism is worth copying whether or not you use the vocabulary. - [Scorecard](/glossary/scorecard): The fixed weekly rhythm these five rows are built to be read out in, and why it stays short. - [Building a Scorecard](/kpis/eos-scorecard): Where the weekly list comes from, how long it takes to settle, and a picker to draft one. - [Metric owner](/glossary/metric-owner): Why the name on a row should be whoever can move it, not whoever reports it. ## FAQ ### How do you measure sales when there are only two salespeople? Keep the same five weekly rows and read them per person rather than as a team total. With two sellers a team average hides everything worth knowing, since one strong month covers one weak one and nobody has the conversation. Meetings held, pipeline created and follow-ups past due all work fine at that size. Skip quota attainment spread, which needs more people than you have to say anything, and review win rate quarterly rather than monthly so the sample is large enough to be worth arguing about. ### Should the weekly board show revenue at all? One money row, and put it at the leadership level rather than on the sales board. Cash collected or closed-won for the week is the check on whether the activity is landing on deals worth having, the standing risk with a board made only of inputs. What it cannot do is drive the weekly conversation, because by the time it moves the work that caused it happened a full sales cycle ago and nothing about this week will change it. ### Our win rate went up and revenue went down. What happened? Almost always the team stopped bidding on hard work. Win rate rises whenever sellers become selective, which is why it is close to useless read on its own and useful read beside pipeline created and meetings held. If win rate climbed while new pipeline fell, you have a team getting better at picking easy deals and worse at finding enough of them. The fix is a coverage target, not a win rate target, since a win rate target rewards exactly the behavior that caused the problem. ### How long before a new sales KPI is worth reading? Count deals rather than weeks. An activity row like meetings held is readable almost straight away, because a week produces enough of them to see a pattern. A quality row like win rate needs enough decided deals underneath it that one odd month cannot swing it, which a team closing three deals a month waits a long time for. Where the volume is thin, read the row quarterly and resist the urge to explain every monthly wobble, which is mostly sample size wearing a story. ## Your board reports the quarter after it is decided? Send us the numbers your sales team reads every week. We will mark which ones move before the revenue does, which are counting activity nobody would act on, and where the arithmetic between meetings and the quarterly number quietly breaks. One reply from a person, inside a business day. [Talk to us](/contact?reason=kpi_help) _Updated 2026-08-29_ --- # Finance KPIs a leadership team should see weekly Finance is assumed to be the department where every number arrives late, and half of that is wrong. Cash, collections and billing habits all move week to week and all respond to somebody picking up a phone. Five rows belong in the weekly leadership meeting, seven belong in a monthly review, and confusing the two is what leaves a company surprised by its own bank balance. ## What is finance accountable for week to week? Knowing what cash exists, what is owed, and how fast both are moving. Profit is an opinion formed at the month end; cash is a fact available on Friday. A finance function that reports monthly and nothing else has handed the leadership team a rear-view mirror and asked it to drive. In a company of twenty to two hundred people this rarely needs new software. It needs somebody to pull four or five numbers on the same day each week and read them out. The first three weeks usually surface a billing habit nobody knew about. The weekly rows also give the rest of the leadership team something to act on. Receivables over 60 days is a sales conversation as often as a bookkeeping one, and invoices sent late are usually an operations handoff. Showing the numbers to everyone moves the fix to whoever can make it. _[Chart: Finance among the departments on a weekly Scorecard: cash and billing weekly, margin monthly]_ ## Which five finance numbers belong in the weekly meeting? Cash in weeks of payroll, cash collected, invoices sent on time, receivables past 60 days and forecast variance. Every one of them can be pulled on a Friday morning, and four of the five will respond to effort inside the following week. That is what separates them from margin and profit. Pull them all on the same weekday, every week. Cash numbers move with the payment run, so a Tuesday reading and a Friday reading are two different businesses. Pick the day, write it into the definition, and accept that a consistent slightly-wrong day beats an inconsistent perfect one. - [Cash on hand in weeks of payroll](/glossary/lagging-indicator): Bank balance plus available credit, divided by one week of payroll and fixed costs. Weeks rather than dollars, because weeks are what non-accountants in the room can reason about. Lagging, weekly, owned by the finance lead. Set the band off your own last thirteen weeks. Gamed by holding supplier payments until after the Friday snapshot. - [Cash collected this week](/glossary/input-metric): Money that actually cleared, not invoices raised. No formula. Leading, weekly, owned by the bookkeeper. Set the band off your own last thirteen weeks. Gamed by asking a friendly customer to pay early, which borrows from next week and makes two weeks of the row meaningless in a row. - **Invoices sent within one day of delivery**: Invoices raised inside one working day of the job being delivered, divided by all invoices raised. Leading, weekly, owned by the bookkeeper. Target is structural: 100 percent. Gamed by raising a draft invoice on time and sending it a week later, so measure the send date rather than the create date. - [Receivables over 60 days](/glossary/days-sales-outstanding): Invoice value outstanding more than 60 days past its due date. Lagging, weekly, owned by the bookkeeper. Band from your own last thirteen weeks, driven toward zero. Gamed by writing off old balances quietly, which cleans the row and destroys the record of which customers do not pay. - [Cash forecast variance](/glossary/variance): Absolute gap between the cash you forecast for this week and the cash you ended with, divided by the forecast. Lagging, weekly, owned by the finance lead. Take the band off your trailing 13 weeks. Gamed by updating the forecast on Thursday, so freeze it when it is published. ## What belongs in the monthly finance review? Anything that needs a closed month underneath it. Gross margin, contribution margin by line, days sales outstanding, the cash conversion cycle, days to close, revenue per employee and trailing profit all require the ledger to be settled. Reading them weekly means reading estimates and then arguing about the estimates. Keep the review to one hour and one question per number: is this different from last month, and if so, what did we do. A written variance note against each row beforehand halves the hour. - [Gross margin](/glossary/gross-margin): Revenue minus the direct cost of delivering it, divided by revenue. Lagging, monthly, owned by the finance lead. Set the band at the median of your last thirteen weeks. Gamed by moving delivery salaries below the gross margin line into overhead, which lifts the percentage and changes nothing about what the work costs. - [Contribution margin by service line](/glossary/contribution-margin): Revenue for one line minus the costs that would disappear if you stopped selling it. Lagging, monthly, owned by the finance lead. Band from your own history per line. Gamed by allocating shared overhead selectively, so agree the rule once and change it only at a year end. - [Days sales outstanding](/glossary/days-sales-outstanding): Receivables divided by revenue for the period, multiplied by the days in it. Lagging, monthly, owned by the controller. Band from your own last thirteen weeks. Gamed by picking a high-revenue month as the denominator, so calculate it the same way on a rolling basis. - [Cash conversion cycle](/glossary/cash-conversion-cycle): Days of inventory plus days sales outstanding minus days payable outstanding. Lagging, monthly, owned by the finance lead. Band from your own trailing 13 weeks. Gamed by stretching suppliers, which shortens the cycle on paper and buys a reputation problem and worse terms. - **Working days to close the month**: Working days from month end to signed-off accounts. Lagging, monthly, owned by the controller. Derive the band from your trailing 13 weeks. Gamed by closing on estimates and posting corrections later, so pair it with a count of prior-period adjustments. - [Revenue per employee](/glossary/revenue-per-employee): Trailing twelve month revenue divided by full-time equivalent headcount. Lagging, monthly, owned by the finance lead. Set the band off your own trailing four quarters rather than an industry figure, since the ratio depends entirely on how much you outsource. Gamed by moving staff to contractors, which flatters the ratio and costs the same money. - **Net profit, trailing three months**: Profit after everything, averaged over three closed months. Lagging, monthly, owned by the finance lead. Band from your own trailing four quarters, since thirteen weeks is too short a base for this one. Gamed by deferring discretionary spend, which produces a good month, a bad one after it, and no information from either. ## Where do finance targets come from? Three places, and it is worth knowing which one you are using. A few rows have a structural target, like invoices sent on time at 100 percent. A few come out of arithmetic, like the weeks of cash your board has decided is the floor. Everything else comes from your own last thirteen weeks. Published industry figures are the weakest source here and the most tempting, because finance is where benchmarks are easiest to find. Gross margin varies with how you classify delivery costs, revenue per employee with how much you outsource, days sales outstanding with the customers you serve. Two companies in one industry can differ by half on any of them and both be run well. The cash floor is the one target worth setting by decision rather than by history. Pick the number of weeks of payroll below which the leadership team will act, write it down before you are near it, and say what the action is. Deciding in advance is worth more than the row. - [Trailing 13 weeks](/glossary/trailing-13-weeks): The rolling quarter of your own history that most finance bands should be derived from. - [Benchmark](/glossary/benchmark): Why an outside comparison is worth reading and rarely worth adopting as your own target. ## Which finance numbers should you drop from the weekly read? Anything the close has to settle first. Revenue recognized, profit, EBITDA and any margin figure read weekly is an estimate presented as a fact, and the meeting turns into a discussion of what will change once accruals land. Keep them monthly, where the ledger can support them. Cumulative totals go too. Revenue year to date always rises, so it says nothing about the week you are in, and it is the number most likely to keep a meeting calm while cash quietly deteriorates underneath it. The line to hold is whether a number could send somebody to do something before Friday. Cash collected passes. Receivables past 60 days passes, because it is a list of phone calls. Gross margin does not, and demanding it weekly costs a day and gets restated anyway. - [Lagging indicator](/glossary/lagging-indicator): Confirms what already happened. Worth a few slots as proof, never worth the whole board. - [Examples by department](/kpis/examples): Ten finance measurables and sixty more across the other departments, each with an owner role. - [Leading vs lagging](/kpis/leading-vs-lagging): How to sort your own rows by when they move, with examples for each department. ## What does the cash row look like written out? Cash in weeks of payroll is the row to write out first, because it is the number a leadership team will be asked about at the worst possible moment. Five fields: name, owner, definition, band, source. The definition needs to say what counts as cash, which is where most versions of this row differ. Name: cash on hand in weeks of payroll. Owner: finance lead. Definition: cleared bank balance across all operating accounts plus undrawn credit facility, divided by average weekly payroll and fixed costs over the last thirteen weeks, read every Friday at 9am. Band: 8 to 12 weeks, a floor this leadership team chose rather than a published figure, with anything under 8 raised as an issue that day. Source: the bank feed and the payroll report, both pulled by the finance lead. Companies running EOS® put that row at the top of the weekly Scorecard and give it ten seconds unless it is outside the band. The value is not the framework, it is that one person owns the row, the definition is written down, and a bad reading has a rule attached to it before anybody needs the rule. - [Scorecard](/glossary/scorecard): Why only two or three finance rows reach it, and where the other ones live instead. - [Building a Scorecard](/kpis/eos-scorecard): Assembling a weekly list that a leadership team will actually read, with a picker to start from. - [Metric owner](/glossary/metric-owner): Why the bookkeeper owns collections rows and the finance lead owns the forecast ones. ## FAQ ### Should the whole leadership team see the cash number? Yes, in weeks of payroll rather than as a bank balance. A raw balance invites two bad reactions: comfort when it looks large and panic when it does not, neither of which accounts for what the company spends. Weeks of payroll converts it into something everyone in the room can reason about, and it removes the awkwardness of showing a specific figure to people who have no context for it. If you are not comfortable sharing the exact balance, share the weeks and the band. ### Our bookkeeper says weekly numbers are not possible. Is that true? It is usually true of profit and false of everything else on the weekly list. Cash cleared, invoices sent, receivables aged past 60 days and collection calls made all come out of the bank feed and the invoicing system without waiting for a close. What is genuinely hard weekly is anything that needs accruals, revenue recognition or stock valuation, and none of those belong in a weekly meeting. If the answer is still no, the real blocker is often that invoicing runs in batches once a month, which is itself the finding. ### How do we measure finance itself rather than the company? Three rows do most of it: working days to close the month, forecast variance and the share of invoices sent inside a day of delivery. Together they say whether the numbers arrive fast, whether they were predicted correctly and whether the billing process runs. All three are about the finance function's own work rather than about trading conditions, which makes them fair to hold a finance lead accountable for in a way that revenue and margin are not. ### How many finance rows should sit on the leadership Scorecard? Two or three, not five. The five weekly rows in this guide are the finance department's own board. What the leadership team needs in its weekly meeting is cash in weeks of payroll, cash collected and receivables past 60 days, because those three are the ones where a decision by somebody outside finance changes the outcome. The rest belong on the finance board where the person who can act on them reads them, which is the general rule for every department list. ## Waiting on the month end to find out how the month went? Send us the finance numbers your leadership team currently sees and how often it sees them. We will mark which ones could be pulled weekly with what you already have, which need the close, and where a billing habit is costing you cash nobody has priced. One reply from a person, inside a business day. [Talk to us](/contact?reason=kpi_help) _Updated 2026-08-29_ --- # HR KPIs: the five people numbers worth a weekly look People problems announce themselves late. Someone resigns in November over something that went wrong in July, and the turnover number records it a quarter after that. The rows in this guide are chosen for the opposite property: five weekly measures that move while a fix is still cheap, seven monthly ones that confirm whether the weekly habits are doing anything. ## What is HR accountable for week to week? Filling seats and keeping the people already in them, and both fail quietly. HR owns the process that produces hires and the habits that keep good people from drifting: candidates in play, interviews held, one-on-ones that actually happen, new starters with a written plan. Turnover and engagement are the receipts, and by the time they move the decision was made months ago. Nobody argues with that split until it reaches the weekly board, where the people rows are usually a headcount and a turnover percentage. Both describe a year, and neither tells a manager what to do before Friday. The awkward part is that the weekly rows measure managers rather than the HR function. A missed one-on-one belongs to whoever missed it. HR owns whether the habit exists and whether anybody notices when it stops. _[Chart: People rows on a weekly Scorecard: hiring steps and manager habits weekly, turnover and engagement later]_ ## Which five people numbers belong on the weekly board? The ones a manager can fix inside a week. Open seats with a live candidate, interviews held, scheduled one-on-ones that happened, new starters with a written plan, and applications per open seat. None of the five needs a survey tool or a closed month, and all five say something about work that is either happening or quietly not happening. Two of these rows make people uncomfortable, which is a good sign. One-on-ones held and new starters with a plan name a manager rather than a market condition, and the discomfort is the information. A row nobody feels responsible for has not been assigned properly. - [Open seats with a live candidate](/glossary/leading-indicator): Approved open roles that have at least one candidate past a first conversation, divided by all approved open roles. Leading, weekly, owned by the recruiter. Take the band from your own trailing 13 weeks. Gamed by counting an unread application as a candidate, so define the stage that qualifies. - [Interviews held](/glossary/input-metric): Interviews that happened with a candidate for an approved seat, counted after the fact. No formula, just a count. Leading, weekly, owned by the recruiter. Band off your own trailing 13 weeks. Gamed by counting a screening call as an interview, which lifts the row and fills no seat. - [Scheduled one-on-ones held](/glossary/ratio-metric): One-on-ones that took place divided by those in the calendar for that week. Leading, weekly, owned by each department manager. The target is structural rather than historical: everything scheduled happens or gets rebooked inside the week. Gamed by deleting the meeting instead of moving it, so count deletions beside it. - **New starters with a written 90-day plan**: People in their first week who have a dated plan with named milestones, over all people in their first week. Leading, weekly, owned by the hiring manager. Structural target of every new starter. Gamed by a template with nothing filled in, so a plan counts only once someone has signed it. - [Applications per open seat](/glossary/cadence): Applications received this week divided by approved open seats. Leading, weekly, owned by the recruiter. Band from your own trailing 13 weeks, per role family rather than across all of them. Gamed by leaving old job postings running to collect volume, which buys a good number and no shortlist. ## What belongs in the monthly people review? The outcomes, plus the shape of them. Voluntary turnover over a trailing year, the share of it you regret, first-year departures, median days to fill a seat, offer acceptance, an engagement score read beside its response rate, and how many seats were filled from inside. All seven need more than a week of people to mean anything. Run the review with names in front of you rather than percentages alone. In a company of sixty, one resignation moves the turnover figure by a full point, so the list matters more than the number. Two departures from one team is a manager conversation rather than a market one. - [Voluntary turnover, trailing 12 months](/glossary/employee-turnover): People who chose to leave in the last twelve months divided by average headcount over the same period. Lagging, monthly, owned by the people lead. Band from your own trailing four quarters, since a single quarter of it is mostly noise. Gamed by reclassifying a managed exit as voluntary. - **Regretted share of leavers**: Departures the hiring manager would have preferred to keep, over all departures. Lagging, monthly, owned by the people lead. Band from your own trailing four quarters. Gamed by deciding after the fact, so ask the manager to mark regretted or not within a week of the resignation and leave it alone. - [First-year turnover](/glossary/cohort): People who left inside twelve months of starting, divided by everyone who started in the matching period. Lagging, monthly, owned by the people lead. Band from your own trailing four quarters. Gamed by a long probation that ends in a mutual parting, which keeps the row clean and teaches nothing. - **Median days to fill a seat**: Median days from an approved requisition to a signed offer, on filled seats only. Use the median, because one hard search will drag a mean past anything useful. Lagging, monthly, owned by the recruiter. Band from your trailing four quarters. Gamed by approving the requisition late. - [Offer acceptance rate](/glossary/lagging-indicator): Offers accepted divided by offers made. Lagging, monthly, owned by the recruiter. Band from your own trailing four quarters. Gamed by making an offer only once the candidate has confirmed they will say yes, which produces a perfect row and hides every pay conversation that went badly. - [Engagement score with response rate](/glossary/enps): The recommend question asked of your own staff, scored as the share of promoters minus the share of detractors and reported next to the response rate. Lagging, reviewed monthly and asked quarterly, owned by the people lead. Band from your own history. Gamed by chasing responses only from teams expected to answer well. - **Seats filled from inside**: Open roles filled by an existing employee divided by all roles filled. Lagging, monthly, owned by the people lead. Band from your own trailing four quarters. Gamed by relabeling a sideways move as a promotion, so count only moves that came with a changed job description. ## Where do HR targets come from? Your own history for most of them, a decision for a few, and almost never an outside figure. Turnover benchmarks in particular mix industries, pay bands and company sizes into one number that describes nobody. Read your last thirteen weeks for the weekly rows, your last four quarters for turnover, and set the band a little better than where you sit now. The rows worth setting by decision are the habit ones. One-on-ones held and new starters with a plan are not questions of what the market allows but of what this leadership team will insist on. Pick the standard and let the row report whether it survived a busy month. For the hiring rows, split the history by role family before you set anything. A warehouse seat and a controller seat fill on different clocks, and one band across both produces a number that is wrong in two directions at once and defensible in neither. - [Trailing 13 weeks](/glossary/trailing-13-weeks): The rolling quarter behind the weekly hiring rows, short enough that it still describes how you recruit now. - [Goal band](/glossary/goal-band): A range instead of a single figure, so one resignation in a small company does not read as a failure. ## Which people numbers should you drop? Headcount, training hours logged, total applicants and any survey score shown without its response rate. Each is true and none of them would change a decision a manager makes on Monday. Headcount is a cumulative total wearing a people label, and an engagement score from a third of the company is a mood reading from whoever felt like answering. Training hours is the row people fight hardest for, usually because somebody is measured on delivering them. Hours booked say nothing about whether anyone can now do something they could not before. Measure what the training was meant to change instead. Total applicants has a subtler problem: it rewards a wide job posting, and a shortlist a small team never works through. Applications per open seat, read beside interviews held, catches that early. - [Vanity metric](/glossary/vanity-metric): Headcount, hours logged, applications received: numbers that grow on their own and settle no argument. - [Examples by department](/kpis/examples): Ten people measurables with an owner role apiece, alongside the lists for the other departments. - [Leading vs lagging](/kpis/leading-vs-lagging): Sorting your own rows by when they move, which matters more here than in any other department. ## What does the one-on-one row look like written out? Take scheduled one-on-ones held. The row needs five fields written down: name, owner, definition, band and source. The definition is the part that decides whether the number means anything, because a fifteen-minute corridor conversation and a booked thirty minutes with an agenda are not the same event, and only one of them survives a busy quarter. Name: scheduled one-on-ones held. Owner: each department manager, reported as one company figure by the people lead. Definition: a booked meeting of at least twenty-five minutes between a manager and a direct report, held in the week it was scheduled, with a rebooking inside that week counting and a cancellation not. Band: 95 to 100 percent, a standard this leadership team set. Source: the calendar export, pulled Friday by the people lead. In EOS® this sits on the weekly Scorecard next to the sales and cash rows rather than in a separate people report, which is most of the value. A missed week gets read out to the whole leadership team, and the manager answers for it the way the sales lead answers for a thin pipeline. - [Scorecard](/glossary/scorecard): Where one or two people rows sit once the weekly meeting has a fixed shape, and why only one or two. - [Building a Scorecard](/kpis/eos-scorecard): How a leadership team assembles its weekly list from nothing, with a picker that drafts a starting set. - [Metric owner](/glossary/metric-owner): Why a habit row belongs to the manager who performs it rather than to the person who reports it. ## FAQ ### Can a company with no HR person track any of this? Yes, and it is usually easier, because there is nobody to hand the work to. Four of the five weekly rows come out of a calendar and a spreadsheet of open seats, which a founder can maintain in ten minutes a week. What a company without an HR function loses is not the measurement, it is the person who notices a pattern across teams. Until you have one, read the rows by manager rather than as a company total, since the total will average away the team that is in trouble. ### Is an engagement survey worth running in a 40-person company? Once a quarter at most, with the response rate reported beside the score and no promise of anonymity you cannot keep. At forty people, a team of five is identifiable from its answers whatever the tool claims, and people work that out quickly. The useful version is short, asks the same few questions every time so the trend means something, and is followed by a visible decision. A survey with no decision after it teaches the company that answering is pointless, which costs you the next one. ### How do we work out what turnover is costing us? Do the arithmetic with your own figures rather than reaching for a published multiple. Take the recruiter or agency fee, the hours your team spent interviewing at their loaded cost, the weeks the seat sat empty valued at whatever that role produces, and the ramp period before the replacement is fully productive. That number is defensible in a leadership meeting because everyone in the room can check every term of it, which no external percentage of salary ever is. ### Should a manager see the turnover figure for their own team? Yes, with the caveat that in a team of six it is a story rather than a statistic. Show the manager who left, when, and whether the departure was regretted, and skip the percentage entirely below about fifteen people. The conversation you want is about two specific resignations and what preceded them, and a percentage actively gets in the way of that by turning two people into a decimal nobody can argue with. ## Your people rows only move once somebody has already resigned? Send us the people numbers your leadership team sees and how often it sees them. We will mark which ones are habits you can watch weekly, which are outcomes that need a year behind them, and where a manager is being measured on something they cannot change. One reply from a person, inside a business day. [Talk to us](/contact?reason=kpi_help) _Updated 2026-08-29_ --- # Operations KPIs: on-time, cycle time, and rework An operations board that reports units and hours describes how busy the department was. It says nothing about whether the customer got what was promised on the day it was promised, or what it cost to fix the parts that went wrong. Five rows answer that weekly. Seven more, once the month is closed, say what the answer cost you. ## What is an operations team accountable for? Delivering what was promised, when it was promised, without doing it twice. Those three clauses are the whole department. On-time delivery covers the promise, cycle time covers the speed, and rework covers the cost of getting it wrong the first time. Everything else an operations lead measures is a way of explaining one of those three. Keeping it to three clauses matters because operations is where a board grows fastest. Every incident produces somebody suggesting a new row, and a year later there are thirty, nobody reads any, and the meeting is a status update with numbers attached. The three trade against each other, which is the conversation worth having weekly. A team can hit its dates by cutting corners, and rework hours show that inside a month. It can eliminate rework by taking twice as long, and cycle time shows that sooner. _[Chart: Operations on a weekly Scorecard: dates, speed and rework weekly, cost and margin after the close]_ ## Which five operations numbers belong on the weekly board? On-time delivery, median cycle time, rework hours, capacity booked four weeks out, and jobs already past their promised date. Four of them are readable off the job list on a Friday without anybody building a report, and the fifth is a phone call somebody should be making today rather than a number to admire. Read on-time delivery and jobs past due together or you will misread both. On-time delivery is a percentage of what finished this week, so a team can hold it high while a handful of impossible jobs sit unfinished outside it. The overdue count is where those jobs live. - [Jobs delivered on the promised date](/glossary/on-time-delivery): Jobs completed on or before their promised date, divided by all jobs completed that week. Lagging by a few days, weekly, owned by the operations lead. Band is structural: the percentage you are prepared to promise a customer out loud. Gamed by moving the promised date, so lock the first date given. - [Median cycle time](/glossary/cycle-time): Median working days from order accepted to job delivered. Median rather than mean, since one large job will drag an average anywhere. Lagging, weekly, owned by the operations lead. Band from your own trailing 13 weeks. Gamed by starting the clock at scheduling rather than at order. - **Rework hours**: Hours spent redoing work already recorded as finished. No formula, just a booking code. Lagging, weekly, owned by the operations lead. Band from your own trailing 13 weeks, driven downward. Gamed by booking the fix as new work, which is why the code has to be easy and never used against an individual. - [Capacity booked for the next four weeks](/glossary/leading-indicator): Committed hours in the next four weeks divided by available hours. Leading, weekly, owned by the scheduler. Band from your trailing 13 weeks, with a ceiling as well as a floor: fully booked means every late job pushes the next one. Gamed by counting unconfirmed work as committed. - [Jobs past their promised date](/glossary/input-metric): Open jobs whose promised date has gone by, counted rather than valued. Leading, weekly, owned by the project manager. Structural target of zero, which almost nobody hits. Gamed by quietly rescheduling on a Friday afternoon, so read the count of dates changed next to it for the first few months. ## What belongs in the monthly operations review? Cost and quality, which both need a closed month behind them. Billable utilization, gross margin on delivered work, cost per unit, first-time-through rate, complaints per hundred jobs, change orders per job and supplier on-time delivery. Read weekly they swing on whichever large job happened to finish, which teaches a team to explain rather than act. Give the review one hour and go job by job on the worst three rather than department by department on the averages. An average margin tells you the month was acceptable. The three jobs that lost money tell you which quote template, which crew or which customer to do something about. - [Billable utilization](/glossary/utilization-rate): Hours booked to customer work divided by hours available. Lagging, monthly, owned by the operations lead. Band from your own trailing 13 weeks, with a ceiling. Gamed by booking rework and internal fixing to the customer code, which is why this row only means anything read beside rework hours. - [Gross margin on delivered work](/glossary/gross-margin): Revenue on delivered jobs less the direct cost of delivering them, over that revenue. Lagging, monthly, owned by the operations lead with finance agreeing what is direct. Band from your trailing four quarters. Gamed by leaving supervision out of direct cost, which lifts the percentage and changes no quote. - [Cost per unit delivered](/glossary/output-metric): Total delivery cost for the month divided by units, jobs or tickets delivered. Lagging, monthly, owned by the operations lead. Band from your own trailing four quarters. Gamed by changing what counts as a unit halfway through a year, so define the unit once and note the date you defined it. - [First-time-through rate](/glossary/first-call-resolution): Jobs delivered with no correction, rework or callback, over all jobs delivered. Lagging, monthly, owned by the quality lead. Band from your own trailing 13 weeks. Gamed by a generous definition of correction, so write down what counts before the first month rather than during the first bad one. - [Complaints per hundred jobs](/glossary/ratio-metric): Customer complaints logged, scaled to a hundred delivered jobs so a busy month is comparable to a quiet one. Lagging, monthly, owned by the operations lead. Band from your trailing four quarters. Gamed by resolving a complaint informally and never logging it, which is the usual reason this row looks calm. - **Change orders per job**: Change orders raised divided by jobs live in the month. Lagging, monthly, owned by the project manager. Band from your own trailing four quarters. Gamed by bundling six changes into one order, so count changes rather than paperwork and read the row against margin on the same jobs. - [Supplier on-time delivery](/glossary/variance): Supplier deliveries arriving on or before the agreed date, over all deliveries received. Lagging, monthly, owned by the buyer. Band is structural, at whatever you agreed in the terms. Gamed by accepting a revised date as the agreed one, which converts a supplier problem into your own scheduling problem. ## Where do operations targets come from? Two sources, and mixing them up is where operations targets go wrong. A promise date is a commitment you chose, so on-time delivery has a structural target of the percentage you are willing to sign up to publicly. Everything else, cycle time and rework included, comes off the median of your own last thirteen weeks. Set the on-time figure deliberately rather than optimistically. Ninety-five percent and ninety-nine percent are different businesses: the second usually means quoting longer lead times, holding more stock or refusing work, and all three of those are decisions for the leadership team rather than for the scheduler. Decide, then write the number on the board. For the historical rows, take the median of thirteen weeks rather than the average. Operations data is full of one enormous job, and a mean lets that job set the target for a quarter. - [Trailing 13 weeks](/glossary/trailing-13-weeks): The rolling quarter these bands come off, long enough to survive one job going badly wrong. - [Benchmark](/glossary/benchmark): Why an outside on-time figure is worth reading and never worth adopting, given how differently people count. ## Which operations numbers should you drop? Units produced, hours worked, tickets closed and anything counting effort rather than delivery. A busy shop and a productive one look identical in an hours column. Total jobs completed has the same fault: it rises with a good month for sales and falls with a quiet one, and neither movement tells an operations lead to do anything. Tickets closed deserves a specific warning, because it is the row most likely to make service worse. Closing is the one step a team fully controls, so a target on it produces tickets closed early, reopened by the customer, and closed again. First-time-through rate catches that. Dropping a row means taking back the weekly slot rather than deleting the data. The system keeps counting units. The leadership team stops spending four minutes a week reading a number nobody was going to act on. - [Vanity metric](/glossary/vanity-metric): Units, hours and closures: counts that rise with activity and say nothing about the promise you made. - [Examples by department](/kpis/examples): Ten operations measurables with owners and starting goals, plus the lists for every other department. - [Dashboard](/glossary/dashboard): Why a screen of operations charts is a different object from a weekly list somebody answers for. ## How is the on-time delivery row written out? On-time delivery is the row worth writing out, because two people in the same room will count it differently within a month. Five fields settle it: name, owner, definition, band, source. Most of the work is in the definition, and specifically in whose date counts as the promise once a customer has changed the scope twice. Name: jobs delivered on the promised date. Owner: operations lead. Definition: jobs marked delivered this week whose delivery date is on or before the date confirmed to the customer at order, where a customer-requested scope change resets the date once and only once, with the reset recorded. Band: 93 to 97 percent, a standard this leadership team agreed rather than an industry figure. Source: the job system export, pulled Friday morning by the operations lead. Teams running EOS® read that row out on the weekly Scorecard in about ten seconds and drop anything under the band into the issues list with a name against it. The framework is not the point. One owner, a definition nobody can reinterpret in the meeting, and a rule for a bad week agreed before the bad week arrives. - [Scorecard](/glossary/scorecard): The weekly list these rows are written to be read out in, and why two operations rows on it is usually plenty. - [Building a Scorecard](/kpis/eos-scorecard): Assembling the first version, how long it takes to settle, and a picker that drafts one by industry. - [Metric owner](/glossary/metric-owner): Why the scheduler owns capacity and the operations lead owns the date, even though both sit in one department. ## FAQ ### Every job we do is different. Is cycle time meaningless for us? Not meaningless, but the total is. Split the jobs into three or four families that share a rough shape, and read a median for each one. A custom fabrication shop that groups by rough job size gets a usable signal within a quarter, where the all-jobs median moves whenever the mix changes and tells you about the mix rather than about the work. If the families are hard to define, start with two, small and large, and split further once you can see the numbers behaving differently. ### Who owns on-time delivery when sales set the date? Operations owns the row and sales owns the promise, and the row is where that argument becomes visible instead of permanent. If dates are being agreed in the sales conversation without a capacity check, the number will sit stubbornly below its band no matter what the delivery team does, and it will keep doing that until somebody changes the quoting process. That is the useful outcome. A row that surfaces a handoff problem every week is doing more than a row that always reads green. ### How do we measure rework without people hiding it? Make the booking code trivial to use and never attach it to an individual's review. Rework hours are only useful when the team reports them honestly, and one conversation about somebody's personal rework total will end the reporting permanently. Report it as a department figure, treat a rising trend as a process question, and ask what upstream step produced the fault. Teams that do this usually find the causes are in scoping and handover rather than in the hands doing the work. ### Do these rows work for a service business rather than a factory? Almost all of them, with the vocabulary swapped. A job becomes an engagement or a ticket, units become deliverables, and the shop floor becomes a project board. On-time delivery, cycle time, rework and capacity booked ahead apply unchanged to an agency, a managed service provider or an accounting practice. The one row that usually needs rethinking is cost per unit, where a service business is normally better served by margin per engagement than by any unit figure it can invent. ## Your operations board counts activity rather than promises kept? Send us the rows your operations meeting reads each week and the dates you quote customers. We will mark which numbers describe a promise, which only describe how busy the team was, and where the on-time figure is being held up by a definition nobody agreed. One reply from a person, inside a business day. [Talk to us](/contact?reason=kpi_help) _Updated 2026-08-29_ --- # Build a KPI Scorecard in a week: a five-day plan Most Scorecards die in the planning stage rather than in use. A leadership team books an afternoon, argues about definitions, and puts the whole thing off until somebody has time to do it properly. Nobody ever has that time. What follows is a five-day plan that ends on Friday with a working weekly board: rough targets, imperfect data, one owner per row, and a first reading already in the calendar. ## Can a leadership team really build this in a week? Yes, if you accept a rough version. The work that takes months is not the building, it is the waiting for perfect definitions and clean data. Five short sessions get you a board with five to eight rows, an owner on each, and targets you already expect to change. That is a weekly Scorecard, and it improves faster in use than on paper. The plan below asks for about four hours of leadership time, split into five sittings so that nobody has to clear a day. Short sittings also stop the exercise turning into a design workshop, which is the failure mode: a beautiful template with no numbers in it, waiting on a reporting project that never gets funded. One warning before Monday. Do not start by listing every number your systems can produce. That list is long, comforting and useless, because it answers the question of what you can measure rather than what you would act on. The week starts from the second question and works backward to whatever data you happen to have. - [Scorecard](/glossary/scorecard): The board itself: a short list of measures, a name and a goal beside each, and a quarter of history across the page. - [Where KPIs fit](/kpis/eos-scorecard): How the weekly board sits beside quarterly priorities and the annual plan, with a picker for a first draft. - [The KPI guide](/kpis): What makes a number worth managing by, how many a small company can carry, and the tests each row has to pass. ## Monday: each leader names one number Book thirty minutes and ask every leader the same question. If you could see one number on Monday morning and nothing else, what would it be? Write the answers down without editing them. You will get five to eight, one or two will be vague, and at least one will be something nobody else in the room was watching. Ask for the number they would want, not the number they can get. The gap between those two is the most useful thing produced all week, and Wednesday exists to close it. If you let the question drift toward what is available in the reporting tool, you will end up with the reporting tool's opinion of your business. Two rules keep Monday short. One number per person, so the sales lead cannot hedge with four, and no debate about whether an answer is a good measure. Bad answers get fixed on Tuesday or dropped in week three. Arguing about them now costs an hour and settles nothing, because none of you have seen the row in use yet. ## Tuesday: write the definition down A row nobody can define gets counted differently every week, so Tuesday goes on turning each answer into a sentence. Name, owner, and the exact rule for what counts. Half an hour per row is normal for the first three, then it speeds up because the same arguments repeat. Write the rule where the person collecting the number will read it. The arguments are the work. Does a proposal count when it is sent or when the client opens it? Is a job on time against the date we promised in week one or the date we renegotiated in week four? Both answers are defensible and only one of them can be in the spreadsheet, so pick and record it. Owner means the person who can change the number through their own actions this week, not the person who runs the report. If a row has two owners, a red week produces two explanations and no decision. If it has none, it is a fact about the market and belongs in the monthly review instead. - [Metric owner](/glossary/metric-owner): The single name beside a measure, picked for who can change it rather than who reports it. - [Measurable](/glossary/measurable): The word a team using this system will hear for a row on the weekly board. - [Leading indicator](/glossary/leading-indicator): A number that moves before the result does, which is what makes a weekly reading worth holding. ## Wednesday: find out where each number comes from Every row needs a source and a person who pulls it, and Wednesday is where two or three rows fall over. If a number takes longer than five minutes to collect, either automate the collection or swap in something close enough that somebody can get it in one. A proxy you actually have beats an ideal measure that arrives late or never. Walk each row from the definition to the click that produces the figure. Which system, which filter, which day of the week, and who is doing it. A row that lives in one person's head is a row that goes blank the week they are on vacation, and a board with blanks in it stops being read within a month. Expect one favorite to die here. Somebody always wants a number that would need a change to the way work is logged. That is a real project with a real cost, and it can go on the issues list, but it does not go on this week's board. Take the closest thing you can pull on Friday and move on. ## Thursday: put a target beside every row Targets are the part teams stall on, so give them an hour and no more. Where you have a few months of history, take a good week out of it and use that figure. Where you have none, ask the owner what fair looks like and mark it provisional. A wrong target beside a row still tells you more on Friday than an empty column does. Prefer a band to a single figure on anything that bounces around week to week. Two numbers, a floor and a ceiling, keep a team from treating ordinary variation as a crisis, and they make the genuinely bad week obvious to everyone in the room without anyone having to say so. Where you do have history, thirteen weeks is the usual window: long enough to show a pattern, short enough to still describe how you work now. Once a row hits its target three weeks running, raise it. That habit matters more than the accuracy of anything you set today. - [Goal band](/glossary/goal-band): A floor and a ceiling instead of one figure, so a normal week does not read as a failure. - [Trailing 13 weeks](/glossary/trailing-13-weeks): The rolling quarter most weekly targets are set from, and why the window stays short. - [Target](/glossary/target): The figure a row is read against each week. Up and to the right is an ambition rather than a target. ## Friday: read the board out loud Fill in one week of actuals and read the board out in front of the team, five minutes for the whole thing. Say the row, say the target, say on track or off track. Nothing else. The reading is what shows you which definitions are still fuzzy, which owner is wrong, and which row nobody can explain out loud. Hold the discipline of not discussing anything during the reading. A row that is off track gets written on the issues list and dealt with later in the meeting, in the segment that exists for exactly that. Teams that argue their way down the board spend forty minutes on it, fix nothing, and quietly drop the whole exercise by week five. In EOS® this reading is the second segment of the Level 10 Meeting™, which is a useful shape to borrow whether or not you run the rest of the system. Same day, same time, same order, numbers read before problems are discussed, and the meeting ends when it said it would. _[Chart: The board you should have by Friday: owner, target, and thirteen weeks of actuals across the top]_ ## What changes in week two and three? Expect to change something in each of the first four weeks, and then to stop. Weeks two and three usually kill one row, rename another, and move an owner. By about week six the board settles down and the arguments move off the definitions and onto the business, which is the point of building the thing at all. Resist adding rows. The pressure to grow the board is constant, because every leader can think of a second number they would like to see, and a board of twenty rows gets skimmed rather than read. If a new row goes on, something comes off, and the trade gets made out loud in the meeting. Once the shape holds, the department lists are worth a look for rows you did not think of. Take one or two, not ten. The value of a weekly board comes from the same small set of numbers being read at the same time every week by people who have to answer for them. - [Examples by department](/kpis/examples): Sales, marketing, finance, operations and people rows with owners, ready to lift into a draft. - [Leading vs lagging](/kpis/leading-vs-lagging): Telling the two apart quickly, which is the check that decides a weekly slot against a monthly one. - [The wider toolkit](/tools): The other tools this weekly board sits beside, and the mistake teams make with each one. ## FAQ ### How many rows should the first version have? Five to eight, which is the low end of the five to fifteen a leadership board can carry. One per leader is the simplest rule, and it means everybody in the room owns something rather than sitting through the reading as a spectator. Fifteen rows work fine once the habit is established, but a team that arrives there in week one is usually merging departmental lists together. You will add two or three over the next quarter as gaps show up in real meetings, which beats guessing at them now. ### What if we have no historical data to set targets from? Set the target by decision instead and write down that you did. Ask the owner what a good week would look like, use that figure, and revisit it after four readings when you can see the range the row actually moves in. Nothing goes wrong: for the first month the value of a target is that it forces a yes or no answer during the reading, not that it is accurate. What does go wrong is leaving the column empty, because a row with nothing beside it gets judged by whoever speaks first. ### Should the board be a spreadsheet or software? A spreadsheet, for the first quarter at least. The rows will change enough in the first six weeks that any time spent configuring a tool is time spent configuring something you are about to rewrite. A shared sheet with one row per measure, one column per week and the owner's name in the second column is the whole requirement. Software earns its place later, once the definitions have stopped moving and somebody is tired of chasing five people for numbers every Friday morning. ### Who should collect the numbers? Each owner collects their own row, and the meeting facilitator chases whoever has not filled theirs in by Friday morning. Handing all collection to one person looks efficient and quietly breaks the link between the number and the person who has to answer for it. It also creates a single point of failure the first week that person is away. If a row genuinely cannot be pulled by its owner, that is a problem with the row rather than an argument for centralizing the work. ## Want a second opinion on the rows before Friday? Send us the numbers your leadership team named on Monday and what each one is meant to tell you. We will say which ones will move inside a week, which belong in a monthly review, and where two rows are measuring the same thing twice. We answer these ourselves, usually the same day. [Send us your rows](/contact?reason=kpi_help) _Updated 2026-08-30_ --- # Integrator vs Visionary: which seat do you need? The Visionary™ invents the future and holds the relationships nobody else can hold. The Integrator™ runs the week, settles the arguments between departments, and owns the profit. Most founders start out doing both jobs, and most companies hit a ceiling at the point where doing both stops being possible. Here is what separates the two roles, how they work together, and what hiring a part-time Integrator really involves. ## What the two seats are The Visionary is the idea generator: new products, big relationships, culture, and the problems nobody else has spotted yet. The Integrator takes those ideas and turns them into a plan somebody is accountable for, then holds the team to it week after week. One creates the pressure and the other absorbs it, which is why the pairing works. The titles on the payroll rarely match. An Integrator is usually a chief operating officer, a general manager or a president, and occasionally a long-serving operations lead who has been doing the job informally for years. What defines it is not the title but two things being owned by one person: the numbers and the harmony of the leadership team. The Visionary seat is real work as well, which founders in it often need convincing of. Generating direction, holding the relationships that only the owner can hold, and noticing the thing that will matter in eighteen months are all output. The trouble starts when that output arrives on a Friday afternoon with no filter between it and forty employees. - [The Integrator seat](/glossary/integrator): Who runs the company day to day, what they own, and why the seat is defined by accountability rather than by title. - [The Visionary seat](/glossary/visionary): Ideas, relationships, culture and the problems nobody else has seen yet, treated as a job with output. - [The leadership team](/glossary/leadership-team): The five to seven people who own the functions and meet weekly to work the same list of issues. ## Where the two roles actually differ In what they are measured on. The Visionary is judged on direction and on the relationships that could not be delegated. The Integrator is judged on whether the plan happened and whether the team is still speaking to each other. That difference decides who runs the weekly meeting, who owns the numbers, and who gets the final word when two departments disagree. The tie-break rule is the part that surprises people. When the two disagree about something operational, the person running the company wins, and the founder has agreed in advance to that. Without it the Integrator is a coordinator with a nice title, and everyone in the building works out inside a month whose opinion actually counts. Time horizons differ too. One is looking at the next two or three years and the next conversation with a major customer. The other is looking at this quarter, this week and the row on the board that has been red for a month. Both views are necessary and neither person can hold both without dropping one. ## How the pairing works week to week Through two habits. The two meet privately on a regular cycle to say the things that should not be said in front of the leadership team, and the founder brings new ideas to the issues list instead of announcing them to the company. Both habits exist to stop the same failure: the team receiving direction that has not been costed by anyone. The private meeting is where resentment gets caught early. Most breakdowns between the two are not about strategy; they are about the founder undercutting a decision in a corridor, or the Integrator quietly declining to do something because they think it is a bad idea. Neither of those gets raised in a room with six other people in it. The idea channel is the other half. Ten ideas a week from a founder is genuinely valuable and genuinely destabilizing. Routing them into a list means the good ones become quarterly priorities with owners and the rest get dropped in ten minutes, which is a better outcome for everyone than the company learning to ignore the owner. _[Chart: Splitting the two seats is mostly work on the people component, and it shows up in traction within a quarter]_ - [Accountability Chart™](/glossary/accountability-chart): Why the structure gets drawn as jobs first and names second, and what it exposes when it is. - [Rocket Fuel®](/glossary/rocket-fuel): The book that named the pairing, written by Gino Wickman and Mark C. Winters, and what it argues. - [The private meeting](/glossary/same-page-meeting): The regular one-to-one between the two seats, and the conversations it exists to make possible. ## Which seat do you need to fill? Almost always the Integrator, because the founder already holds the Visionary seat and has not vacated it. The signal is not size but symptom: decisions waiting on one person, the same problems arriving every quarter, and numbers going red without anyone raising them. That pattern tends to appear somewhere between twenty and fifty people, though headcount is the weaker signal of the two. The rare opposite case is real. Some companies are run by a capable Integrator with no one generating direction, so the plan is executed beautifully and points at the same market it did five years ago. That is a harder gap to fill by hiring, because the Visionary usually has to be an owner. The test worth running is a week of honest logging. Write down every decision that came to you and mark which ones only you could have made. Do it honestly and the list comes back mostly operational, and that is the job somebody else should have. ## Filling the seat part-time A part-time Integrator is the common answer for a company that needs the job done but cannot carry a full salary yet. Reported norms in this market run from one to two days a week, across an engagement of nine to eighteen months, checked August 2026. Day rates are not published anywhere consistently, so treat any figure you are quoted as a negotiation rather than a market price. Two things make the part-time version work or fail. The first is scope: one and a half days buys the weekly meeting, the numbers and the chasing, and it does not buy a functional leader who also happens to run the company. The second is authority. Nobody holds a leadership team to anything on a day and a half a week if the founder quietly reverses them on the other days. Costs are worth separating in your head. Our own cost model covers a different purchase: an outside facilitator running the sessions, eight billable days in year one at reported fees between $4,500 and $6,600 a day. A part-time Integrator is a hire, not a facilitator, and one does not substitute for the other. Plenty of companies pay for both, and the calculator on our cost page is the honest way to size the first half. - [The part-time version](/glossary/fractional-integrator): How the arrangement works in practice, the scope that fits the hours, and the risk that comes with it. - [What implementation costs](/cost): Session fees by tier, the day count in year one, and a calculator for your own team size. - [Choosing help](/how-to-choose-an-implementer): What to ask a facilitator before signing, the tiers, and the answers that should end a conversation. ## How the split goes wrong Four ways, and three of them are the founder. The hire is given the title without the final word. The founder keeps a favorite department. Ideas keep arriving directly at the team. Or the wrong person is promoted, usually the most loyal manager rather than the one who can hold a room to an uncomfortable decision. The loyalty promotion is the expensive one. Somebody who has been there nine years knows the business and often cannot tell the founder no, which is most of what the job requires. The alternative is not automatically an outside hire, but the question to ask about any internal candidate is whether they have ever pushed back on the owner and been right. The first six months are supposed to look rough. A new Integrator running their first weekly meeting will run it badly. Judge the seat on the fourth quarter rather than the first, and watch whether problems are getting closed rather than reported again. ## FAQ ### Can the founder hold both seats? Up to a point, and the point arrives earlier than most founders expect. Below roughly twenty people one person can generate direction and run the week, because the week is short enough. Past that the operational half expands until it fills every day, and the parts that get dropped are the ones nobody chases: the awkward accountability conversation, the red row on the board, the decision that will annoy someone. Founders who keep both seats tend to keep the work they enjoy and quietly shed the rest, which is exactly the work an Integrator exists to do. ### Should the Integrator be an owner? It helps and it is not required. What the seat needs is authority that the founder has publicly agreed to, which can come from equity, from a contract, or from the owner saying in front of the leadership team that operational decisions end with this person. Equity makes that easier to sustain over years and it is not a substitute for the agreement itself. Plenty of companies run the arrangement with a salaried general manager and no shares, and it works as long as nobody in the building is unsure who has the final word. ### Is a part-time Integrator a stopgap or a permanent arrangement? Usually a stopgap, and a useful one. Engagements of nine to eighteen months are the reported pattern, checked August 2026, which is long enough to install the meeting rhythm, the weekly numbers and the habit of closing issues, and short enough that nobody treats it as the final structure. Some companies convert the person to full-time, some hire someone else once the payroll can carry it, and a few keep the part-time arrangement for years because the company is stable and does not need more. All three are reasonable endings. ### What does the founder actually do afterward? Less than they feared and more than they expected. The Visionary keeps the relationships only the owner can hold, the direction-setting, the culture, and the problems that have not become visible yet. What goes away is the daily arbitration: who gets the resource, why the schedule slipped, whether that customer complaint needs a call. The first couple of months tend to feel strange and slightly redundant. Then the ideas that arrive while nobody is asking you to settle a scheduling row turn out to be better than the ones that used to arrive between meetings. ## Not sure which seat is empty in your company? Tell us how the last month went: what decisions came to you, which problems keep coming back, and how many people you have. We will say which seat is really vacant, whether a part-time arrangement fits the size you are, and what to look for in whoever fills it. If it is worth introducing you to somebody, we will say so plainly. In EOS® terms the answer is usually structural rather than personal. [Find an implementer](/contact?reason=find_implementer) _Updated 2026-08-30_ --- # KPI dashboards: when a screen earns its place A dashboard is a screen that shows current values. A weekly Scorecard is a short table somebody reads out loud and answers for. They look similar and they do completely different jobs, which is why so many companies buy the first one and wonder why nothing changed. Here is when a dashboard earns its keep, whether to build or buy one, and the five ways they fail. ## What a dashboard is and is not It is a display: tiles, charts and current values, usually pulled automatically and refreshed without anyone touching it. That is genuinely useful. What it is not is a management habit. Nobody has ever been held to a number because it was rendered nicely, and a screen with nobody named against a row is decoration with live data in it. The distinction matters because the two get bought as if they were the same purchase. A team that wants to manage by numbers buys a KPI dashboard, spends six weeks connecting sources, and ends up with eighteen tiles that nobody opens on a Tuesday. The numbers were never the missing part. The missing part was somebody saying on track or off track out loud with five colleagues listening. Put the other way round: a company with a weekly reading habit and a shared spreadsheet is managing by numbers. A company with a beautiful screen and no meeting is not. If you only have budget for one of the two, the meeting is free. ## When a dashboard helps and when the weekly table wins A dashboard wins when the question is what is happening right now and who needs to react today: support queues, uptime, orders in the last hour, cash in the account. The weekly table wins when the question is whether the business is on plan, because that needs a small number of rows, a person against each one, and a moment where somebody answers for the red ones. The clue is the reaction time. If the right response to a number moving is within the hour, it belongs on a screen somebody watches. If the right response is a discussion and a decision, it belongs on a table read once a week, where five to fifteen rows and a trailing view give you the pattern rather than the noise. Both can be true for the same business. An operations lead can watch a live queue all day and still bring one weekly row about the same function to the leadership meeting. What breaks is putting the live queue in front of the leadership team, who then spend twenty minutes reacting to an hour of data. _[Chart: The weekly version: one owner and one target per row, with the trailing weeks visible next to each other]_ - [Dashboard](/glossary/dashboard): What the term covers, where a screen helps, and the point at which it starts replacing the meeting. - [KPI](/glossary/kpi): What separates a key number from the rest of the reporting, and how few of them a team can carry. - [The weekly board](/kpis/eos-scorecard): How to build the short table, choose the rows, and handle one that stays red for three weeks. ## Build it or buy it? Buy when your data already lives in tools that the product connects to and your rows are ordinary: revenue, pipeline, tickets, hours. Build when the number that matters most is specific to how your company works and no connector will ever produce it. Most companies of twenty to a hundred people should do neither for the first quarter and use a spreadsheet. The reason for the delay is that rows change. A first draft of a weekly board typically loses two or three rows by the end of the quarter, because a measure that sounded important turns out to be unactionable or gameable. Automating a row costs real engineering time, and automating one that gets deleted in six weeks costs it twice. When you do buy, check the boring things rather than the demo. Whether the tool can express your definition of a number rather than its own. Whether a row can carry an owner's name. Whether last quarter's figures survive a source system changing. Published prices sit on the vendors' own pricing pages and change often enough that any number quoted here would be stale by the time you read it. ## The five ways dashboards fail Too many tiles, so nothing is the point. No owner, so nobody answers for a number. No target, so a figure is neither good nor bad. Vanity rows that only ever go up. And no cadence, meaning nobody opens it on a fixed day, which turns the whole thing into decoration that took a quarter to build. The owner problem is the one worth fixing first, and it costs nothing. Put a person's name next to every row, agree that the name means answering for the number rather than producing it, and half the other problems become visible immediately. Rows nobody will accept ownership of are usually rows nobody can influence. Targets are the second cheap fix. A number without an expectation cannot be read: eleven is fine or a disaster depending on what was supposed to happen. Rough targets set on the second Tuesday and corrected a month later work far better than precise ones that arrive never. - [Who owns a number](/glossary/metric-owner): What ownership means when the person answering for a row is not the person producing the data. - [Vanity metrics](/glossary/vanity-metric): How to spot a number that only ever goes up, and what to replace it with on the weekly board. - [Metric](/glossary/metric): Every measure is a metric and only a few are key. The line between the two, in one question. ## What actually belongs on the screen Two or three things per audience, not everything you can connect. A leadership screen carries the same rows the weekly table carries and nothing else. A functional screen carries the live numbers that team reacts to today. A screen for the whole company carries the two or three figures everyone can influence, and it is the one most worth having on a wall. The company screen is the one that gets skipped and returns the most. Two numbers that everybody in the building affects, updated where people walk past them, do more for shared attention than a suite of departmental views nobody outside the department opens. Keep the definition of each number written down next to it. Half the arguments in a review are about what a figure counts rather than about the business, and a one-line definition under a tile ends most of them before they start. ## The order that works Spreadsheet first, for a quarter. Read it out loud every week with a person against each row. Delete the rows that turn out to be noise, keep the ones that survive, and only then pay to automate what is left. Teams that run this order end up with fewer tiles, better rows, and a habit that would survive the tool being switched off. Manual collection has a hidden benefit for the first few weeks. Somebody typing a number in every Monday finds out quickly which sources disagree with each other, and that argument is worth having before a connector quietly picks one of them for you. In EOS® the weekly table is called the Scorecard and it is deliberately low technology, a short board read at the start of the leadership meeting. Automation is a comfort rather than the point. The point is that a person says a number out loud and the room decides whether to do anything about it. - [KPI examples](/kpis/examples): Ready-made rows for marketing, sales, finance, people and operations, each with its failure mode. - [Build one in a week](/blog/scorecard-in-a-week): Five working days from a blank sheet to a board somebody has already read out loud once. - [KPI basics](/kpis): What counts as a key number, how many a team can carry, and where most first drafts go wrong. ## FAQ ### How many tiles should a dashboard have? Fewer than you want, and the number depends on who is looking. A leadership view should match the weekly table, which for most companies means five to fifteen rows and closer to five in the first quarter. A functional view can hold more, because the person reading it lives in that function all day and knows what normal looks like. The failure pattern is the same at every size: a screen built to prove the data exists rather than to answer a question, which nobody opens twice. ### Can a dashboard replace the weekly meeting? No, and trying is the most expensive mistake in this area. A screen removes the work of collecting numbers, which is worth paying for once your rows have settled. It cannot make a person answer for a red row in front of colleagues, and that sentence is where decisions come from. Companies that cancel the meeting because everyone can see the data end up with a well-informed team that changes nothing, since seeing a problem and owning it are different acts. ### What should a small company use before it buys anything? A shared spreadsheet with one row per number, one column per week, an owner's name against each row and a target next to it. That is the entire requirement, and it works for a team of eight or eighty. Keep thirteen weeks visible so a pattern is readable rather than a single point. Most companies could run this for a year without buying anything, and the ones that do are usually in better shape than the ones who spent the same year connecting data sources. ### How often should the numbers refresh? As often as anyone would act on them, and no more. Daily refreshes on a number reviewed weekly create noise, and people start reacting to a bad Tuesday that would have averaged out by Friday. Live is right for a support queue or a production line, weekly is right for almost everything a leadership team reads, and monthly is right for anything that depends on the accounts being closed. Match the refresh to the decision rather than to what the connector can do. ## Have a dashboard nobody opens? Send us what is on it: the tiles, who was meant to look, and how often anyone actually does. We will say which rows deserve a weekly reading, which ones belong on a screen a team watches, and which you can delete without losing anything. Somebody here reads it properly and answers, normally within a business day. [Get KPI help](/contact?reason=kpi_help) _Updated 2026-08-30_ --- # EOS isn't working: ten patterns and the fix Six months in, the weekly meeting feels like a chore, the Rocks keep slipping, and somebody has started saying the quiet part out loud. Usually the system is not the thing that broke. Here are ten patterns, the cause behind each, the first thing to try, and when to stop trying things yourself. ## Name the symptom before you change anything Write down what is actually happening in one sentence. Meetings run long. Rocks miss. Nobody trusts the numbers. The room is polite and nothing real gets said. Those four look alike from the outside and have almost nothing in common underneath, and a team that skips this step usually buys more of whatever it already has too much of. The reflex when a system stops working is to add to it: another board, another report, another standing meeting about why the standing meeting is failing. Almost every fix below removes something instead. Most of these ten patterns are caused by volume, and adding volume to a volume problem makes the next quarter worse. Give the diagnosis a week. Sit through one leadership meeting with a notebook and record where the time went and which decisions got deferred for the second or third time. That page will point at one of the patterns below, which beats a team debate about whether EOS® is worth continuing. ## The ten patterns at a glance Each row below pairs a symptom with the cause we find behind it most often and the first thing worth trying. Work one row at a time. Teams that try four fixes in one quarter cannot tell which one helped, and they usually abandon all four when the quarter comes in flat. Caption: Ten failure patterns, the usual cause of each, and the first fix worth trying. | Symptom | Usual cause | First fix | | --- | --- | --- | | The weekly meeting runs long and decides nothing | Reporting has crowded out problem solving | Cut status to five minutes and give the rest to the issues list | | The same issue comes up week after week | The team debates it and nobody writes down who owns the next step | Close every issue with a name, a date and a line on the to-do list | | The room is polite and nothing real gets raised | Someone in it is unsafe to disagree with | Have the founder ask for one criticism of themselves, then say nothing | | Rocks miss every quarter | Too many of them, or they were handed out rather than accepted | Cap the company at three to five and let each owner set the date | | Nobody believes the numbers | No single owner per row, or definitions that changed midyear | One written definition and one owner per number, frozen for a quarter | | The quarterly session reruns the last one | The annual plan never turned into different work | Line this quarter's Rocks against the last and delete anything repeated twice | | A leader misses commitments and nothing happens | The seat was never described, so there is nothing concrete to miss | Write what the seat owns in five bullets, then rate the person against it | | New direction arrives between sessions | Ideas have no route into the list, so they land on the whole company | Send new ideas to the issues list and let the team price them | | Two departments quietly work around each other | Two people are accountable for the same outcome | Redraw the seats so each outcome ends at one name, then backfill | | The team has stopped using the tools at all | The system went in on top of the old habits instead of replacing them | Keep two tools for a full quarter and shelve the rest until those stick | ## When the weekly meeting is the problem The most common version is a ninety-minute meeting with sixty minutes of reporting in it. The agenda exists to get through the numbers fast so the team can argue about the two or three things that matter. If your meeting inverts that, the fix is subtraction: shorter updates, a real issues list, and permission to skip a segment nobody needs this week. The second version is quieter and worse. Everyone agrees, the meeting finishes early, and the real problem never reaches the table. The test is simple: when did somebody last tell the founder they were wrong in front of the leadership team, and what happened to them afterward? The Level 10 Meeting™ is worth defending as a format because it removes the negotiation about what happens next. Same order, same time, same day. Teams that let the order drift end up back in a status meeting, because status is the comfortable thing to do with a room full of people. - [The weekly agenda](/eos/level-10-meeting): What each segment is for and where teams lose control of the ninety minutes. - [Identify, discuss, solve](/glossary/ids): The three-step routine for working an issues list, and why teams stall on step one. - [The issues list](/glossary/issues-list): Where problems go so they stop arriving in corridors, and what makes one get worked. ## When the numbers and the Rocks are the problem Two symptoms, one root. Rocks that miss every quarter and a Scorecard nobody trusts both come from work that was assigned rather than accepted. If a leader did not say the number out loud and agree it was achievable, they will report on it rather than own it, and reporting is what you get in month three. Start with the count. Three to five company priorities a quarter suits most leadership teams, and teams carrying ten rarely finish more, and feel worse about the quarter. Cutting the list is unpopular for one meeting and obviously right for the rest of the quarter. Distrust in the weekly numbers almost always traces to definitions. Two people compute the same row differently, and within a month the team argues about the measurement rather than the result. One written definition per row, one name against it, and no changes until the quarter ends fixes more than a new reporting tool will. - [The quarterly session](/glossary/quarterly-session): What the day is for, what it produces, and how to tell a productive one from a repeat. - [Rebuild the Scorecard](/blog/scorecard-in-a-week): A five-day plan for naming the numbers, defining them and finding the data. - [What a KPI has to do](/glossary/kpi): The tests a number passes before it earns a weekly row on the board. ## When the structure is the problem If a leader misses commitments and nothing happens, or two departments keep working around each other, the fault is usually structural. Somebody is accountable for an outcome that also belongs to somebody else, or a seat was drawn around a person who was already there. Neither gets fixed by a conversation about commitment. The test that exposes it takes an afternoon. For each outcome the company depends on, write the one name that owns it. Where you cannot write a name, or write two, you have found the argument the team has been having in code for the last year. That is what the Accountability Chart™ is for, and it is the reason drawing one is uncomfortable. Structural problems also masquerade as effort problems. A leader who is good at their old job and out of their depth in the new one will work harder rather than say so, and the team reads it as a work-rate issue for months. Rating people against a written seat separates the two quickly. _[Chart: Most stalls trace to one component rather than the whole system, which is why the fix is usually narrow]_ - [Seats before names](/eos/accountability-chart): Drawing the boxes around the work rather than around the people already in them, and the argument that surfaces. - [The tools, in order](/tools): Which pieces do the most work early, and which can wait until those stick. - [Get, want, capacity](/glossary/gwc): The three-part check on whether a person fits the seat they hold. ## When the founder is the problem This is the pattern nobody writes on the whiteboard. Direction arrives between sessions, decisions get reversed in corridors, and the leadership team learns to wait rather than commit. EOS Worldwide points at a leader who will not be held to account by their own team as the failure mode it sees most often, and nothing in the toolkit routes around it. The mechanical part is fixable. New ideas go on the issues list like everything else, get priced by the team, and either become a priority with an owner or get dropped in ten minutes. Founders who adopt that routine tend to find it a relief. The harder part is the reversal habit. If a decision made in the room can be undone in a hallway on Thursday, the room is theater and everybody knows it. The Integrator™ seat only works when the owner has said, in front of the team, that operational calls end elsewhere. ## When to stop trying things yourself Bring in an outside facilitator when the problem is a person in the room rather than a process on the wall. A self-implementing team can fix agendas, counts and definitions on its own. It cannot referee a fight between two owners, tell a founder something unwelcome, or make a seat conversation happen that everyone has been avoiding for a year. The other trigger is repetition. If you have run the same fix twice and the symptom came back both times, the thing you are fixing is not the cause. Somebody who has watched dozens of leadership teams will usually name it in one session, which beats another two quarters of experiments. It is also fine to conclude the system is wrong for the company rather than badly run. Under about ten people the overhead does not pay. If the real problem is strategy, capital or a market that moved, no meeting cadence touches it. - [Choosing help](/how-to-choose-an-implementer): What to ask a facilitator before signing, what the tiers really mean, and the replies that should make you walk. - [The case and the counter-case](/why-eos): The argument for running the system, how much the published results prove, and where something else fits better. - [Is the bill justified?](/blog/is-eos-worth-it): Year-one cash, the time cost nobody budgets, and where the answer is no. ## FAQ ### How long should it take before EOS feels like it is working? Expect the first quarter to feel worse and the second to feel different. The first ninety days surface arguments the company has been storing up, usually about seats and about which numbers are real. By the end of the second quarter you should be able to point at three things: meetings that end on time with a name against every decision, weekly numbers reported whether or not they look good, and one problem that got closed and stayed closed. If none of those hold after two full quarters, something on the list above is in the way. ### Should we change implementers or stop altogether? Separate the two. Ask first whether the sessions produce decisions your team then acts on, because if they do, the facilitator is doing their job and the gap sits in the days they are not there. If a session feels like watching a curriculum get delivered, that is a fit problem worth raising directly before it becomes a switch. Changing facilitators resets some progress and is still right when the person cannot get honesty out of your leadership team. Stopping altogether is right when nobody at the top wants to be held to anything. ### Our team says the meetings are a waste of time. Are they right? Sometimes, and the complaint deserves a hearing before anyone defends the format. A meeting that spends an hour on status genuinely is a wasted hour, and the people saying so are describing a badly run meeting rather than resisting accountability. Time the segments for two weeks and see where the ninety minutes go. If most of it is reporting, fix that and ask again. If most of it goes on real problems and people still call it a waste, the objection is about who gets to decide things, which is a more serious conversation. ### Can we fix this without paying for more sessions? Often, yes. Agenda discipline, cutting the priority count, writing definitions for the weekly numbers and drawing the seats are all within reach of a leadership team on its own, and between them they cover most of the patterns above. What a team rarely manages alone is an honest conversation about one of its own members, especially the owner. If the blocked item is a person rather than a process, buying a single facilitated session to work that one issue costs far less than a full engagement. ## Tell us what is actually stuck Describe the last two months: what the weekly meeting looks like, which priorities slipped, and what nobody in the room is willing to say. We will tell you which pattern it looks like, whether you can fix it without help, and if not, which kind of facilitator suits it. If the answer is that you need nobody, we will say so. [Get a straight read](/contact?reason=find_implementer) _Updated 2026-08-30_ --- # Is EOS worth it? The honest math Running EOS® with a facilitator costs between $36,000 and $52,800 in fees in the first year on the rates reported for 2026, and that is the smaller half of the bill. The larger half is roughly a thousand hours of leadership time. Here is the arithmetic on both, what an answer of yes would have to look like in your own numbers, and the cases where the answer is plainly no. ## The cash side, in full Year one is eight billable days with a facilitator. At the fees reported for 2026 that is $36,000 at the Professional tier and $52,800 at Expert, with $42,000 in the middle at our own Certified midpoint of $5,250 a session. Travel adds about $600 a day when the facilitator flies to you, and software runs from nothing to about $12 per person a month. The day count falls after the first year. Eight days becomes six in year two and five in year three, so a full three-year arc is nineteen days: about $85,500 at Professional, $99,750 at the midpoint and $125,400 at Expert, before travel and software. A facilitator whose plan does not taper like that is selling a subscription rather than an installation, and it is a fair thing to ask about in the first call. Two of those line items are optional and one is not. Travel disappears if the quarterly sessions run remotely, which plenty of facilitators now do by default. Software is genuinely optional in year one, because a spreadsheet holds a set of weekly numbers and a priority list without complaint. The session fees are the purchase, and everything else is packaging. _[Chart: Reported per-session fees by tier for 2026. The middle bar is our own midpoint, not a published rate, because no Certified figure is published anywhere we could verify.]_ ## The bill that never reaches the budget This is our own arithmetic. Take a leadership team of seven. The weekly meeting is ninety minutes each, which is about 500 hours across the team over a 48-week year. The eight session days cost roughly another 450, a full day for each of the seven. That is close to a thousand hours of your most expensive people, and at any loaded rate you care to use it dwarfs the facilitator's invoice. Nobody puts that in a spreadsheet, which is why the conversation about whether the fees are too high tends to be the wrong conversation. Multiply a thousand hours by whatever your leadership hours are actually worth and the fee stops being the number that decides anything. What decides it is whether those hours were going to be spent well otherwise. That reframe cuts both ways, and it is the honest part. If your leadership team currently spends a comparable amount of time in meetings that produce nothing anyone can name, the time cost is not new, it is being moved. If your team barely meets and moves fast, the system is asking you to spend something you do not currently spend, and you should want a clear reason. The weekly ninety minutes is also the part that persists after the engagement ends. Session days stop. The Level 10 Meeting™ does not, which is the point of it, and it is the commitment worth testing before you sign anything longer. - [The full cost breakdown](/cost): Fees by tier, the day count by year, travel, software, and a calculator you can set to your own headcount. - [The weekly meeting](/eos/level-10-meeting): What the ninety minutes contain, how the time splits, and where teams lose control of it. - [Doing it yourself](/glossary/self-implementing): What running the system without a facilitator involves, and the two things it usually fails on. ## What a yes would have to look like Decide the measure before you spend, or you will grade the engagement on how the sessions felt. Pick three numbers you already collect and would be embarrassed to move backward on. Revenue against the plan you wrote is the obvious one. Add a margin figure and one operating number your team argues about, and write down where all three sit today. Feelings are a genuine signal and a poor primary measure. Meeting quality usually improves, because a meeting with an agenda beats one without, and that on its own is not evidence the system paid for itself. Ask instead whether a decision the company was avoiding got made, and whether the thing that decision was supposed to change actually changed. Be careful with the published case studies, including the ones on this subject that circulate widely. Growth figures from vendors and facilitators are self-reported and unaudited, and the companies that hire a facilitator were already the sort of companies that invest in getting better. The numbers are not dishonest. They just cannot tell you what will happen at your company. ## The two-quarter test Two quarters is enough to know. By the end of the second one you should be able to name a decision the company had been deferring that finally got made, a number the team now reports honestly whether or not it looks bad, and a problem that got closed and stayed closed. Three for three is a yes. One for three is not. The first quarter is a poor test on its own because it is supposed to be uncomfortable. Drawing the seats surfaces an argument about a person, and the weekly numbers surface a disagreement about what counts. Both of those look like the system causing trouble when they are the system finding trouble that already existed. Set the checkpoint in the calendar at the start, with the three numbers written down and the review date booked. A team that skips that step tends not to review anything, and eighteen months later it is still judging the arrangement on a general feeling. ## When the answer is no Four cases, and none of them are about the money. Below roughly ten people, where decisions still get settled by talking to each other. The bottleneck is strategy, the cash plan or where capital goes, not execution. The owner will not be held to anything by their own team. Or nobody on the leadership team has the ninety minutes a week to give. The last one sounds like an excuse and usually is not. A leadership team that genuinely cannot protect the same ninety minutes every week is telling you something true about the company, and buying eight facilitated days will not create the time. Fix the calendar problem first and revisit the question in six months. The strategy case deserves more sympathy than it gets. This is an execution system, and it is good at making a company do what it decided to do. If the decision itself is the weak part, or if the business needs a capital plan more than it needs a meeting cadence, a different framework is the better buy. Scaling Up, from Verne Harnish, goes considerably deeper on strategy and cash and generally suits larger teams. - [Set against Scaling Up](/compare/eos-vs-scaling-up): Where the two systems overlap, where they genuinely differ, and which company size each one suits. - [The counter-case](/why-eos): How much the published results actually prove, and the cases that call for a different system entirely. - [It is not working](/blog/eos-isnt-working): Ten patterns behind a stalled rollout, what sits underneath each one, and where to start. ## The cheap version, run first Two books and a spreadsheet cost under two hundred dollars, and about half of what the system does is available at that price. A meeting that runs the same order every week, plus five to fifteen numbers with one owner each, is the piece that carries the most weight, and no part of it requires a facilitator to install. Run that for a quarter and you learn the thing you actually need to know, which is not whether the tools are sound. It is whether your leadership team will keep the meeting booked in a bad month and whether anyone is willing to say out loud that a priority did not get done. If both hold for twelve weeks, the paid version has something to build on. If they do not, the fees would have bought you nothing. What the money buys, when it is worth buying, is somebody with no stake in the room who will name the awkward thing and keep the annual planning day from sliding twice. That is a real service and it is worth what it costs to plenty of companies. It is just a much easier purchase to justify after the free half of the system has already proved the team will use it. ## FAQ ### What does EOS cost in the first year? Eight billable days with a facilitator, which is $36,000 at the Professional tier and $52,800 at Expert, using the fees reported for 2026. Nothing published gives a Certified figure we could verify, so we model $5,250 a session, the midpoint between the two, which puts the middle of the range at $42,000. On top of that, travel runs about $600 a session when the facilitator comes to you, and software costs nothing to roughly $12 per person a month. Nobody charges for the first meeting, which is why a facilitator will always find time for it. ### Is it cheaper to self-implement? In cash, dramatically. The books cost under two hundred dollars and the software is optional, so the difference against a facilitated year one is the whole of the fee. In time it costs the same, because the weekly meeting and the planning days are the same commitment either way. What you give up is the neutral party: somebody with no stake in the internal politics who will tell the owner something unwelcome and keep the quarterly session from slipping. Teams that self-implement successfully tend to have one person willing to play that role for free. ### How do we know whether it worked? Write down three numbers before you start and check them at the end of the second quarter. Revenue against the plan is one. A margin figure is another. The third should be an operating number your team already argues about, because that is the one nobody can quietly redefine later. Alongside those, ask whether a decision the company had been avoiding finally got made and whether it stuck. Meeting quality tends to lift either way, so treat it as a reassuring signal rather than proof, and it should not be the measure you commit to in advance. ### Can we spend less and still get the benefit? Several ways, and they all beat haggling over the per-day figure. Run the quarterly sessions remotely and the travel line disappears. Skip the software for the first year and use a spreadsheet. Ask for a smaller year one, since some facilitators will run fewer days for a team that has already been operating the weekly meeting on its own. You can also start with a Professional-tier facilitator rather than an Expert one, which is the difference between $36,000 and $52,800 in year one for the same eight days. ## Worth it for your company, or not? Send us your team size, your industry, what you can spend and what made you look this up. We will come back with a straight read: whether the fees are a sensible purchase at your stage, what the time commitment really means for a team your size, and which facilitators fit if the answer is yes. If books and a spreadsheet are the better first step, we will say that instead. [Get a straight read](/contact?reason=get_started) _Updated 2026-08-30_ --- # EOS vs Scaling Up: which system fits your company EOS® suits an owner-managed company of roughly 10 to 250 people that wants one simple rhythm everybody can follow. Scaling Up suits a leadership team that is already growing quickly and wants sharper strategy and cash planning to go with the rhythm. Both run on quarterly priorities and a weekly meeting. The real difference is how much thinking they ask of you. ## The verdict, in more detail Pick EOS when the problem is that nobody agrees who owns what and the weekly meeting wanders. Pick Scaling Up when the seats are already clear and the harder questions are pricing, positioning and cash. A twelve person firm usually finds EOS enough. A sixty person firm with an acquisition in view usually wants the extra strategy and cash work. The two systems came out of different rooms. Gino Wickman wrote Traction in 2007 after years inside small Michigan companies where the founder was still in every decision. Verne Harnish wrote Mastering the Rockefeller Habits in 2002 and expanded it into Scaling Up in 2014, working with fast-growth firms and the CEO groups he had helped build. That difference shows up in every tool each one hands you. EOS is deliberately narrow. Six components, a two-page vision document, one chart of seats, one weekly number list, three to seven priorities a quarter, one meeting agenda. You can teach the whole vocabulary in a morning, and that is the point: a team of fifteen with no planning habit can start on a Monday and be running it properly by the third quarter. Scaling Up asks more of you and gives more back. Its One-Page Strategic Plan carries core values, purpose, targets, and the quarterly and annual themes on a single sheet, and it sits behind a set of strategy worksheets that push on who your customer is and what you charge. It also treats cash as its own discipline rather than a report you read after the fact, which is the piece EOS leaves to your finance lead. Neither one is a management theory you argue about. Both are checklists with a meeting attached, and both fail the same way, which is a leadership team that stops holding the meeting in month five. - [What EOS actually is](/what-is-eos): The six components, the tools, and the sizes of company it was built for. - [What EOS costs](/cost): Session fees by tier, a standard first year, and what self-implementing runs to. Caption: EOS and Scaling Up on the questions leadership teams ask first. Facts checked August 2026 against Traction, the Scaling Up books and scalingup.com. | Question | EOS | Scaling Up | | --- | --- | --- | | Origin and book | Traction, Gino Wickman, 2007. Written from work inside small owner-managed companies, and later supported by a training body, EOS Worldwide. | Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, Verne Harnish, 2002, expanded into Scaling Up in 2014. Harnish also founded the CEO membership group Entrepreneurs' Organization, which its site notes. | | Who it fits by size | EOS Worldwide puts the range at 10 to 250 employees, privately held. In practice most teams running it well are somewhere between 20 and 100. | Firms already growing fast and planning to keep going. No size range is published; the worked examples in Harnish's books skew toward larger companies than Traction's do, and the tools are used well below that. Its site says more than 70,000 firms have used the one-page tools. | | Cadence and meetings | One weekly leadership meeting on a fixed agenda, a quarterly planning day, an annual two-day session. The weekly hour and a half is the load-bearing habit. | A daily huddle of under fifteen minutes, a weekly management meeting, a monthly session, then quarterly and annual planning. More touchpoints, and the daily huddle is the one teams either love or quietly drop. | | Core tools | A two-page vision document, a chart of seats and owners, a weekly Scorecard of five to fifteen numbers, quarterly Rocks, and one meeting agenda. | The One-Page Strategic Plan, the Rockefeller Habits Execution Checklist, strategy worksheets covering the customer and the offer, and a set of cash planning tools. | | The framing idea | Six Key Components™ that every business has whether or not it names them: vision, people, data, issues, process and traction. | Four decisions the site puts as People, Strategy, Execution and Cash, on the argument that everything that stalls a growing firm sits under one of them. | | Cost band | Implementer day rates reported in 2026 run from roughly $4,500 at the Professional tier to roughly $6,600 at Expert. Eight billable days is the usual first year, so budget in the high thirties to low fifties of thousands. The books cost under $200. | No coach rates are published anywhere on the Scaling Up site, checked August 2026, so treat any figure you read elsewhere as one person's quote. The books are similarly cheap to buy. | | Software | A crowded field built around the weekly meeting, from the officially licensed products down to a shared spreadsheet that works fine for a year. | Tools exist for the one-page plan and the huddle, but far fewer teams pay for one, and plenty run the plan in a document. | | Certification and coaches | A tiered certification run by EOS Worldwide, with hundreds of implementers in the United States and a published directory. | The site reports more than 150 certified coaches globally, with the certification run by Scaling Up itself. | | Where it shines | Getting a stuck team to agree on who owns what, and making the weekly meeting produce decisions instead of updates. | Sharpening what you sell and to whom, and making cash a planned number rather than a surprise at the end of a good quarter. | | What it plays down | Pricing, positioning and cash strategy. EOS assumes you know your market and gives you the discipline to work it. | The people side of a small team. It has hiring and review tools, but it spends less time on getting a founder to hand over a seat. | ## What people get wrong about the choice Three mistakes come up on nearly every call. Teams treat the two as rival philosophies when both are execution checklists. They assume Scaling Up is the grown-up version for bigger companies, which is not what either book claims. And they spend two months choosing instead of running a weekly meeting badly for four weeks and learning something. The philosophy mistake is the expensive one. Nobody argues about whether a checklist is correct; they argue about whether their team will keep it. Both systems ask the leadership group to sit in a room every week and be honest about numbers that are red. If your team will not do that, the choice of system changes nothing, and the fix is a conversation about commitment rather than a comparison table. The size mistake comes from the word scaling. Plenty of 200 person firms run EOS well, and plenty of 20 person firms use the One-Page Strategic Plan without ever hiring a coach. Size shapes which questions hurt most, not which book is allowed. The third one is easy to fix. Take whichever weekly agenda appeals, run it for a month with real numbers on the screen, and see what the team does when a row goes red three weeks running. The system that survives contact with your own meeting is the one to buy help for. - [Tools and templates](/tools): The meeting agenda, the seat chart and the weekly number list, free to copy. - [Choosing an implementer](/how-to-choose-an-implementer): The questions worth asking, and the answers that should end the call. - [EOS vs Pinnacle](/compare/eos-vs-pinnacle): A guide-led approach with an open toolkit, weighed against the closed EOS set. ## Switching between them, or running both Mixing works when you keep one meeting rhythm and borrow tools into it. It fails when two facilitators bring two vocabularies and the team spends the hour translating. The common successful pattern is an EOS rhythm with the strategy and cash worksheets from Scaling Up bolted on, run by one person who owns the agenda. Switching outright is less common than people expect, and the reason is rarely the system. A team that has run a weekly number list for two years has built the habit that matters, and moving to a different one-page format buys very little. What usually triggers a real switch is a change in the business, such as an acquisition or a move into a market where the pricing question suddenly dominates. If you do switch, keep the numbers. Whatever you call the sheet, thirteen weeks of history on the same five to fifteen measures is worth more than any template, and rebuilding it from scratch costs you a quarter of visibility. One warning about running both with paid help. Two facilitators on the day rates our cost page reports, disagreeing politely about whether the priority is called a Rock, is the most expensive way to be confused. Pick who owns the room, and let the other set of tools come in as worksheets rather than as a second process. Scaling Up and the One-Page Strategic Plan belong to Gazelles, Inc.; we are affiliated with neither company. ## FAQ ### Is Scaling Up just EOS for bigger companies? No, and the timeline alone makes that hard to argue: the Rockefeller Habits book came out five years before Traction. They are two answers to the same question, written for different rooms. Scaling Up carries more strategy and cash work and a busier meeting rhythm. EOS carries less and is easier to keep. Company size affects which questions hurt, not which system you are allowed to use. ### What does a Scaling Up coach cost? The Scaling Up site publishes no coach rates anywhere we could find, checked August 2026, so we will not print a number. Coaches are independent and price their own work, the same way EOS implementers do, and quotes move with the size of your team and the length of the engagement. Ask two or three for a written scope and compare days, not day rates. For EOS the reported figures sit on our cost page. ### Can we run the weekly meeting from one system and the planning from the other? Yes, and it is the most common blend we see. Keep one weekly agenda so the team never has to ask which meeting this is, then pull in whichever planning sheet asks the better questions for your business. The rule that keeps it from turning into a mess: one person owns the agenda and the vocabulary, and anything borrowed arrives as a worksheet rather than as a second process with its own facilitator. ### Which one should a 25 person company start with? Usually EOS, on the grounds of load rather than quality. At that size the binding problem is normally that two people think they own the same thing and the weekly meeting is a round of updates. The narrower toolkit fixes that faster and costs less to learn. Move toward the strategy and cash worksheets once the weekly meeting has stopped producing surprises, which is usually about a year in. ## Not sure which of these to start with? Tell us the size of your leadership team, what broke last quarter, and whether you have run a weekly number list before. A person reads it and replies within one business day with a straight recommendation, including when the answer is to keep what you have. [Get a recommendation](/contact?reason=get_started) _Updated 2026-08-30_ --- # EOS vs Pinnacle: how the two compare EOS® fits a team that wants a fixed set of tools, a large pool of certified help and a rhythm it can copy on Monday. Pinnacle fits an owner who wants a mentor in the room and is happy to shape the toolkit around the business rather than the other way round. Same weekly discipline underneath, different amount of structure handed to you. ## The verdict, in more detail Choose EOS if you value a known quantity: one book, one toolkit, a published directory of implementers and a second opinion available in most cities. Choose Pinnacle if the appeal is a guide who has run a company of your kind and will adapt the tools to it. The trade is coverage and consistency against fit and flexibility. Pinnacle Business Guides describes its approach as more than another operating system, calling it an approach to building a business and a life, with Greg Cleary listed as founder, checked August 2026. Its framework is published as the 5 Pinnacle Principles, set out on the site as an equation rather than a list, alongside what it calls an unlimited toolbox and a starting session it names Base Camp. That word unlimited is the honest signal of the difference. EOS gives you a closed set of tools and says most companies need nothing else for the first two years. Pinnacle presents a wider shelf and a guide who picks from it. Neither is obviously right, and which one you want usually depends on whether an incomplete toolkit feels like freedom or like homework. The other real difference is depth of bench. EOS Worldwide runs a tiered certification with a public directory, so if the first person is wrong for you, there is a second and a third. Pinnacle's site lists its guides by name, and the group is visibly smaller, checked August 2026. For a company outside a major metro that matters more than any feature comparison. What the two share is more than what separates them. Quarterly priorities with one owner each, a weekly meeting where numbers get read before opinions, and an outside facilitator whose main job in year one is stopping the founder from answering every question. - [EOS in plain terms](/what-is-eos): The vocabulary, the closed toolkit and the kind of company it was written for. - [The price of EOS help](/cost): Reported day rates, a typical first-year total, and the do-it-yourself route. Caption: EOS and Pinnacle on the questions leadership teams ask first. Pinnacle facts are only what pinnaclebusinessguides.com publishes, checked August 2026. | Question | EOS | Pinnacle | | --- | --- | --- | | Origin and book | Traction, Gino Wickman, 2007, supported since by the training body EOS Worldwide. The book is the whole system and sells for the price of a paperback. | The site names Greg Cleary as founder and offers a free audiobook, Peak Performance: The Five Principles Every Great Business Lives By. We found no other book presented as the core text. | | Who it fits by size | A privately held company of 10 to 250 employees, per EOS Worldwide. The 20 to 100 band is where it is used most. | The site aims at owners and chief executives and says its clients run from family businesses to private equity backed firms. No employee range is published. | | The framing idea | Six components said to be present in any company, named or not: vision, people, data, issues, process and traction. | The 5 Pinnacle Principles, published as People plus Purpose plus Playbooks plus Performance equals Profits. | | Cadence and meetings | Ninety minutes a week to a published agenda, one planning day a quarter, two days a year. The Level 10 Meeting™ format is written down and free to copy. | The site names a Base Camp session as the starting point and refers to Pinnacle days, but publishes no weekly agenda or meeting rhythm, so treat the cadence as something to ask a guide about. | | Core tools | A closed set of six, published in the book and unchanged since: the vision document, the seat chart, the weekly number list, quarterly Rocks, the issues list and a single meeting agenda. | An open set the site calls an unlimited toolbox, drawn on by the guide for the company in front of them. The individual tools are not listed publicly. | | Cost band | Reported 2026 day rates sit near $4,500 at the Professional tier and near $6,600 at Expert. Eight days is the normal first year, so the fee line lands in the tens of thousands rather than the hundreds. See our cost page for the full working. | Not published. The site asks you to book a call rather than showing a rate, checked August 2026, so anyone quoting a Pinnacle price online is quoting one engagement rather than a list. | | Coaches and certification | Certification runs in tiers, the US roster numbers in the hundreds, and the directory is public and filterable. | The site calls its people guides rather than coaches, describing them as mentors who have already made the climb, and names each one. That published list is short enough to read in a sitting. | | Software | Several platforms built around the weekly meeting, plus an officially licensed product. A spreadsheet does the job for the first year. | No software product is presented on the site, so plan on whatever your team already uses for the numbers. | | Where it shines | Speed to a working rhythm, and the safety of a second opinion. Two implementers will run a similar meeting, which makes the system easy to hand over. | Fit. A guide who adapts the toolkit can serve a business whose shape does not match a standard template, which is the usual complaint about any fixed system. | ## What people get wrong about the choice The biggest error is reading marketing language as a feature list. Words like approach, guide and unlimited describe a posture, not a mechanism, and you cannot tell from a homepage what happens in the room. The second error is assuming a smaller network means a weaker system, when for one company the only question is whether one good person is available. We will not repeat claims about Pinnacle that its own site does not make. You will find blog posts asserting things about its founding and its relationship to other systems, and we could not confirm them on the public site in August 2026, so they are absent from this page. If the origin story matters to your decision, ask on the first call and get the answer from the source. The comparison that actually decides it is not system against system. It is this named person against that named person, both of whom you have talked to for an hour. Facilitation quality varies more between two people holding the same certificate than it does between two systems. That is our own read after enough of these calls, not a finding from a study, but nobody who has sat through a bad quarterly session argues with it. One more trap: judging a system by how good the first session felt. Everyone leaves an offsite feeling clear. The test is week seven, when a number is red for the third time and somebody has to say so with the owner in the room. Ask both candidates what they do in that meeting, and listen for a specific answer. - [Free templates](/tools): Our copies of the agenda, the chart of seats and the weekly number list. - [Vetting the person](/how-to-choose-an-implementer): What to ask on a first call, and which replies should end it early. - [EOS vs Scaling Up](/compare/eos-vs-scaling-up): Harnish's one-page plan and busier meeting rhythm, weighed against the EOS toolkit. ## Switching between them, or running both Running both at once makes no sense here, because the overlap is nearly total and the value of either is a single agreed vocabulary. Switching is straightforward and cheap, since the habits transfer even when the words do not. What decides a switch is almost always the person facilitating rather than a missing tool. If you move, keep three things and let the rest go: the weekly numbers with their history, the list of who owns what, and the quarterly priorities already in flight. Those are the assets. The templates they sit on are worth very little, and rebuilding them under new headings costs a quarter of visibility for no gain. Give the change one honest quarter before judging it. The first six weeks under any new facilitator feel better than what came before, because attention is high and the offsite is recent. Look at week ten instead: is the meeting still finishing on time, and is anyone raising the awkward issue without being asked. If you are in year one and unhappy, the cheaper move is usually a different person inside the same system rather than a different system. Say what is not working, ask for a replacement, and only look elsewhere if that conversation goes badly. Pinnacle, the 5 Pinnacle Principles and Pinnacle Business Guides are trademarks of their owner. This site has no tie to that company or to EOS Worldwide, and neither one pays us. ## FAQ ### What is Pinnacle, in one paragraph? Going only by what its site publishes in August 2026, Pinnacle is a business operating approach delivered by people it calls guides rather than coaches, founded by Greg Cleary. The framework is the 5 Pinnacle Principles, an equation the site prints in full, and the first engagement is named Base Camp. What the toolkit actually contains, and how often the leadership team is meant to meet, are not set out publicly, so those are questions for the first call rather than things you can read up on. ### What does Pinnacle cost compared with EOS? Pinnacle publishes no rate anywhere on its site, checked August 2026, and points you to a discovery call instead. On the EOS side there are at least reported numbers to work from: roughly $4,500 for a Professional tier day, roughly $6,600 at Expert, and eight days in a normal first year. Our cost page shows the arithmetic. Neither organization sets its practitioners' fees, so the only figure worth anything is a written quote from the person you would actually work with. ### Is one of them better for a company under 30 people? Both work at that size, and cost is what usually separates them. Under 30 people a full facilitated engagement is a real line item, so plenty of teams start with the book and a copied agenda and bring anyone in only once the meeting is stuck on the same issue twice. If you do hire, the deciding factor at this size is whether the person has run a company as small as yours, not which system they teach. ### Which has more people available to help? EOS, clearly. Its network runs to hundreds of certified implementers across the United States with a directory you can filter by location, so most teams can talk to three candidates and pick one. On the Pinnacle side the roster published in August 2026 is a short one you can read in a sitting. If you are outside a major metro, availability may settle this for you before anything on the table above does. ## Weighing a named implementer against a named guide? Send us both names, the size of your leadership team and what broke last quarter. A person reads it and replies within one business day with the questions we would ask each of them, and where we think the two would differ. [Get a recommendation](/contact?reason=get_started) _Updated 2026-08-30_ --- # EOS vs 4DX: a full system against one discipline These two are not competing for the same slot. EOS® is a whole operating system: how you plan, who owns which seat, what the leadership team meets about, how issues get closed. 4DX is one discipline inside that, aimed squarely at the problem of a goal that keeps losing to the day job. You can run 4DX without an operating system, and you can run an operating system without ever hearing the phrase. ## The short answer, then the reasoning If your leadership team argues about who owns what and the weekly meeting produces no decisions, you need an operating system. If the seats are settled and the failure is that a stated priority quietly gets no hours, 4DX is the sharper instrument. Plenty of companies end up wanting both, and that combination works better than most people expect. The 4 Disciplines of Execution is published by FranklinCovey, and its own page frames the method as a formula for executing your most important priorities rather than as a way to run a company. That framing is worth taking literally. There is nothing in it about org design, nothing about a two-page plan for the next three years, nothing about what a leadership team does with a disagreement it cannot settle in the room. What it does have is a diagnosis. FranklinCovey calls the day-to-day work that keeps a business alive the whirlwind, and the whole method is built on the observation that the whirlwind always wins a fair fight against a new goal. The four disciplines are its answer: narrow the goals to almost none, find the behavior upstream of the result, put the score somewhere the team can see it, and hold a short meeting where people commit to next week in front of each other. Read that list next to a weekly leadership meeting and the overlap is obvious. A quarterly priority list narrows goals. A weekly number sheet is a scoreboard. The meeting where owners report is a cadence of accountability. What a system adds around those is everything a company has to settle before priorities are the right argument to be having. So the honest comparison is not which is better. It is whether the thing broken at your company sits inside the narrow problem 4DX solves, or outside it. - [The six components](/what-is-eos): Vision, people, data, issues, process and traction, and what each one asks of a leadership team. - [What running EOS costs](/cost): Session rates by tier, a normal first year, and the price of doing it without help. Caption: EOS and the 4 Disciplines of Execution on what each one actually supplies. FranklinCovey rows taken from its own pages, checked August 2026. EOS rows come from Traction and from our cost research. | Question | EOS | 4DX | | --- | --- | --- | | What it claims to be | A complete way to run a small or mid-sized company: planning, structure, numbers, meetings and problem solving under one vocabulary. | An execution method. FranklinCovey's page describes it as a simple, repeatable formula for executing your most important priorities, and does not present it as a way to run a business. | | Origin | Gino Wickman's Traction, 2007, written out of hands-on work with owner-managed firms, with a certification body built around it afterwards. | FranklinCovey. The book carries Chris McChesney, Scott Thele, Sean Covey and Beverly Walker as authors, and the publisher's page describes a second edition with more than thirty percent new content, without giving a year. | | The core idea in one line | Six things every business has to get right, whether or not it has names for them. | The urgent day-to-day work, which FranklinCovey calls the whirlwind, will beat any important goal unless you build four specific habits against it. | | The four or six named parts | Vision, people, data, issues, process and traction, worked in that order. | Focus on the Wildly Important, Act on the Lead Measures, Keep a Compelling Scoreboard, Create a Cadence of Accountability. The site groups them as focus, engagement and accountability disciplines. | | How many goals | Three to seven quarterly priorities across the leadership team, plus a weekly list of five to fifteen numbers that never expires. | As few as possible, and the discipline is named for it. The method pushes a team toward one or two goals it will not miss, on the argument that a longer list is the whirlwind winning again. | | The measurement idea | A weekly sheet mixing outcome numbers and activity numbers, one owner per row, read out loud in the same order each week. | A sharper version of the same instinct: separate what you can push on this week from the result you want, and put the first kind on the board where it drives behavior. | | Meetings | Ninety minutes of leadership time every week to a set running order, one planning day each quarter, and two days once a year. | A short weekly huddle for the team working the goal, in which each person commits to one or two actions and reports on last week's. Nothing is specified above that level. | | What it does not cover | Pricing, positioning and financial strategy. It gives you the discipline to work a market rather than a view on which market. | Almost everything an operating system covers: who sits in which seat, how the leadership team plans a year, what happens to a recurring problem nobody owns, how the company hires and reviews. It is a discipline, not a system. | | How you buy it | Independent implementers charging by the session, at reported 2026 rates that run from about $4,500 to about $6,600 depending on tier, or the books alone for under $200. | FranklinCovey sells work sessions in person and online, plus on-demand courses, consulting and coaching. No prices are published anywhere on the pages we checked in August 2026. | | Who has run it | EOS Worldwide publishes a public implementer directory and aims the system at privately held firms in a band running from about ten staff up to roughly 250. | FranklinCovey names Whirlpool, Marriott, DeKalb Medical Center and EoS Fitness among its case studies. It publishes no count of teams or organizations trained. | ## Where the comparison usually goes wrong The common error is treating this as a either-or purchase decision. 4DX is closer to a technique than a product, and a leadership team can adopt its best idea in an afternoon without buying anything. Two other errors follow from that: expecting 4DX to settle who owns what, and expecting a weekly number sheet to do the goal-narrowing work on its own. Start with the technique point. The most portable idea in the method is the split between the number you want to move and the number you can push on this week. A team that puts three of the second kind on its weekly sheet has taken the useful part, whatever it calls the practice. The second error shows up in companies that buy a work session hoping it fixes a leadership problem. It will not. If two people both believe they run sales, a goal-setting workshop just gives them something new to disagree about. That is an org-chart conversation, and no execution method contains one. The third is subtler and hits teams that already run a weekly rhythm well. A number sheet with fifteen healthy rows tells you the business is fine. It does not tell you which single thing this quarter is worth losing sleep over, and a team can read green rows for a year while the strategic move it agreed to in January never gets a full week of anyone's attention. That gap is exactly what the first discipline exists to close. - [Free tools](/tools): A meeting running order, a seat chart, and a way to draft your first number sheet. - [Picking an implementer](/how-to-choose-an-implementer): What to ask, what a good answer sounds like, and the replies that should end the call. - [EOS vs OKRs](/compare/eos-vs-okrs): The same operating-system-against-a-goal-format question, with the format most software companies reach for. ## Running both without making a mess Layering is the normal outcome and it is straightforward, because the two work at different altitudes. The operating system owns the leadership meeting and the quarterly plan. The execution discipline gets pointed at one priority that keeps slipping, usually inside a single department, with its own short weekly huddle underneath the leadership hour. The mechanics that make this work are dull. One priority, one team, one scoreboard the team can see without opening a laptop, and a huddle short enough that skipping it feels lazy rather than reasonable. The leadership meeting hears about it the way it hears about any other quarterly commitment, in one line, on track or not. What breaks it is running the huddle as a second leadership meeting. If the same seven people attend both, you have not added a discipline, you have added forty minutes. The point of the small huddle is that the people in it can change the number being read, which is rarely true of a leadership group. There is also a sequencing question worth answering honestly. A company with no weekly rhythm at all should not start here. Build the boring habit first, get three months of the same numbers read in the same order, then aim the sharper method at whichever priority the rhythm shows you keeps failing. The 4 Disciplines of Execution and the discipline names above belong to FranklinCovey Co. This site sells nothing for them and is not connected to EOS Worldwide. ## FAQ ### Is 4DX an operating system like EOS? No, and FranklinCovey does not describe it as one. Its own page presents the method as a formula for executing important priorities, checked August 2026. There is no component for how the company is structured, no annual planning format, no mechanism for a recurring problem that has no owner, and no guidance on hiring or reviews. Those gaps are not oversights. They are what tells you the method is meant to sit inside a way of working rather than to be one. ### What does 4DX cost? FranklinCovey publishes no prices on the 4DX pages we checked in August 2026. It sells the method as in-person and online work sessions, on-demand courses, consulting and coaching, and pricing appears to come from a sales conversation rather than a list. Treat any number you find elsewhere as one company's quote. If you only want the ideas, the book is the cheap route and gives you enough to try the technique on one goal. ### Can we borrow the lead measure idea without adopting the whole method? Yes, and most teams that get value from 4DX are doing exactly that. Take your quarterly priority, ask which weekly behavior has to happen for it to land, and put that behavior on the number sheet next to the outcome it is supposed to produce. You now get a signal in week two instead of week ten. Nothing about that requires a workshop, a license or a new vocabulary in the meeting. ### Our team already reads a weekly number sheet. Is there anything left to gain? Usually one thing: narrowing. A healthy weekly sheet is a maintenance instrument, and maintenance instruments are bad at forcing a choice. If your last three quarters ended with priorities that were technically alive but never got real hours, the discipline of picking one goal the team will not miss, and treating everything else as background, is the piece you are missing. The scoreboard and the huddle you already have. ## Not sure whether you need a system or a sharper habit? Describe the last priority that slipped and why you think it slipped. If the honest answer is that nobody owned it, we will say so. If it is that everyone owned it and the week ate it, we will say that instead. One reply from a person, within a business day. [Get a recommendation](/contact?reason=get_started) _Updated 2026-08-30_ --- # EOS vs System & Soul: how the two differ These two are closer relatives than any other pair on this site. System & Soul was started in 2021 by people who had been coaching EOS®, and its own about page says so. What it sells is a framework built around the same weekly discipline with a second half bolted on, the part it calls soul: culture, energy and whether the people running the plan still want to. Whether that second half is worth switching for is the whole question. ## The short answer, then the reasoning Stay where you are if the weekly meeting is doing its job and the complaint is vague. Look at System & Soul if the structure is running fine and the problem is the human half: a leadership team hitting its numbers while quietly checking out. It is a smaller network with far less published detail, so expect to judge it on the coach rather than on documentation. The company's about page dates the founding to March 2021 and names three founders, Benj Miller, Chris White and McKenzie Reeves Decker. The same page states plainly that Chris and Benj came out of coaching work in the Entrepreneurial Operating System, and that McKenzie had led a divisional team at Maxwell Leadership. That lineage is not something the company hides, and it explains why the weekly shape of the two will feel familiar to anyone crossing over. Its pitch is a contrast. The site claims to be the only business framework that combines the system and the soul to create breakthrough, and everything hangs off that split. The system half is what you would expect: rhythms, roles, tools and a weekly meeting guide. The soul half holds culture, engagement and the energy of the leadership group, with its own instruments. That is a real gap. The usual failure with any packaged system is not that the tools were wrong. It is that by month fourteen the meeting is a chore, the numbers are still green, and two of the seven people in the room have already decided to leave. Measuring that in the same week you read the numbers is a question the older toolkits leave to the facilitator. The reason to be careful is evidence. Almost nothing about the framework's structure is published. The pages we read in August 2026 name products and outcomes but give no component list, no meeting agenda, no price, and no size range. Compare that with a toolkit that sits in full inside a book you can buy for twenty dollars and judge before anyone quotes you. - [How EOS is put together](/what-is-eos): The six components, the tools under each one, and the order a team works them in. - [Budgeting for either](/cost): Reported session rates, a normal first year, and what changes if you self-implement. Caption: The two frameworks on what each organization publishes about itself. The System & Soul rows come from that company's home and about pages, read in August 2026. The EOS side draws on Traction and on our cost research. | Question | EOS | System & Soul | | --- | --- | --- | | Age and origin | Traction was published in 2007 and the training body grew around it, so the toolkit has had close to twenty years of teams breaking it in public. | Founded in March 2021, per its about page, by Benj Miller, Chris White and McKenzie Reeves Decker. Young enough that long-run evidence does not exist yet. | | Relationship between the two | The older of the pair, and the one the other defines itself against. | Stated on its own about page: Chris and Benj had their roots as business coaches in the Entrepreneurial Operating System. The company does not otherwise position itself as a replacement on the pages we read. | | The organizing claim | Six components every business has to strengthen, worked in a fixed order, with a named tool for each. | That a business has both a system and a soul and that most frameworks only address the first. The site calls itself the only business framework combining the two to create breakthrough. | | Named parts of the framework | All of it public: a two-page plan, a chart of seats, the weekly measures, the quarterly list, a running issues log and a fixed meeting order. | Not published on the pages we checked. The framework is described as covering rhythms, roles, tools and conversations, without a component list, a phase order or an agenda. | | Instruments it is known for | A weekly sheet of five to fifteen numbers and a two-page plan, both of which you can copy out of the book before you speak to anyone. | A Business Health Diagnostic, Winning Metrics, a Leadership Pulse and an Engagement Index, plus a meeting guide and a software product called S2 Sync. What each contains is not shown publicly. | | Books | Traction and a shelf of follow-ups, each sold openly and each containing the tools it describes. | The Clarity Field Guide, described as a guided journal for business leaders, and The System & Soul Business Growth Guide, subtitled Six Strategic Shifts for Businesses That Value People and Productivity. | | Size of the help network | Hundreds of certified implementers in the United States alone, listed in a public directory, so most metro areas have several to choose between. | Forty-six active business coaches in the United States and abroad, a figure the about page carried as of its most recent June 2025 entry. In most cities that means one candidate, not a shortlist. | | Published pricing | Nothing official, but reported 2026 session rates run from about $4,500 to about $6,600 depending on tier, which is enough to build a budget from. | None anywhere on the site, checked August 2026. Neither coach engagements nor the software carry a published figure, so a quote is the only way to find out. | | Where it is strongest | Getting accountability settled and making a weekly meeting produce decisions, with a deep bench of people who have done it many times. | The half most systems treat as the facilitator's problem: whether the leadership team is engaged, and whether the culture underneath the plan is holding. | | The main risk | A toolkit applied literally by someone who has run out of curiosity, which is a hiring problem rather than a design one. | Thin public evidence and a small roster. You are buying a specific coach's judgment more than a documented method, so the reference calls matter more than usual. | ## Where the comparison usually goes wrong Two mistakes dominate. The first is reading a shared lineage as proof that one is a copy of the other, which is neither fair nor useful. The second is switching frameworks to solve a problem that a different facilitator would have solved inside the one you already run. On lineage: people leaving a certification body to build something adjacent is ordinary in this field and says nothing about quality either way. Ask what the newer thing does that the older one does not. Here there is a real answer about measuring culture, and that answer is what deserves judging. The switching mistake costs more. A leadership team bored of its own meeting reads a new framework's site and feels relief, because fresh vocabulary is energizing for about six weeks. If the real problem is a facilitator who stopped pushing back, the new words buy you those six weeks and then you are in the same room. A third runs the other way. Some teams dismiss the soul framing as soft, then spend a year losing their best people while every row on the sheet stays green. Whatever you buy, a regular honest read on whether the leadership group is still committed belongs in the same meeting as the numbers. - [Templates to copy](/tools): Everything you need to start the rhythm yourself, with no coach and no license. - [Vetting whoever you hire](/how-to-choose-an-implementer): The reference questions that separate a facilitator with judgment from one reciting a deck. - [EOS vs Pinnacle](/compare/eos-vs-pinnacle): Another guide-led alternative, weighed on the same published-or-not standard. ## Moving between them, or borrowing one idea A move is unusually cheap here because the weekly shape survives it. Keep the number history, keep the quarterly priorities, and let the vocabulary change around them. Borrowing is cheaper still: add one recurring read on how the leadership group is actually doing, and you have the idea without the migration. If you do move, protect the numbers first. A year of the same rows read every week is the asset, and no framework change is worth restarting that history. Whatever the new sheet is called, carry the old rows onto it and reset targets only where the business has genuinely changed. The borrowing version takes ten minutes a month. Pick a few questions the leadership team answers honestly on a schedule, put the results beside the numbers in the same meeting, and treat a bad answer the way you treat a red row: something to solve, not something to note. One warning for anyone shortlisting from a network of forty-six people: availability rather than fit will decide it if you leave the search late. Ask for two references from companies your size before you weigh the framework at all. System & Soul, S2 Sync and the product names used above belong to System & Soul, Inc. We earn nothing from either organization named on this page. ## FAQ ### Was System & Soul founded by former EOS implementers? Its own about page says its founders came out of that world: Chris and Benj had their roots as business coaches in the Entrepreneurial Operating System, in the site's wording, checked August 2026. It does not describe them with any certification title, and we have not seen that claimed anywhere official, so the accurate version is that two of the three founders coached the older system before building this one. That is worth knowing mostly because it explains why the weekly rhythm feels familiar. ### What does System & Soul cost? No figure is published. We read the home and about pages in August 2026 and found no rate for coaching, no price for the S2 Sync software and no packaged program cost. That is not unusual for a coach-led framework, but it does mean a budget comparison has to come from quotes. Ask for the shape as well as the number: how many sessions, how long each one runs, what happens in year two, and whether the software is separate. ### Is the smaller coach network a problem? It is a real constraint rather than a verdict. Forty-six active coaches worldwide, the count on the about page as of its most recent June 2025 entry, means most cities have one option and some have none, so you may be choosing between a remote coach who fits and a local one who does not. Weigh that against a directory with hundreds of names where the risk runs the other way, and the work is filtering rather than finding. ### We run EOS well. Is there any reason to look at this? Only one, and it is narrow. If your numbers are green, your priorities land, and yet the leadership team has gone flat, the culture instrumentation is the piece being sold and it is not something the older toolkit contains. Before you switch, try the cheap version: run a short honest read on the team's engagement in the same meeting as the numbers for two quarters. If that fixes it, you saved a migration. If it does not, you now know what you are shopping for. ## Weighing a switch, or just restless? Tell us how long you have run your current rhythm, what still works, and what has gone flat. We will say whether this looks like a framework problem or a facilitator problem, and we will say so even when the answer is to change nothing. A person replies inside a business day. [Get a recommendation](/contact?reason=get_started) _Updated 2026-08-30_ --- # EOS vs OKRs: a system or a goal format One of these tells you how to run a company. The other tells you how to write down what you are trying to achieve this quarter. Teams put them head to head anyway, usually because a board member ran OKRs at a larger company and the founder has just finished Traction. Set out honestly, the two barely overlap, and the small patch where they do is the only place a real decision has to be made. ## The short answer, then the reasoning A goal format cannot answer who sits in which seat, what the leadership team does every Monday, or where a recurring problem goes to die. An operating system answers all three and treats goal-writing as a small part of the job. If you are choosing between them you are almost certainly comparing a whole thing against one of its parts. The goal format has real history behind it. What Matters, the site run alongside John Doerr's work on the subject, credits the method to Andy Grove at Intel and dates its arrival at Google to Doerr in 1999. It defines an objective as what is to be achieved and key results as the benchmarks that show you got there, with three to five of them typical, and it lists three different grading habits rather than one, including the percentage scale Google uses. Checked August 2026. None of that describes a company. It describes a sentence structure and a grading convention. Everything a leadership team argues about in its first year of trying to get organized sits outside the format: the two people who both think they own marketing, the issue that has been raised in nine consecutive meetings, the fact that nobody can say what the business is meant to look like in three years. EOS® takes the opposite approach. It starts from the claim that a company has a small number of parts that all have to work, gives each part a tool, and puts quarterly priorities in as one of them. The goal-writing is deliberately unfussy: a short list, one owner each, done or not done. There is no grading scale because grading a priority is not the bottleneck the system was built to clear. So the useful question is not which is better at goals. It is whether the thing you are missing is a better way to phrase ambition, or a way to run the room where ambition gets decided. - [What the system contains](/what-is-eos): Six parts, one named tool under each, and the sequence a team works through them. - [OKRs against KPIs](/blog/okr-vs-kpi): The narrower question of goals against health measures, and why most teams need both lists. Caption: An operating system and a goal format on the questions that actually separate them. OKR entries below are what whatmatters.com published as of August 2026. The EOS entries come from Traction and from what implementers charge. | Question | EOS | OKRs | | --- | --- | --- | | What kind of thing it is | A packaged way to run a company, with a tool for structure, planning, measurement, meetings and problem solving. | A goal-setting method. What Matters describes it as a collaborative approach to setting ambitious goals with measurable results, and claims nothing beyond that. | | Where it came from | Gino Wickman's Traction in 2007, written from work with owner-managed companies, with a certification network built afterwards. | Andy Grove at Intel, carried into Google by John Doerr in 1999, according to Doerr's own site. It is a public method with no owner, no license and no certification body. | | How a goal is written | A short sentence with a named owner and a finish line the team agrees before the quarter starts. No scoring scale. | An objective in words paired with three to five key results that benchmark progress, in the site's own framing, with grading conventions ranging from a plain yes or no to a percentage. | | How ambitious a goal should be | Achievable on purpose. The list is meant to be finished, and a quarter where most of it lands is the normal outcome rather than a sign of sandbagging. | Often deliberately out of reach, which is why grading exists at all. A team is expected to miss some of them, and the number it lands on is treated as information rather than failure. | | Who else in the company uses it | The leadership team first, then the same shape repeated one level down once the top of the house is steady. | Frequently the whole organization at once, which is where the format earns its reputation for administrative weight in companies too small for it. | | What it says about meetings | A fixed weekly hour and a half for the leadership team, planning days each quarter, two days a year, and a stated method for closing out problems. | Nothing binding. Quarterly cycles are the norm and reviews are encouraged, but the method leaves the meeting design entirely to you. | | What it says about structure | A chart of seats and owners, built from the work rather than the people, and a habit of putting the right person in each one. | Nothing. Ownership of a key result assumes an org chart the format does not help you draw. | | Ongoing health measures | A weekly sheet of numbers with one owner per row, read before priorities in the same meeting, separate from the quarterly list. | Not part of the format. Teams that only run this end up rebuilding a health list under some other name, usually after a quarter in which every goal was met and something broke anyway. | | What it costs to adopt | Free from the books, or roughly $4,500 to $6,600 a session with a certified implementer at 2026 reported rates. | Free. No license, no certification, and the reference material is widely published. Costs appear only if you buy software or a consultant. | | Best fit | A privately held company of roughly 10 to 250 people whose leadership team needs the whole set of habits, not one of them. | A company big enough that the people at the top have lost line of sight on the work, and disciplined enough to grade honestly rather than for show. | ## Where the comparison usually goes wrong The recurring error is category confusion, and it costs real months. A leadership team decides between a company-wide operating manual and a paragraph template, argues in circles because the two are not answering the same question, and puts off the weekly discipline that would have taught them more than the debate did. You can spot the confusion by what the argument is about. Whether goals should stretch or stay reachable is a genuine disagreement inside the format and worth an hour. Whether the format will fix a leadership meeting that is a round of updates is not: that asks a paragraph template to do a job it has no parts for. The second error runs the other way and hits companies that already have a system. Because quarterly priorities are deliberately plain, some teams write them as vague intentions and never say what finished looks like. That is the one thing the goal literature is better at, and borrowing it costs nothing: give every priority a written finish line, agreed in week zero. A third mistake is scale blindness. Grading, cascading and the tooling around them were designed for places where the top of the company cannot watch the work happen. In a firm of forty, that machinery adds ceremony without adding sight, and the team ends up maintaining a system instead of using one. Size is the variable most of these arguments are actually about. - [Templates and calculators](/tools): Free sheets for the meeting, the seats and the numbers, plus a cost estimator. - [Choosing help](/how-to-choose-an-implementer): How to test whether a facilitator will push back, and what to do when they will not. - [EOS vs 4DX](/compare/eos-vs-4dx): The other whole-system-against-one-technique comparison, this time with an execution discipline. ## Running both, and what to drop when you do Keep one quarterly list and one weekly meeting. If the goal format is already in use and people like it, let quarterly priorities be written in its shape and reviewed in the operating system's meeting. What you drop is the second review cycle, the second tool, and any grading ritual that produces a number nobody acts on. The blend that works is unglamorous. Priorities carry an ambition plus the two or three measures that prove it happened, they sit on the same page as everything else the leadership team carries, and they are read weekly as on track or not. Nobody logs into a second product to update a percentage. The blend that fails has a signature you can hear in a hallway: someone asking which of the two lists a piece of work belongs to. When that question is live you have two systems, and the team is spending its energy on routing. Pick the real list and let the other be a writing convention. Sequencing matters if you are starting from nothing. Build the weekly number habit first: it is cheapest, and it shows you which problems deserve a quarterly commitment. Add the goal machinery only once leadership has stopped seeing the work firsthand, which is the condition it was built for. The material on objectives and key results cited here is published by What Matters; we are affiliated with neither that organization nor EOS Worldwide. ## FAQ ### Are Rocks just OKRs with a different name? They do the same job and they are built to different tolerances. Both name a small number of things a team commits to for a quarter with someone accountable for each. The differences are that quarterly priorities are meant to be achievable and are read as done or not done, while the goal format expects a stretch and grades the shortfall. There is also no cascade in the operating system by default: the leadership team runs its list, and the layer below copies the pattern only once the top is steady. ### Can we keep our OKRs and still adopt an operating system? Yes, and it is common in companies where a board or an investor expects the goal format. Write the quarterly list in whatever shape your stakeholders read, then run it through the operating system's meeting rather than a second review process. The only thing worth insisting on is one list and one meeting. Two review cycles with two owners is how both end up stale, and it happens fast. ### Does the goal format handle weekly numbers? No, and that gap is the most common reason teams running it alone eventually go shopping. It is a format for change, so it has nothing to say about the ordinary measures that tell you the business is healthy this week. Teams notice the hole when a quarter closes with every goal met and something unrelated has been quietly deteriorating since week three. Our article on goals against health measures walks through where that line sits. ### We are forty people. Which should we start with? Start with the weekly discipline, whatever you call it. At that size the binding constraint is almost never the wording of your ambitions, it is that the leadership team has no reliable hour in which decisions get made and no shared picture of who owns what. Fix that and you will find your quarterly list improves on its own. Borrow the one habit worth borrowing from the goal literature, which is defining the finish line before the quarter starts, and skip the grading. ## Being told to run OKRs and not sure it fits? Send us the size of your company, who is asking for the format, and what your leadership team currently does every week. We will tell you whether the request is reasonable at your scale and what the cheapest honest version of it looks like. A person answers, usually the same day. [Get a recommendation](/contact?reason=get_started) _Updated 2026-08-30_ --- # Ninety vs Success.co: which EOS app fits Two products carry a license from EOS® Worldwide, and a leadership team shopping for the first time usually cannot tell them apart from the feature grids. The real split is philosophical. One of them has grown past the method it was built for and now serves several. The other has stayed deliberately narrow and treats the method as the specification. ## The short answer, then the reasoning Success.co is the closer fit if you want the software to follow the method exactly as the book describes it, and Ninety is the closer fit if you expect to drift from it or want the deepest free reference material behind the product. Price is not the deciding factor here. Both publish a free tier and a thirty day trial, and both cost less per person than one hour of implementer time. One disclosure before the detail: we may earn a referral fee if you sign up through our links, and our disclosure page has the full arrangement. It changes nothing about which product we name for which company, and no vendor reads a page here before it goes up. Ninety is the bigger of the two and the one most leadership teams have already heard of. Its pricing page, checked August 2026, lists four plans per user per month: a free plan at zero, then Essentials at $8.40, Accelerate at $9.80 and Thrive at $11.20, each of those shown against a higher regular price of $12, $14 and $16. The trial runs thirty days on the top plan. What matters more than the cents is that Ninety took a license from EOS Worldwide in 2023 and has since widened the product to support other operating systems as well, which is either reassuring or a warning sign depending on how you read it. Success.co went the other way. Its implementer page carries an official licensee badge and the phrase 100 percent EOS-Pure, and the company says the product was built with more than thirty implementers and refined by them. Nothing in the interface asks you to choose a framework, because there is only one. The free tier is generous by any standard: unlimited use of the vision organizer, the org chart and the organizational checkup, with no expiry attached. Where Success.co is harder to shop for is price. The paid plan is called All Inclusive and is charged per user, and the page names five team size bands running from one to twenty five up through two hundred fifty one to a thousand, with a note that your cost per user falls as the team grows. The dollar figures are not in the page. That is per-user pricing that falls with team size, and the exact figures are only shown in the app, checked August 2026, so treat any number you find on a blog as somebody's guess. - [Building a Scorecard](/kpis/eos-scorecard): Choosing the five to fifteen numbers worth reading out loud, and handling one that stays red for a month. - [What running the system costs](/cost): Session rates by tier and a realistic first year, so you can size the software line against the rest. Caption: Ninety and Success.co on what each vendor publishes about itself. Every row taken from the companies' own live pages, checked August 2026, with gaps written as gaps rather than filled in. | Question | Ninety | Success.co | | --- | --- | --- | | What it sets out to be | A platform organized around the six components of the method, now broadened to run other operating systems from the same account. | A single-method product. The company describes itself as EOS-Pure and offers no way to switch the vocabulary to another framework. | | Relationship to EOS Worldwide | Licensed since 2023, announced publicly at the time, with the license covering use of the official terms inside the product. | Carries an official licensee badge on its site and says the product was built with more than thirty implementers and refined by them. | | Free plan | Zero dollars per user, covering the V/TO®, the Accountability Chart™, assessments, the toolbox and read-only access to the knowledge portal. | Called Free Forever, covering unlimited use of the vision organizer, the org chart and the organizational checkup, with no time limit attached. | | Paid pricing | Three plans per user per month: $8.40, $9.80 and $11.20, each listed beside a higher regular price of $12, $14 and $16. | One plan, All Inclusive, priced per user in five team size bands from 1 to 25 up to 251 to 1,000. The dollar figures are not published on the page. | | Free trial | Thirty days on the top plan, no card asked for at signup. | Thirty days on the paid plan, no card asked for at signup. | | What the cheapest paid plan adds | The Level 10 Meeting™ agenda, weekly numbers, quarterly priorities, to-dos, the issues list, the mobile app and integrations. | Nothing to choose. There is one paid plan and it carries the whole product, which is where the name comes from. | | What the higher plans add | Insights and extra meeting types midway up, then an AI assistant, knowledge portal authoring, process documentation and API access at the top. | Not applicable. Single sign-on is $250 a month and directory sync another $250, and directory sync requires single sign-on first. | | Reference material outside the app | A public glossary running to roughly eighty five terms, a blog with a working feed, case studies, webinars and a help center, none of it gated. | A hub of long-form articles under named authors, help documents, free downloadable templates and an annual survey of implementers. | | What it offers implementers | A free partner program with a referral link, collateral and a revenue share whose rate the company does not publish. | A published 25 percent lifetime revenue share on introduced clients, or a 15 percent discount passed to the client instead, plus a free account for anyone with an eosworldwide.com address. | | Nonprofit pricing | Half price for registered 501(c)(3) organizations. | Half price for 501(c)(3) organizations or the local equivalent. | ## Where this comparison usually goes wrong Three errors show up over and over. Teams shop on the feature grid when the grids are nearly identical. They read the multi-framework question backwards, treating breadth as maturity or as dilution without asking which one their own company needs. And they buy in month one, before anyone knows what the weekly meeting actually looks like. Take the feature grid first. Both products model the same artifacts, because both are licensed to model the same artifacts. Put them side by side and you will find a handful of differences that matter to nobody in year one: how a meeting rating is captured, whether a headline is its own object, what becomes of a completed priority. Choosing on that is choosing on noise. The framework question deserves better thinking than it usually gets. If your leadership team is likely to keep the method for a decade, breadth buys you nothing and costs you a slightly busier interface. If you suspect you will borrow from elsewhere within two years, or you already run a goal format the method has no opinion about, a product that has been through that widening is the safer purchase. Neither answer is more grown up than the other. The timing error is the expensive one. Software is very good at making a badly designed weekly meeting look organized. A team that has never held the meeting on paper does not yet know which numbers belong on the sheet, which means it will fill the new tool with rows it abandons by March. Run it in a spreadsheet for a quarter, find out what you actually watch every Monday, then pay for something to hold it. Neither of these companies is EOS Worldwide, and a license does not make a product official in the sense buyers usually mean. This site has no connection to EOS Worldwide either. - [Ninety against Bloom Growth](/compare/ninety-vs-bloom-growth): The same question with the vendor that charges a flat monthly fee instead of a rate per seat. - [All five products at once](/compare/best-eos-software): The wider roundup, including the official product and the one that lives inside Microsoft Teams. - [Meeting and Scorecard templates](/tools): A running order and a first draft of a weekly number sheet, free and without an email form. ## Switching between them, and what moves with you Moving from one to the other is mostly a copy and paste job, because the artifacts are the same shape in both. The vision organizer, the org chart and the current quarter's priorities transfer in an afternoon. What does not transfer is history, and that is the only thing worth negotiating over before you commit. Meeting history, ratings and closed issues are the awkward part. Both products hold them, neither hands them to the other in a usable form, and a team that has run the rhythm for three years will feel the loss for about a month. If that record matters to you, ask each vendor what an export contains before you sign, in writing, and hold onto the answer. Running both at once is a mistake with one exception. Two sources of truth for a weekly number sheet means neither gets updated, and the meeting fills with reconciliation instead of decisions. The exception is a deliberate two week overlap while you migrate, with one product declared read-only from the start and a date on the calendar to turn it off. ## FAQ ### Which one is cheaper? Ninety is the one you can price without a sales conversation. Its three paid tiers are posted at $8.40, $9.80 and $11.20 for each user every month, checked August 2026. Success.co publishes team size bands but not the figures behind them, so the answer for your headcount is only visible once you are inside the product. For a team of ten either bill lands in the low hundreds a year, which is smaller than one implementer session. ### Does either one come from EOS Worldwide? No. Both hold a license, which is not the same as being the publisher's own product. If you specifically want software made by the organization behind the method, that is EOS One™, and it is covered in our roundup of all five products. A license means the vendor is allowed to use the official terminology, nothing more and nothing less. ### Is the multi-framework support in Ninety a problem for a purist team? In practice, no. The extra options sit out of the way and a team that never touches them will not notice. The reason it comes up at all is directional rather than functional: a product serving several methods has to make compromises none of them asked for, over years, and some buyers would rather back the vendor whose roadmap has only one audience. That is a bet on the future, not a complaint about today. ### Do we need software at all in the first year? No, and plenty of teams are better off without it. A shared spreadsheet holds the weekly numbers, a document holds the plan, and a recurring calendar invite holds the meeting. Software earns its place when the sheet stops updating itself, when someone brings the wrong version to the meeting, or when a second department starts running the same rhythm and the copies multiply. ## Want a straight recommendation for your headcount? Tell us the size of the leadership team, whether you have run a weekly number sheet before, and whether an implementer is already involved. We will say which of the two we would put in front of you, or that neither is worth paying for yet. A person replies inside one business day. [Ask for a recommendation](/contact?reason=kpi_help) _Updated 2026-08-30_ --- # Ninety vs Bloom Growth: seats or flat fee These two products model the same weekly rhythm and charge for it in opposite ways. One bills a small amount for every person you add. The other posts a flat monthly membership with unlimited seats. For a leadership team of six the first is far cheaper. The arithmetic turns somewhere between twenty and thirty people, depending on whether Ninety's discounted rate or its regular one applies, and past that point it turns hard. ## The short answer, then the reasoning Count the people you would actually give a login to, then do the multiplication before you read another feature list. Below about thirty seats at Ninety's discounted rate, or about twenty at its regular one, Ninety is the cheaper purchase by a wide margin. Above that the flat membership starts winning, and it keeps winning as more departments join. Everything else about this pairing is a smaller decision than that one. One disclosure first: we may earn a referral fee if you sign up through our links, and our disclosure page has the full arrangement. It has no effect on which product we point a given company toward, and no vendor sees a page here before publication. Ninety, checked August 2026, posts four plans charged for each person every month. The free plan is zero. The three paid plans are Essentials, Accelerate and Thrive, listed at $8.40, $9.80 and $11.20 against higher regular prices of $12, $14 and $16. The thirty day trial runs on the top plan and asks for no card. Registered nonprofits pay half. Bloom Growth prices the other way around. Its page, checked the same month, lists three memberships by the month rather than by the head: Core at $299, Scale at $499 and Flourish at $999, and it states unlimited user seats at every tier. A coaching add-on starts at $2,500 a month and puts one of the company's own coaches alongside the software. There are month to month plans with no long contract, and annual plans that lock the rate. Run the numbers on a real company. Ten seats on Ninety's middle plan is about $98 a month at the discounted $9.80, or $140 at the regular $14. Bloom Core is $299 either way. At forty seats it is roughly $392 against $299 discounted, and $560 against $299 at the regular rate. Which rate you get decides whether the crossover lands near thirty seats or near twenty, so read your own quote before trusting the round number. That last sentence is the whole strategic question hiding inside this comparison. Per-seat pricing quietly discourages you from inviting the department manager who would benefit most. A flat fee does not. Whether that matters depends on how far down the company you intend to push the meeting. - [Weekly numbers that earn their place](/kpis/eos-scorecard): How to choose the handful of measures a leadership team can actually act on each Monday. - [The six components](/what-is-eos): What the system asks of a leadership team before any software is involved at all. Caption: Ninety and Bloom Growth on their own published terms. Prices and claims read off each company's live pages in August 2026, with anything the pages leave out recorded as unpublished. | Question | Ninety | Bloom Growth | | --- | --- | --- | | How it charges | For every person with a login, every month, on a plan you pick from four. | A flat monthly membership with unlimited seats included, on a plan you pick from three. | | Published prices | Free at zero, then $8.40, $9.80 and $11.20 for each user each month, shown beside regular prices of $12, $14 and $16. | Core at $299 a month, Scale at $499 and Flourish at $999. Coaching can be bolted onto any tier from $2,500 a month. | | Where the cost crosses over | Cheaper for small leadership groups. About $98 a month at ten seats on the middle plan, or $140 if the regular rate applies rather than the discounted one. | Cheaper once headcount climbs. The same $299 covers ten people or eighty, so the per-head cost keeps falling. | | Free tier | Yes, and unusually complete: the vision organizer, the seat chart, the assessment tools and a read-only library, all free and with no expiry. | None published. The site offers a free trial of a membership rather than a plan you can sit on forever. | | Method it follows | Built around the six components and licensed since 2023, then widened so the same account can run other operating systems. | Describes itself as compatible with several systems and sells custom terminology on its top tier, so the vocabulary can be renamed. | | What the top tier buys | API access, custom assessments, an assistant that drafts summaries, and the right to author internal reference pages. | Renamed terminology, AI-generated insights and a priority success manager, on top of everything in the two lower memberships. | | Coaching | Not sold by the vendor. A separate partner program routes companies to independent coaches and implementers. | Sold directly as an add-on from $2,500 a month, with the coach positioned as an operational second pair of hands. | | What you can read without an account | A public glossary of roughly eighty five terms, plus articles, recorded sessions and support documents, none of it behind a form. | Marketing and product pages plus a blog. The company ran for years under an earlier name, so older material sits under that brand. | | Trial | Thirty days on the top plan with no card required. | A free membership trial is offered. The page does not state its length. | | Who it suits | A leadership group in single or low double digits that wants a small bill, plus a free plan to fall back on if budgets tighten. | A company past about thirty logins, or one that wants software and a coach on a single invoice. | ## Where this comparison usually goes wrong Buyers compare the headline numbers without deciding how many people will be inside the tool, which is the only input that matters. They also read unlimited seats as an invitation to give everyone a login, and they underrate what bundled coaching does to a decision that should stay independent. The seat count question is not really a budget question. It is a design question about how deep the rhythm goes. If the answer is the leadership team plus a couple of department heads, that is nine or ten people and the per-seat bill is trivial. If the answer is that every manager runs the same weekly meeting with their own team, you are at forty logins within a year and the flat fee looks obvious in hindsight. Unlimited does not mean everyone should be in there. A weekly number sheet with sixty spectators is worse than one with nine participants, because the people who own rows start writing for an audience instead of for the meeting. Give logins to people who own something on a page. The rest can be shown the outcome. Bundled coaching is the one to think hardest about. Buying the software and the coach from the same company is convenient and removes a procurement step. It also means the person telling you whether the system is working has a commercial interest in you keeping the subscription. That is not an accusation, it is a structural fact, and the usual answer is to keep the coach independent of the tool. Our page on choosing an implementer covers the questions that surface this. Neither vendor is EOS® Worldwide, and neither product makes an implementation succeed on its own. This site is not connected to EOS Worldwide either. - [Ninety against Success.co](/compare/ninety-vs-success-co): The other head to head: two licensed products, one broad and one deliberately narrow. - [All five products at once](/compare/best-eos-software): The roundup, covering the official product and the one built inside Microsoft Teams. - [Choosing an implementer](/how-to-choose-an-implementer): The questions to ask a coach, and the answers that should end the conversation early. ## Switching, and the point at which it is worth the disruption Most companies switch in one direction, from per-seat to flat, and they do it when the invoice crosses a line somebody notices. The move itself is a few hours of retyping. The argument for waiting is that a migration costs a month of meeting quality, and no team should pay that for a saving of a few hundred dollars a year. Set a trigger rather than agonizing. Something like: when the monthly software bill passes the flat membership by a third, we look again. Below that the saving is real but small, and the disruption of moving is not. Above it the gap compounds every time you add a person, and the case makes itself without a spreadsheet. The migration is unglamorous. Rebuild the plan and the org chart by hand, retype the quarter, then bring the last two months of weekly numbers so the sheet opens with a trend rather than a single reading. Older history goes into a spreadsheet nobody will look at, which is fine, because in practice nobody does. Running both is not a strategy. Two homes for the same weekly number sheet means the meeting turns into a reconciliation exercise, and the least diligent copy becomes the one people quote. Allow a short overlap while you move, declare one of them read-only on day one, and put the shutdown date in the calendar before you start. One thing that does not transfer either way is the habit. If the rhythm is shaky, changing tools will feel like progress for two weeks and then leave you exactly where you were, with a different invoice. ## FAQ ### At what headcount does Bloom Growth become the cheaper option? It depends which Ninety rate you are quoted, and the answer moves by ten seats. At the discounted $9.80 the crossover sits near thirty logins, where $294 a month meets Bloom Core's $299. At the regular $14 it arrives nearer twenty one, where $294 meets the same $299. Below the crossover the per-seat bill is smaller; above it the flat fee wins and the gap widens with every person you add. Both figures are the published August 2026 prices, and either company can reprice. ### Does Bloom Growth have a free plan? Its pricing page publishes no permanently free tier, only a free trial of a paid membership, and it does not state how long that trial runs. Ninety does publish a free plan at zero dollars, covering the vision organizer, the org chart and assessments with read-only access to its reference material. If a free fallback matters to you, that difference is decisive on its own. ### Is Bloom Growth still called Traction Tools? The company operated under that earlier name for years before rebranding, so older articles, screenshots and forum threads refer to it that way. The product line is the same one. It is worth knowing when you are searching for reviews, because a lot of the honest write-ups predate the current name and will not appear if you search the new one alone. ### Should we take the bundled coaching? Only if you have already decided you want a coach, and only after you have talked to at least one independent implementer for comparison. Bundling is convenient and the price is published, which is more than most coaching arrangements offer. The trade is that your adviser and your software vendor become the same company, which makes it harder to hear a straight answer about whether the tool is the problem. ## Not sure how many seats you will really need? Give us your current leadership headcount, say whether departments will run the same weekly meeting, and when you expect that rollout to begin. We will do the arithmetic with you and say which pricing model comes out ahead, including the case where you should stay on a spreadsheet another quarter. [Get the arithmetic done](/contact?reason=kpi_help) _Updated 2026-08-30_ --- # Best EOS software: five products compared Five products serve companies running EOS®, and they are more alike than any vendor would like you to believe. All five hold the same artifacts: a plan on two pages, a chart of seats, weekly numbers, quarterly priorities, an issues list and an agenda. What separates them is how they bill you, where they live, and how strictly they hold to the method as written. ## The short answer, then the reasoning There is no best product here, only a best fit, and it falls out of three questions. How many people will hold a login. Whether your company already lives inside Microsoft Teams. And whether you want a tool that holds the method rigidly or one that bends when your company does. Answer those three and the field usually narrows to one. A disclosure to get out of the way: we may earn a referral fee if you sign up through our links, and our disclosure page has the full arrangement. It does not change what appears on this page, nobody paid to be included, and no vendor read this before it went up. We give no scores and rank nothing, because a rank would hide the only thing that matters, which is the shape of your own company. Start with headcount, because it moves the bill more than any feature. Four of the five charge for every person you add. One charges a flat monthly membership with unlimited seats. Under about thirty logins at a discounted rate, or twenty at a regular one, the per-seat products are cheaper by a lot. Past that, the flat fee pulls ahead and keeps pulling. The third question is about the method itself. Two of these vendors hold a license from EOS Worldwide, one is the publisher's own product, and two are independent and openly serve other systems as well. A team that expects to keep the method for a decade should lean toward the strict end. A team that already borrows from elsewhere should lean the other way, and should not feel bad about it. - [Choosing the weekly numbers](/kpis/eos-scorecard): The step most teams skip: deciding what belongs on the sheet before anything holds it. - [What the whole thing costs](/cost): Implementer session rates and a realistic first year, so the software line sits in proportion. Caption: Five products and the option nobody sells you, on what each vendor publishes about itself. Prices and claims read off the companies' live pages in August 2026; anything a page leaves out is written here as unpublished. | Product | What it charges | Free tier | What sets it apart | Best fit | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Ninety | Four plans per user per month: free, then $8.40, $9.80 and $11.20, each listed against a higher regular price. Half price for nonprofits. | The most generous free plan here. It carries the V/TO®, the Accountability Chart™, the assessments and read access to the reference library. | The largest of the five, with the best free reference material anywhere: an ungated glossary of roughly eighty five terms. Licensed since 2023, then widened to run other systems. | A small leadership group wanting a modest invoice, a free plan to fall back on, and the best library to learn the method from. | | Success.co | A single paid plan called All Inclusive, priced by the head, with five brackets by team size and a lower rate per person in each larger one. Single sign-on and directory sync cost $250 a month apiece. | Yes. Free Forever covers the two-page plan, the seat chart and the checkup with no time limit and no seat limit. | The strictest of the five. An official licensee badge, the label EOS-Pure, and no setting anywhere to rename the vocabulary. Built with more than thirty implementers, it says. | A team that wants the software to be an argument-settler about how the method is supposed to work, with no options to drift. | | Bloom Growth | Three flat monthly memberships with unlimited seats: $299, $499 and $999. One of the company's coaches can be attached to any of them for $2,500 a month and up. | No permanent free plan published. A free trial of a membership is offered, and the page does not state its length. | The only one that stops charging as you grow, and the only one selling its own coaching alongside the software. Its top tier lets you rename the terminology. | A company past roughly thirty logins, or one that wants the tool and a coach on a single invoice. | | Strety | One rate per user per month: $13 in the United States, CA$15 in Canada, AU$15 in Australia. No free plan is listed. | None published. A thirty day trial runs without a card. | It runs inside Microsoft Teams as a native app with single sign-on, so the meeting happens where people already are. Slack appears among its listed integrations rather than as a second native home. | A Microsoft-centered company whose people will not reliably open one more browser tab. | | EOS One™ | The first user is free permanently, and every additional user is $10 a month. One product, no feature tiers and no add-ons. | Yes, in an unusual shape: a single seat that never expires, which suits a founder trying the tools out alone. | The publisher's own software, called on its site the official product for running the method, so it tracks the tools rather than interpreting them. | A team that wants no gap between what a coach teaches and what the screen shows, at one flat rate per seat with nothing to choose. | | A spreadsheet and a calendar invite | Nothing beyond what you already pay for. | Entirely, which is the point. | It holds the numbers and the plan perfectly well, and it makes the team decide what belongs there rather than filling in somebody else's fields. | Every company in its first few quarters, and plenty of small teams for good. | ## Which one for whom, in plain terms Six people and a tight budget: Ninety, or nothing at all yet. A team that wants the method held rigidly: Success.co. Past twenty to thirty logins, depending on the rate you are quoted: Bloom Growth. A company that runs on Microsoft Teams: Strety. A founder who wants the publisher's own tools with no interpretation: the official product from EOS Worldwide. The small and thrifty case is the most common one we see, and Ninety is the easy answer because you can start at zero. Put the plan and the seat chart in the free plan, keep the numbers in a sheet, and upgrade the month you tire of retyping them. The rigidity case matters more than it sounds. Some leadership teams argue endlessly about how the method is meant to work, usually because two people read the book and remember different halves. Software with no alternatives ends that argument. If your team has the habit, buy the strict one and let the interface referee. The scale case is arithmetic, not preference. Once managers below the leadership team run the same weekly meeting, logins multiply fast, and a flat membership stops the bill from tracking that rollout. The Microsoft case is about friction, nothing else. Adoption of a weekly rhythm fails on small obstacles, and one of the smallest and most lethal is a tool that lives somewhere people do not already have open. If your company is a Teams company, that single fact outweighs most of the feature differences on this page. - [Ninety against Success.co](/compare/ninety-vs-success-co): The two licensed products in detail: one broad and multi-method, one deliberately narrow. - [Ninety against Bloom Growth](/compare/ninety-vs-bloom-growth): Per-seat billing set against a flat membership, with the crossover point worked out. - [Templates before software](/tools): A meeting running order and a first draft number sheet, free and with no email form in the way. ## Where roundups like this usually mislead Scored lists are the main offender. A number out of ten implies the products differ far more than they do, and it hides the fact that the right answer swings on headcount and habit rather than features. Two other traps: buying in month one, and assuming a license makes a product official. On scores, consider what is being measured. Every one of these tools holds the same handful of artifacts, because the method has that handful. The genuine differences are billing model, host application and strictness, and none of those compress into a rating out of ten. This site sells none of these products and is not connected to EOS Worldwide. Where we earn a referral fee, the notice sits above the article rather than at the bottom. ## How to run a trial that tells you something Trial two products at most, at the same time, with the same real data, for three consecutive weekly meetings. Anything less than three meetings tests the setup screens rather than the tool. Anything more than two products means nobody finishes either one, and you end up choosing on the demo you remember best. Use live numbers, not sample data. Take whatever figures you already have, in whatever state, and load them into both. A sheet with history behaves differently from an empty one: trends appear, one row turns out to be impossible to maintain, and somebody discovers their number has no owner. Give accounts to the people who will use them, including the executive least interested in new software. That person is the real test. If they open it three weeks running without being chased, you have your answer. Finally, ask each vendor in writing what an export contains before the trial ends. Every product here holds your plan, your numbers and your meeting history, and the answer to that question is the difference between switching later in an afternoon and being stuck. Vendors answer it readily while you are still a prospect. ## FAQ ### Which product is the official one? The publisher's own software is the only one that can claim that, and its site describes it as the official product for running the method. Two others hold licenses, which permits them to use the official terminology inside their products but does not make them the publisher's software. The rest are independent and say so. Any vendor implying more than that is stretching the word. ### Do we need any of this software? Not at the start. One spreadsheet, one document and a repeating calendar entry will carry the whole rhythm through your first few quarters, and the constraint is useful: it forces the team to argue about which numbers belong on the sheet instead of filling in boxes a product designer chose. Pay for something once the manual copying starts costing more than the subscription. ### What does the software cost against everything else? Very little. Ten seats on a middle plan runs about $1,176 a year at Ninety's discounted rate and about $1,680 at its regular one, using the published August 2026 prices. A first year with an implementer runs into the tens of thousands. If a decision between two of these products is taking your leadership team more than one meeting, the time is worth more than the difference in the bill. ### Can we move our data if we change our minds later? The short artifacts do: retyping a two-page plan, a seat chart and one quarter of priorities is an afternoon of work. Carry across roughly two months of figures so the fresh sheet opens with a direction rather than one reading, and park the rest in a spreadsheet. What rarely survives is the record of past meetings, so put the export question to a salesperson while you are still a prospect. ## Want the shortlist cut down to one? Send us three things: the number of logins you expect, whether your company lives in Microsoft Teams, and how far along you are with a coach. We will name one product, explain the reasoning, and tell you if the honest answer is to wait another quarter. A person writes back within a business day. [Get the shortlist](/contact?reason=kpi_help) _Updated 2026-08-30_ --- # Level 10 Meeting: the weekly EOS meeting, explained The weekly leadership meeting most teams run has no shape, so it fills with reporting and ends with the same problems it started with. The Level 10 Meeting™ agenda fixes that with seven segments, fixed lengths, and an hour reserved for solving things. Below is that agenda minute by minute, what each segment is for, where teams lose control of it, and how to run the format without adopting anything else. ## What is on the agenda, and why ninety minutes? Seven segments in a fixed order, always the same length: five minutes of personal and business good news, five reading the Scorecard, five on quarterly Rocks, five for headlines about customers and staff, five checking last week's to-dos, sixty solving issues, and five to close. Ninety minutes in total, same day and time every week. The arithmetic is the whole argument. Twenty-five minutes of reporting, five minutes to close, and everything left over goes to problems. Most leadership meetings invert that ratio without meaning to, spending an hour on updates and the last ten minutes agreeing to discuss the real issue next week, which is how an issue survives a quarter. The lengths are not suggestions. A segment that runs long is stealing from the hour, and the hour is the only part of the meeting that changes anything. Whoever runs the meeting is really running a clock, and the most valuable sentence they say all week is that something is an issue and goes on the list. Caption: The weekly agenda, ninety minutes end to end | Segment | Minutes | What happens | | --- | --- | --- | | Segue | 5 | One personal and one business piece of good news from each person. It gets everyone talking and marks the start. | | Scorecard | 5 | Read each row, its goal, and on track or off track. Off-track rows go straight to the issues list without discussion. | | Rock review | 5 | Each quarterly priority is called on track or off track. Off track goes to the list, and nobody explains why here. | | Headlines | 5 | One-line news about customers and staff. Good or bad, no commentary. Anything needing a decision drops to the list. | | To-do list | 5 | Last week's commitments, done or not done. Roughly ninety percent should be done. Not done goes to the list. | | Issues | 60 | Work the list one item at a time, hardest first, until each one ends in a decision somebody owns. | | Conclude | 5 | Recap the new to-dos, decide what gets communicated to the rest of the company, and rate the meeting. | ## Run the meeting against a clock The timer below is our own version, not an official tool. It runs the seven fixed-length segments and shows the clock for the current one. If a segment runs long, the overrun turns red and keeps counting until you move on. Two buttons count issues raised and issues solved. At the end, you see minutes over by segment and issues raised against issues solved. Put it on the shared screen and have the person running the meeting press the buttons. It builds the habit the format depends on: when the clock ends a segment, anything unfinished goes on the list. After three or four weeks, the summary will usually point to the same segment running long. That is the issue to raise. Our version of a timer for the weekly leadership meeting. It runs the seven fixed-length segments, shows the current segment's clock and any time over, and counts issues raised and solved. At the end it reports minutes over per segment and the raised against solved count. Nothing is stored unless you email the summary to yourself. The segments: 1. Segue: 5 minutes 2. Scorecard: 5 minutes 3. Rock review: 5 minutes 4. Headlines: 5 minutes 5. To-do list: 5 minutes 6. Issues: 60 minutes 7. Conclude: 5 minutes ## What the meeting is not Teams treat it as a status meeting, a department meeting or a stage for whoever brought slides. It is none of those. The reporting segments are there to spot what is off, not to explain it. In five minutes on the Scorecard you can say a row is red and add it to the list. There is no room to hear why it went red. Teams that keep the old habit and bolt the agenda on top end up with a status meeting that has a timer running. The tell is easy to hear. If the loudest word in the first twenty-five minutes is why, the meeting has drifted. Why belongs in the hour, once the item is on the list and the whole team has agreed it is worth that hour. Each stray item already has a better home. Updates go into the shared doc or the channel people already read. Department business goes to that department's own weekly at its own level. A presentation, a new pricing model or a hiring plan worth forty minutes, gets its own booked session with the material sent out first, and whatever it needs decided comes back to the list. ## Who attends and who runs it The leadership team, one person per function, which for most companies lands between five and seven. One of them runs it, usually the Integrator™, the person who holds the day to day together. Someone keeps the clock and writes the list, sometimes the same person. A guest joins for the one item they are needed for, then leaves when it closes. Running the meeting means guarding the format, not chairing the discussion. The person on the clock says very little about the content and a lot about the time: that segment is over, that is an issue, put it on the list, we are eleven minutes into a five-minute item. Handing the role to whoever is most senior tends to produce the worst version of it, because the most senior person in the room usually has the most to say about everything in it. Be strict about guests. Keeping an operations manager in the room for the full ninety minutes so they can speak for twelve of them costs the company an hour and teaches everyone that attendance is decorative. Bring them in for their item, let them answer, send them back to work. If the same guest turns out to be needed most weeks, that says something about the shape of the leadership team, and it belongs on the list too. ## Why the first twenty-five minutes run on rails Because reporting expands to fill whatever time it is given. The four reporting segments are deliberately too short to discuss anything, which forces every problem they surface onto a list instead of into the room. For about three weeks that feels wrong. Then the team notices the change: issues are closing, and the same three have stopped coming back. The reading is the part teams find hardest to keep quiet through. A row comes up red, the owner starts explaining, and eight minutes disappear into a conversation two of the six people in the room needed to hear. The habit to build is a single word: the owner says off track, the facilitator writes the row on the list, and the board moves on. Segue looks like the soft segment and is the one to protect. Ninety seconds of unstructured chat before a meeting starts happens anyway, so putting it inside the agenda costs nothing and buys a room where people have already spoken before anyone has to disagree with someone. - [Scorecard](/glossary/scorecard): The weekly table read out in the second segment, one row per measure and one name against each. - [Rocks](/glossary/rocks): The handful of ninety-day priorities each person committed to, called on track or off track in this segment. - [To-do list](/glossary/to-do-list): Last week's commitments, seven days old at most, marked done or not done with no discussion. ## What the hour in the middle is actually for Working the issues list, one item at a time, hardest first. The team picks the top three by importance, takes the first, and stays on it until somebody has decided something or has committed to do something by a stated day. Nine issues touched and none closed is a worse hour than two issues finished. The three-step version this system uses is called IDS®: identify the real issue, discuss it once, then solve it. Identify is where most of the value sits, because the thing raised is usually a symptom. Late deliveries turn out to be a hiring problem, and the ten minutes spent finding that out saves the forty that would have gone on scheduling. Discuss means everyone says their piece once. The facilitator's job is to stop the second lap, where the same three positions get restated in different words. Solve means one person leaves holding one thing with a deadline on it, and that commitment lands on the to-do list where it will be read out next week whether it was done or not. - [IDS](/glossary/ids): Identify, discuss, solve: the three steps that turn an issue into a decision inside the meeting. - [Issues List](/glossary/issues-list): Where every problem waits its turn: the weekly list, the departmental ones, and the long-term parking lot. - [Meeting pulse](/glossary/meeting-pulse): Why the weekly rhythm matters more than the length, and what happens when a week gets skipped. ## The departmental version The same seven segments one level down, run by whoever owns that department. It reads that team's own numbers and works that team's own list, and it usually finishes faster because there are fewer rows. Anything the department cannot close by itself moves up to the leadership list, and anything the leadership team settles comes back down as context. The two levels avoid overlap by owning the issue, not the topic. An issue sits on one list at a time, held by the group that can actually close it. A shipping delay a warehouse team fixes by moving its cut-off time is theirs. The same delay caused by a supplier contract nobody in that room can renegotiate goes up. Watch for the same item being chewed over at both levels in one week, once on Monday and again on Thursday, ending in two decisions that contradict each other. Whoever runs the departmental meeting escalates out loud in the conclude segment: this one goes up, and you will hear what came back next week. ## How the meeting ends With three things in the last five minutes. Read back the new to-dos so every action has a name attached out loud. Agree what needs saying to the rest of the company and who says it. Then everyone rates the meeting out of ten, and anything below eight comes with one sentence about what would have made it better. The rating is the part people skip and the part that fixes the format. A team that scores itself honestly for a month will find its own problems faster than any advice from outside, because the low scores cluster: always the same segment overrunning, always the same person arriving with nothing ready. The cascading message matters more than it sounds. Half the damage a leadership meeting does is done in the hours afterward, when six people give six versions of a decision to their teams. Thirty seconds agreeing on one sentence prevents a week of quiet correction. ## Where the agenda breaks down Four ways, and all four are visible from the clock. The reporting segments overrun. The issues list is written during the meeting instead of over the week. The hour is spent on the easiest items because they close quickly. And the meeting is moved when somebody is busy, which teaches the team it is optional. Moving the meeting is the one that kills the habit outright. A weekly rhythm survives a bad week; it does not survive being rescheduled twice. Run it with whoever is in the room, and let the missing person read the notes. The easy-items problem is subtler. Closing six small issues feels productive. The expensive one stays at the top of the list for another month. Pick by importance and accept an hour that ends with a single decision. ## The first four weeks Rough, then better. Week one runs long because nobody has read numbers aloud to this room before. Week two the board is half empty. Week three the first hard issue arrives and the hour finally does its job. Week four the to-do list catches somebody out in public, and that is the week the format starts working. 1. **Week one: it runs long**: Expect a hundred and ten minutes and a segue that eats nine of them. Do not buy the time back from the issues hour. Stop each reporting segment on time, mid-sentence if it comes to that, and let the room feel the clock. One hard stop teaches more than a reminder in the calendar invite. 2. **Week two: the Scorecard is half empty**: Half the rows have no number yet because nobody owns the report, and reading blanks out loud is uncomfortable. Read them anyway. An empty row with a name against it becomes an issue, and most of them fill in by week four, which beats holding a separate meeting about measurement. 3. **Week three: the first real issue**: Something the team has avoided for months finally lands, and the whole hour goes on it. The meeting is doing its job. One decision somebody owns is worth more than six small items closed. Write it down in the words the team agreed, not in a tidier version drafted afterwards. 4. **Week four: the to-do list bites**: Last week's commitments get read out and two are not done, in front of everyone, with no explanation asked for. That is the week the meeting acquires teeth. Keep the tone flat and the question closed: done or not done. Not done goes on the list, and the reason, if it matters, is an issue. ## Running it remotely Video works when three rules hold. Cameras on for the whole ninety minutes, one shared document everybody can see, and the list edited live so the room watches items land on it. The segue is the segment that dies first on a call, so protect it. A facilitator willing to interrupt matters more than mute discipline. The shared document does the work a whiteboard does in a room. Put the numbers, the quarterly priorities, the to-dos and the issues list in one file, screen shared or open on a second monitor, and edit it while people talk. An issue that appears on screen as somebody names it gets argued about far less than one recalled from memory forty minutes later. Segue on video collapses into three people saying good week, nothing much, because nobody can read the room and nobody wants to go first. Ask each person by name in a fixed order and let the pauses sit. It costs the same five minutes it costs in an office and it buys the same thing: a team that has heard each other's voices before the first disagreement. ## Can you run this without the rest of the system? Yes, and plenty of teams do. The agenda needs two things to work: a weekly list of numbers to read and a written issues list that survives between meetings. Neither requires the rest of the toolkit. What you lose without the wider system is the connection between the issues and a quarterly plan that decides which of them matter. Printing the agenda and putting it on the wall is the cheapest version of adopting it. Seven lines, seven durations, and a facilitator willing to say that something belongs on the list. The rest of the tools this framework carries are worth reading about before you decide how much of it you want. In EOS® the meeting is called the Level 10 Meeting, and it sits with the Scorecard and the quarterly priorities as one of the parts teams adopt first. The name matters less than the structure. If you take the ninety-minute shape and nothing else, you will still have a better meeting next Tuesday than you had last Tuesday. _[Chart: The weekly meeting touches most of the six components. Process is the one it largely leaves alone]_ - [Every tool, one page each](/eos): Every tool the framework carries, what each is for, and the mistake teams make with it in year one. - [The weekly numbers](/kpis/eos-scorecard): How to build the board that gets read in the second segment, and what belongs on it. - [Level 10 Meeting](/glossary/level-10-meeting): The short definition, the seven segments, and what the ten in the name refers to. ## FAQ ### Why is the meeting ninety minutes rather than an hour? Because an hour does not leave enough room to solve anything once the reporting is done. Twenty-five minutes of reading and five to close are close to fixed costs whatever the length, so a sixty-minute version leaves half an hour for issues, and half an hour usually gets you one item and an argument. If ninety minutes is genuinely impossible for your leadership team, cut the number of rows read and protect the solving time, because the reporting is the part that can be caught up on by email. ### Who should be in the room? The people who own a function. By default, nobody else. In a 10-to-250-person company that is usually five to seven: sales, operations, finance, whoever runs the technical side, and the person holding the day to day together. The test is whether somebody owns a number and a set of quarterly priorities. Seniority does not decide it, and neither does how busy they are. Below five the format still works and takes less time. Above about ten it stops working, because the issues that matter to half the room are noise to the other half and the hour goes on explaining context. Two mistakes are common. One is inviting the next management layer so that nobody feels left out, which turns the issues hour into a briefing. The other is leaving out somebody who owns a Scorecard row, so their rows get read by a proxy who cannot answer for them. Departments that need their own version run the same format at their own level. ### What if there are no issues to solve this week? Then your issues list is not being kept properly, which is itself the issue. Every off-track Scorecard row, every off-track quarterly priority, every not-done to-do and every headline that needs a decision drops onto the list during the reporting segments, so a well-run meeting arrives at the hour with more items than it can close. A team that reaches the middle segment with an empty list is usually solving problems in corridors instead, where the decisions are invisible and get reversed. ### Does anyone take minutes? Not in the usual sense. What gets written down is the issues list as items are added, the decisions reached, and the new to-dos with a name and a date on each. That is enough, and it takes the facilitator no extra time because the same document is the agenda. Full minutes turn out to be a bad trade here: they take one person out of the discussion, and nobody reads them, whereas a to-do list read aloud next week gets acted on because the reading is public. ### Does a smaller team still need the full ninety minutes? Usually not. A team of four with six rows to read is often done in seventy minutes, and departmental meetings frequently run to sixty. The trap is squeezing the full agenda into an hour by stealing time from the solving segment. Reading the numbers costs about the same at any length, so the solving is what gets sacrificed, and the solving is the part that pays. Let the size of your list decide the length, not the calendar. ### What is the difference between a Level 10 and a departmental meeting? The level changes. The format does not. Both run the same seven segments in the same order for the same reasons. The leadership version reads company numbers and works issues that cross functions or need money. The departmental version reads that team's numbers and works what that team can close on its own. The two are joined by the escalation rule: an issue sits on one list only, held by the group that can decide it, and moves up when it turns out to be bigger than the room. Under about thirty people one meeting is usually enough. The second level earns its place once the leadership list fills with items only one department cares about. ## About to run your first one? Tell us who is on your leadership team, what numbers you already read every week, and when you plan to start. We will say which segments to hold firm on in the first month, what to expect in week two when half the board is blank, and whether anything needs to be in place before the first Tuesday. A person reads it and writes back, usually within a day. [Ask about running one](/contact?reason=get_started) _Updated 2026-09-06_ --- # Accountability Chart: EOS seats, roles and who fits An Accountability Chart™ looks almost exactly like an org chart on the page: boxes, lines, names. The difference is the order the boxes were filled in, and what the words inside them describe. An org chart records who reports to whom today. This one sets out what the company needs done, and by how many people, then asks who fits. Here is what changes for a leadership team that draws one. ## What is the difference in one sentence? An org chart records the structure you have, drawn from the people already in it. An Accountability Chart proposes the structure the company needs, drawn from the work, with names added last. Same shape on paper, but built from the other end. That reversal is what makes the second one uncomfortable to fill in, and it is where all of the value sits. The practical difference shows up in what a box contains. An org chart box holds a person and a job title. The other holds a seat and the three to five things it is answerable for, each written as an outcome. Duties do not appear. Anyone reading the page can tell whether the seat is being filled well. That sounds like a formatting preference until you draw it for a company that grew fast. Then two boxes turn out to hold the same accountability, one box holds nine, and a founder is quietly sitting in four of them. None of that is visible on a reporting diagram, because a reporting diagram was never asked the question. Caption: The same six questions, answered differently by each diagram | Question | Org chart | Accountability Chart | | --- | --- | --- | | What goes in a box? | A person and a job title | A seat and the three to five outcomes it owns | | What gets drawn first? | The people you currently employ | The work the company needs done | | What do the lines mean? | Who reports to whom | Who is answerable to whom for results | | Can one person hold two boxes? | Rarely, and it looks like a mistake | Yes, and it is normal in a small company | | What is it used for? | Payroll, onboarding, HR systems | Deciding whether the right person sits in each seat | | How often does it change? | When somebody joins or leaves | Redrawn every quarter, rewritten with the annual plan | ## Why the seats get drawn before the names Because putting names down first turns the exercise into a defense of the current arrangement. Once a leader sees their own box, every question about the structure reads as a question about them. Drawing the empty seats keeps the conversation on what the business needs for the next year, which is the only version of it a team can have honestly. The usual method is to work from the top down with no names visible: what are the three or four functions this company must perform to hit next year's plan, what does each one own, and what sits under it. Twenty minutes in, somebody will say that a seat on the diagram does not exist yet. That is what the team came to find. Adding the names afterward is a separate sitting, deliberately. By then the seats have been agreed on their merits, so the conversation about who fits stays on the person and the seat. Nobody has spent an hour arguing for a box because it happens to be theirs. ## The three seats every company starts with Two seats at the top, three under them. The Visionary owns direction, relationships and the ideas nobody asked for. The Integrator owns the day to day and holds the others to the plan. Underneath sit sales and marketing, operations, and finance. Five boxes, sometimes three in a company under twenty people, and that is a complete first draft. A first draft usually mirrors the company already in front of you: fifteen boxes, one for every manager, because leaving somebody off feels like a demotion. Hold that off for an afternoon. Five boxes force the harder question: what must the business do to hit next year's number? The answer is never fifteen things. Those three functional seats hold up across industries because the work does. Revenue has to come in. Sold work has to get delivered. The money has to stay straight. A software company calls the middle one engineering and a builder calls it operations, and the box does the same job in both. Add a fourth when a function is genuinely big enough to answer for its own results, not because a person deserves a box. ## Five roles to a seat A short outcome the seat is answerable for, clear enough to say out loud and call met or unmet without a side debate. Sales pipeline kept full. Jobs delivered on the date quoted. Cash collected inside terms. Three to five of those per seat. Activities do not qualify, because every activity can be performed diligently in a quarter where the outcome never arrived. Three to five per seat is the working range. Fewer than three usually means you have written down a task and called it a function. More than five and nobody can hold the list in their head, which defeats the purpose: the person in the seat and the person they answer to have to carry the same items. A useful test is to read an accountability out and ask what number would tell you it was being met. An obvious answer means that number probably belongs on the weekly board. No answer at all means the line has been written as an activity, and it needs rewriting before anyone is measured against it. The three seats below are ours, written the way a leadership team writes them on the day: outcomes in the company's own words, short enough to read aloud. Yours will use different nouns. What carries over is the shape, a result with a number somebody could point at. Caption: Three seats and the roles they own, written the way a team would write them | Seat | Roles (up to five) | | --- | --- | | Operations | Every job handed over on the date quoted. Margin held at the rate the job was priced at. Crews scheduled a week ahead. Subcontractors under contract before they start. Safety incidents at zero. | | Sales and marketing | Pipeline covering three months of capacity. Quota met each quarter. Price held without discount approval. Leads answered inside a day. Forecast accurate to within ten percent. | | Finance | Invoices settled inside agreed terms. Books closed by the tenth. Payroll and taxes filed on time. Variance against budget explained, not just reported. Bank and insurance relationships current. | When a seat grows a sixth line, ask what work that line really describes. Most often it belongs to a function that grew up without anyone giving it a name. An operations seat also carrying hiring, onboarding and the handbook is not one long list. It is operations, plus the first outline of a people seat. Draw that second box empty. Loading the first one further only hides what is happening. - [Accountability Chart](/glossary/accountability-chart): The short definition, how the seats are drawn, and what belongs inside a box. - [Weekly numbers](/kpis/eos-scorecard): How an accountability turns into a row somebody reads out and answers for every week. - [Right person, right seat](/glossary/right-person-right-seat): The two separate questions the diagram makes it possible to ask about a person. ## Draw a first draft here The builder below is our own version, not the official worksheet. It starts with the three functional seats. Add more, title each one, write up to five roles as outcomes, put a name in or leave the seat open, and choose which seat it answers to. A name in two seats gets flagged. Copy the draft as indented text or CSV. Fill in the titles and the roles before any names. That is the point of the exercise. Expect the argument to start at the fourth seat. If you cannot write three outcomes for a box, it is a task somebody does, not a seat, and it belongs inside another one. Take the finished draft into the quarterly session rather than treating it as the chart. A seats-first chart builder, our own version. Start with three seats at the top: sales and marketing, operations and finance. Add more, up to 8 seats in all. Each seat has a title, an optional name, and up to five roles stated as outcomes it owns. Put the same person in two seats and the tool flags it. One person can hold more than one seat, but a seat holds only one person. Copy the chart as indented text or CSV. Nothing leaves your browser unless you email it to yourself. ## One seat, one name, and the argument that follows Every seat gets exactly one name, and a person may hold several seats. That rule is where the first real disagreement happens, because co-leadership of a function is common in 10-to-250-person companies and the diagram will not represent it. Two names on a seat means a decision has two owners, which in practice means it has none. The founder usually holds three or four seats on the first draft, which is accurate and also the point. Seeing it drawn starts the conversation about which one gets handed over first. The honest answer is usually the seat they are worst at, which is seldom the one they enjoy least. Where two people genuinely share a function, split the accountabilities and leave the box alone. One owns new business, the other owns delivery. If the accountabilities cannot be split, the two of them are doing one job and the company has a harder conversation waiting for it. - [The GWC™ test](/glossary/gwc): Gets it, wants it, has the capacity to do it. All three have to be yes, seat by seat. - [Integrator™](/glossary/integrator): The seat that runs the day to day and holds the leadership team accountable to the plan. - [Visionary™](/glossary/visionary): The seat that owns direction, relationships and the ideas, which is rarely the same person. ## How a seat gets filled In this order: draw the seat, agree what it owns, then test a person against it. The test has three parts. Do they get it: the job makes sense without being explained twice. Do they still want it on a wet Tuesday in February? Can they carry it at the volume the seat now runs at? All three, or the answer is no. Order is the whole trick. Test a person against a seat nobody has written down, and the room argues about the person, the conversation everybody was avoiding in the first place. Test them against five written lines and you get an argument about the lines. That one can be settled. Which of the three fails tells you what happens next, and the answers are not interchangeable. Capacity often means hours, a tool, or one hire underneath. Of the three failures, it usually costs the least to fix. Getting it either shows up in the first few months or never does. Wanting it cannot be coached at all, and somebody who has quietly stopped wanting a seat will keep performing it competently for a year while the company slows down around them. - [Gets it, wants it, capacity](/glossary/gwc): The three-part seat test in full, what each letter rules out, and why two out of three is still a no. - [Right person, right seat](/glossary/right-person-right-seat): Two separate tests that get blurred into one word about attitude, and why each needs a different response. - [Core values](/glossary/core-values): The half of the question the seat test does not touch: whether somebody belongs in the company at all. ## One person in two seats One person may hold two seats. Two people may never hold one. Below thirty people the first is ordinary and worth writing down, because it creates a scheduling problem you can see coming. The second leaves a decision with nobody answerable for it. That kind of problem gives no warning at all. The asymmetry is not arbitrary. Somebody in two seats can be scheduled. They know which hat Thursday belongs to, and when the two collide, one person has to choose. A seat with two people in it has no such mechanism. The call goes to whoever cares more that week, and six months later nobody can say who was answerable for the result. ## When the reporting diagram is still the right tool For everything administrative. Payroll, approvals, onboarding, holiday cover and every HR system in the building run on reporting lines and always will. The two diagrams are not competing for the same job, and a company that deletes its org chart in favor of the other one has swapped a useful record for a planning tool. Most companies that use both keep the reporting diagram in the HR system, where it updates itself as people join and leave, and keep the seat diagram in the same place as the annual plan, where it gets reviewed when the plan is reviewed. Different documents, different update cycles, different questions. The one thing to avoid is maintaining two diagrams that disagree about who reports to whom without anyone noticing. If the seat diagram says one thing and the payroll system says another, somebody is being managed by two people, and that is worth finding out deliberately, before a difficult quarter finds it for you. ## What the chart looks like at 15 people and at 60 At fifteen, expect five boxes, three names, and a founder who appears in two or three of them. At sixty it is closer to a dozen boxes, one name each, with a second row under sales and under operations. The seats that arrive in between are the ones nobody owned at fifteen: hiring, scheduling, and whoever answers for the numbers. At fifteen people the page looks almost too simple to be worth drawing. Five seats, three names, one of those names in three boxes. Finance is a bookkeeper and the founder. Marketing is whoever has an hour. The value at this size is not the structure, which everyone in the room could already recite, but the lines written underneath each box. They are the first written statement of what the company expects of itself. At sixty the same page has grown a second row and lost its ambiguity. Sales has separated from marketing, because the two answer for different weekly numbers. Operations carries two or three seats beneath it, usually delivery, scheduling and quality. Finance is a controller with a real close date. Somewhere in there a seat appears that owns people work: hiring, onboarding, reviews, the handbook. That work existed at fifteen too. It was spread across three people who each did a quarter of it badly. ## How to draw a first version this week Take an hour with the leadership team and a blank page. Write the functions the company has to perform, then the outcomes each one owns, then what sits beneath it. Leave the names off until a second sitting. Expect the first draft to be wrong in two places, and expect one of those two to be a seat nobody is in. Draw it for the company you expect to be in twelve months. Not the one you are today, and not the one you hope to be in five years. A seat you will need next year is worth putting on the page empty. A seat for a division that does not exist yet is a distraction, and it will be redrawn before you get there. The leadership team draws this page on the Focus Day®, the first working session of an EOS® implementation, before the vision document gets finished across the two Vision Building® days that come after it. Implementers describe it as the hardest of the early sessions, which is a fair expectation to walk in with. The discomfort is the tool doing its job. _[Chart: Seats and the people in them are the component this diagram exists to work on]_ - [The other tools](/eos): What sits around this diagram: the vision document, the weekly board, the quarterly priorities and the rest. - [People Analyzer®](/glossary/people-analyzer): The grid that scores a person against your values once the seat itself has been agreed. - [What the system is](/what-is-eos): The six components and the meeting rhythm the diagram sits inside, in plain English. ## What changes at the quarterly Once a quarter the leadership team redraws the page from blank instead of editing it. A blank sheet takes twenty minutes and catches what an edit never will, because an edit defends whatever is already on the paper. Then every seat gets two questions: does this seat still match the work, and is the right person sitting in it? Redrawing sounds wasteful. It costs less than the alternative. Give one person a blank page and ten minutes to sketch the seats next quarter's plan needs, then set the old version beside it. Those differences become the agenda. An edit yields two tidy changes. A redraw turns up the box somebody has been carrying that nobody ever named. Keep the two questions apart, because their answers run in opposite directions. A seat that no longer matches the work gets rewritten, and nobody's job is on the table. A seat whose holder no longer fits is a conversation with a name attached, and it belongs in a private room. Teams that run the two together end up doing neither one honestly. - [The vision document](/eos/vision-traction-organizer): Eight boxes across two pages. It holds the number and the ninety-day priorities that the seats get redrawn against. - [Rocks](/glossary/rocks): The handful of priorities each seat commits to for the quarter, set once the seats are agreed. - [Leadership team](/glossary/leadership-team): Who is in the room when the page gets redrawn, and why that group is not simply the top row of the reporting diagram. ## FAQ ### Can one person really sit in more than one seat? Yes, and in a company under about thirty people it is unavoidable. The founder frequently holds the top seat plus sales plus whatever function has no leader yet. Writing that down is the useful part: three boxes with the same name in them is a picture of where the company will break first as it grows, and it turns a vague sense of being stretched into a specific list of things to hand over in a specific order. What does not work is two names in one box, which is a different problem entirely. ### Does this mean job titles no longer matter? Titles keep doing their external job. Customers, candidates and banks all read them, and nothing here asks you to give that up. What changes is that the title stops being the definition of the role internally. A person can carry a director title on a business card and be answerable for three specific outcomes on the diagram, and the two documents do not have to match word for word. Problems only start when the title is used to settle an argument the accountabilities should have settled. ### How often should the seats be redrawn? Every quarter, from a blank sheet. The leadership team sketches the seats next quarter's plan needs, sets the old page beside it, and works through the differences. Twenty minutes buys what an edit never will. Once a year, at the annual session, the page gets rewritten properly alongside the plan, and that is the version people are held to. Growth speeds all of this up. A company adding a third of its headcount will find that a seat one person could hold at twenty people needs two below it at forty, and that shows up between quarterlies rather than at year end. ### What if the diagram says somebody is in the wrong seat? That is the outcome the exercise exists to produce, and it does not mean the person leaves. Most of the time the honest answer is that a good person has been carrying a function they were never suited to because they were there when it needed doing. The options are a different seat, a smaller seat with the hard part moved elsewhere, or help. Making the call quickly is kinder than the alternative, which is leaving somebody to be quietly judged for a year against a list they never agreed to. ### How many seats should an Accountability Chart have? Usually fewer than teams expect. The count tracks headcount loosely. Fifteen people usually lands on five seats. Sixty people lands somewhere between ten and fourteen. Past a hundred the leadership page stops growing at roughly that dozen, and each of those seats grows a page of its own underneath instead. If your first draft has a box per manager, you have redrawn the reporting diagram with new labels. Cut back to the functions the business must perform to reach next year's plan, and let a second row appear only where one seat is plainly holding two jobs. ### Is the Accountability Chart the same as an org chart? No, although a photograph of the two would not separate them. What differs is the contents of a box and the order the boxes got filled. One holds a person and a title, and it was drawn from the people already on payroll. The other holds a seat and the handful of outcomes that seat answers for, and it was drawn from the work before a single name went in. Most companies keep both, on different update cycles, because payroll and approvals need reporting lines and always will. Deleting one in favor of the other is the mistake. ### Where do people who do not lead a function appear? They do not, and it catches teams out the first time. This is a leadership document, and it stops where accountabilities stop being company-wide. A ten-person crew shows up as a single seat, held by whoever answers for what that crew produces. A department that wants its own version draws one at its own level, same rules, its own outcomes. If somebody's absence from the page reads as a slight, say something early. The repair is one sentence of explanation, not an extra box. ## About to draw yours for the first time? Send us the functions your company has to perform and roughly how many people perform them. We will tell you how many seats a business your size usually lands on, which of them the founder is probably sitting in, and what is worth agreeing before the leadership team faces a blank page. You get a written reply from one of us, not a brochure. [Ask about your chart](/contact?reason=get_started) _Updated 2026-09-07_ --- # Vision/Traction Organizer (V/TO): the eight boxes The Vision/Traction Organizer, or V/TO®, is a two-page form with eight boxes on it. Five of them sit on the vision page, which settles where the company is going, who it sells to and what the place looks like three years out. The other three sit on the traction page and turn that into this year, this quarter and the list of things in the way. Below is what every box is really asking, the answer leadership teams fudge, and how the form gets filled in. ## What the form is for It is a strategic plan compressed until a leadership team can recite it. Eight questions, two sides of paper, no appendix. The point is not the document but the argument required to write it, because most teams discover halfway down page one that they have never agreed on who their customer is or what they refuse to sell. Strategy documents usually fail on distribution. The content is rarely the problem. Forty slides get built, presented once, and filed. Nobody below the leadership team can repeat a word of it by March, so it changes nothing about what anyone does on a Tuesday. Two pages with eight headings survive that test, because a person can hold eight answers in their head. The compression is the discipline. A box that fits three lines cannot hold hedging, so the leadership team has to pick. That is why the form takes a group two full days the first time and forty minutes a quarter after that. ## The eight boxes, one at a time Five on the vision page and three on the traction page. Core values, the core focus, a long-range target, the marketing strategy and a picture of the company three years out all set direction. The plan for this year, this quarter's priorities and the issues list turn that direction into dates. The table gives what each box asks and the mistake that shows up in it. Treat the table as eight questions worth arguing about. Teams that only fill in fields produce a document nobody uses. Every box has a wrong answer that looks perfectly reasonable on paper, and the wrong answers cluster: too many words, too many priorities, or a number nobody in the room believes. Caption: The eight sections in order: five on the vision page, then three on the traction page | Section | What the box asks | The usual mistake | | --- | --- | --- | | Core values | Which three to seven behaviors describe the people you would clone, and which you would fire someone over. | Writing the values you wish were true. Integrity and teamwork appear on every wall in the country and decide nothing. | | Core Focus™ | Why the company exists, and the one thing it does better than anyone in reach. | A sentence broad enough to cover any work that pays. If it does not rule out a real opportunity, it is not doing its job. | | 10-Year Target™ | One number and one date, far enough out to be uncomfortable. | A round figure picked because it sounds impressive. Nobody plans against it, so it becomes decoration on page one. | | Marketing strategy | Who the ideal customer is, the three things that make you different, the proven process every customer goes through, and what you guarantee. | Describing every buyer who has ever paid an invoice. A target market that excludes nobody gives the sales team nothing to aim at. | | Three-year picture | What the business looks and feels like on a specific date three years out, in about fifteen bullets. | Financial projections and nothing else. The useful version describes headcount, roles, customers and what the week feels like. | | One-year plan | Revenue, profit, a measurable or two, and three to seven goals for the next twelve months. | Fifteen goals, which is a wish list. If everything ships this year, nothing is being chosen over anything else. | | Rocks | The three to seven things that must be finished in the next ninety days, each with one owner. | Priorities without a finish line, so the quarterly review turns into a debate about what done was supposed to mean. | | Issues list | Everything blocking the plan, written down where it cannot be quietly forgotten. | Keeping it in someone's notebook. A list nobody reads out loud each week is a private worry. A queue gets worked. | ## Why the boxes are answered in order Because each answer narrows the next one. The values decide who stays, the focus decides what work is refused, and the long-range number fixes how big a company is being built. A team that jumps to this quarter's priorities first ends up with a list of good ideas that pull in four directions, which is the state most companies were already in. The dependency is easiest to see between the marketing box and the annual plan. A revenue goal written before anyone has agreed on the ideal customer is arithmetic without a route. Once the target market is named, the same goal becomes a countable number of accounts of a known size, and the sales conversation changes from optimism to capacity. Teams that already have a plan can still work the form in order. Put the existing answers in the boxes, then read them top to bottom and see which ones stop making sense next to the one above. - [Core values](/glossary/core-values): The handful of behaviors used for hiring, reviews and the occasional uncomfortable exit. - [Core focus](/glossary/core-focus): The purpose plus the one thing the company is genuinely best at, used to refuse work. - [The long-range target](/glossary/10-year-target): One number, one date, far enough out that the plan has to change to reach it. ## How the first two sessions fill it in Day one takes the top of the vision page: the core values, the core focus, the long-range number and the marketing strategy. Day two takes the picture three years out, the annual plan, this quarter's priorities and the issues in the way. The two days sit about a month apart. The marketing box is the one that usually ends day one unfinished. The order is not administrative. Until the room has agreed which behaviors it would let somebody go over, every later disagreement collapses into a judgment about a person. With that list written down, an argument about next year's number stays an argument about the number. The marketing box stalls because it is the only one that asks the team to give something up on Monday morning. A values list can be aspirational for a week and nobody notices. A named ideal customer is a set of accounts somebody stops calling, and there is usually a founder in the room with a fifteen-year relationship inside that set. Plenty of teams leave it open at the end of day one, spend the month before day two checking which customers pay well and on time, and close it then. The month between the sessions does real work. Everyone goes back to the business carrying half a vision, and that half gets tested against four ordinary weeks. More than one leadership team has arrived on day two having quietly revised its own focus statement, which is far easier before the annual plan has been built on top of it. ## The answers teams fudge Three boxes get soft answers more than the others. Values that describe who the company hopes to become, when the people already there are the evidence. A focus statement written wide enough to justify any invoice. And a target market so general that the sales team keeps calling everybody. All three feel productive to write and none of them changes a decision. The test for every soft answer is the same: name a real opportunity this rules out. If a values list would not have stopped a hire the company regretted, it is a poster. If the focus statement would not have turned down the project that ate last summer, it is a slogan. The uncomfortable version is worth the discomfort. One distributor found on day one that two owners had been selling to contractors while a third chased municipal work, and neither side had ever said it plainly. Naming it cost an afternoon and settled two years of quiet conflict. ## Fill in a rough first pass here This worksheet is ours, not the official form. It has eight boxes: five on the vision page, three on the traction page. Each one asks a plain-language question and keeps the answer short enough to block the wish list. Tick the box beside anything the room fudged. Copy the lot as markdown, or email it and a person here will read it. Use the fudge checkbox honestly. The worksheet's real job is to name the boxes the leadership team has to argue about in the next session. A draft with three fudged boxes is more useful than a clean one, because the clean one is usually the poster version described above. An eight-box worksheet for a company's vision and plan, our own version, not the official form. Each box has a plain-language prompt, a word limit, and a checkbox for marking an answer as fudged. The result copies out as markdown. Your answers stay in this browser unless you email the worksheet to yourself. The eight prompts: 1. What you stand for (30 words): Name three to seven behaviors you would hire for and fire over. Test each one against the people on payroll now, not the people you wish you had. 2. What you are for, and what you are best at (30 words): Write two sentences. First, say what the company exists to do. Second, name the one job you do better than anyone a customer could call instead. A good answer rules out work you could take and still get paid for. 3. The long-range target (15 words): Give one figure and one year, far enough out that today's plan will not get you there. 4. Who you sell to and how (60 words): Say which customer you want more of, what you do differently that a rival cannot copy by Friday, the path from first call to invoice, and the promise you will put in writing. 5. Three years out (100 words): Pick a date three years from now. Describe that morning: revenue, profit, one or two measurables, headcount, which roles exist, who the customers are, and what an ordinary week feels like. 6. This year (50 words): The numbers you will hit by this time next year, plus the goals that get you there. Three to seven of them. A longer list is a wish list. 7. This quarter (50 words): List what must be done in the next ninety days. Three to seven items, each with one name beside it and a finish line somebody else could check. 8. What is in the way (50 words): Every obstacle to the plan, one line each. Keep the list where the whole team sees it every week, not in one person's notebook. ## The vision page and the traction page Five boxes on the vision page: the values, the focus, a long-range number with a date, who you sell to, and a picture of the company three years out. Three on the traction page: the one-year plan, this quarter's priorities and the issues list. That split is a schedule as much as a layout. The vision page is meant to hold still for years. The traction page gets rewritten every ninety days. Print both after a year and the wear tells you which is which. The vision page still looks like the day it was written. The traction page is covered in crossings-out. Priorities turned over four times, and the issues list is built as a queue. That asymmetry is what makes the document survivable. A plan where everything gets renegotiated each quarter is not a plan. One where nothing ever moves is a poster with a border. Keeping the halves apart lets a leadership team change its mind about the next ninety days without reopening the question of what the company is for. When somebody proposes rewriting the focus statement in a quarterly session, the split is the argument against it: that box belongs to the annual, and one bad quarter is not enough to move it. ## The one-page versions teams pin up Most companies publish a cut-down version: the values, the focus, the long-range number, and this quarter's priorities with a name beside each. That fits on a wall and reads out at an all-hands in four minutes. The leadership document keeps the marketing strategy, the full three-year picture, the annual goals and the issues list. Say why those four stay back. Otherwise people assume anything withheld is bad news. The marketing strategy names competitors and prices and belongs where it can be argued about. The issues list reads as a catalog of everything wrong with the company to anyone who has not sat through a meeting where items get closed. The annual goals carry a revenue figure most owners would rather not hand to a competitor over a beer. The three-year picture is the odd one out, held back because it gets rewritten at the annual and a copy on the wall would be wrong within a year. The failure here is publishing the wall version and never the reasoning behind it. A poster with five values on it is the thing people quietly roll their eyes at. The same five, read out with the story of the bad hire they would have prevented, land differently, and that takes ninety seconds. If you pin up one thing, make it the quarter's priorities, each with an owner's name on it. That is the half anyone can act on this week. ## How a team actually fills one in Over two full days away from the office, about a month apart, with one person typing on a screen everyone can see and nobody presenting slides. Day one works down the vision page as far as the marketing strategy. Day two settles the picture three years out and builds the traction page: the annual plan, the quarter's priorities, and the issues. Then it gets reopened every ninety days. In this framework those two days are called Vision Building®, and they come after a first working session that fixes the meeting rhythm and the weekly numbers. The order matters less than the fact that the writing happens together and out loud. A form filled in by the founder over a weekend and circulated by email produces agreement in the reply chain and none in the building. What keeps it alive is the quarterly reread. Ninety days is short enough that the answers are still remembered and long enough for reality to have argued with two of them. _[Chart: The form does most of its work on the vision component, and feeds the data and traction ones]_ - [The three-year picture](/glossary/3-year-picture): Fifteen bullets describing a specific date, not a spreadsheet with growth built into it. - [The one-year plan](/glossary/1-year-plan): Revenue, profit and a short list of goals that the whole leadership team can name from memory. - [Rocks](/glossary/rocks): The ninety-day priorities the traction page cuts the annual goals down to, each owned by one person. ## How it feeds Rocks and the Scorecard Two cuts, both downward. The annual goals get divided into ninety-day priorities, so a goal for the year arrives as three or four things somebody finishes by a date. The numbers in the annual plan get divided into weekly ones, so a revenue target arrives on a board as calls booked and proposals sent. Nothing new is invented at either step. Test the join by working backwards. Take any priority on this quarter's list and ask which annual goal it moves. If that takes more than a sentence to explain, it is somebody's pet project that got onto the page late in the afternoon. Take any weekly number and ask the same thing. A number nobody can trace up to a goal is being counted out of habit. The link runs the other way too, which is the half teams miss. An annual goal that produced no priority in any of the four quarters was never a goal. It was a hope with a date on it, and it will still be sitting there next January in the same words. - [Rocks](/glossary/rocks): The three to seven priorities for the quarter, each with one owner and a finish line. - [The weekly Scorecard](/kpis/eos-scorecard): How a number in the annual plan turns into five to fifteen rows somebody reads out every week. - [The weekly meeting](/eos/level-10-meeting): Where those rows get read and the issues from the traction page get worked instead of admired. ## When it gets read again Four times a year at minimum. Every ninety days the leadership team reopens the traction page, closes out what shipped and sets the next handful of priorities. Once a year the whole document is read top to bottom and the annual plan is rewritten. The picture three years out moves forward a year in that same session. Rolling the picture forward is the step teams skip. Written once against a fixed date and never moved, it describes a company that gets closer every quarter without anybody deciding anything, and by the third year it reads as a forecast. Moving the date at the annual session forces the same argument again: is this still what we are building? A stale one has tells. The priorities on the traction page finished eighteen months ago. Four items sit on the issues list and every one of them is old. Nobody can say the long-range number without opening the file. The revenue goal on it is one the company passed or missed two years back. If finding the document means searching a shared drive, it has not been read in a while, and the honest move is to book the two days again. Tidying the boxes will not do it. ## Can you use the form on its own? Yes, and it is one of the easier pieces to borrow. Two pages, eight questions, and a leadership team willing to spend two days answering them. What you give up by taking only this is the machinery that keeps the answers honest: a quarterly session to revisit them and a weekly meeting where the issues box gets worked rather than admired. Blank templates circulate widely and the questions are not secret. The scarce part is the two days and the willingness to write down an answer somebody in the room disagrees with. A form completed in an hour to have one is worth less than no form at all, because it settles the question of whether the company has a plan without doing the work. In EOS® the form sits at the center of the vision component and gets reopened at every quarterly session. The rest of the toolkit is worth reading about before deciding how much of it you want, but nothing stops a team from starting with these eight boxes and adding the rest later. - [The full toolkit](/eos): The rest of the tools, one paragraph each, with the way a first-year team usually misuses them. - [The system in plain English](/what-is-eos): What the framework is, who it suits, and what a company signs up for when it adopts one. - [The rollout](/eos-process): The sessions in the first year, in the order they happen, and what comes out of each one. ## FAQ ### How long should it take to write the first one? Two full days, with about a month in between. Running them back to back sounds efficient, but it costs you the weeks where day one's answers get tested against a normal month. Day one covers the values, the focus, the long-range number and as much of the marketing strategy as the room can stand. Day two takes the picture three years out and the whole traction page. Teams that try to do the lot in a morning produce answers everyone can live with and nobody would defend, which is the failure worth avoiding. If two full days are impossible, four half-days across a couple of months works, provided nothing else is on those agendas. What does not work is filling it in asynchronously, because the value comes from the disagreements surfacing while everyone is in the room. ### Do we need a facilitator? Not strictly, but somebody has to run the clock and be willing to say that an answer is vague. That is difficult for anyone who also has a stake in the answer, which is why founders often find their own sessions drift. A capable internal facilitator who is not on the leadership team can do it. An outside implementer costs money and buys the ability to push back on the owner, which is the thing internal facilitators find hardest to do twice. ### How often does the document change? The bottom half changes every quarter by design, since the ninety-day priorities and the issues are meant to turn over. The annual plan gets rewritten once a year. The top half moves slowly: values get discovered more often than chosen, and a company that rewrites them twice in eighteen months has probably not found them yet. If the long-range target changes every year, the team wrote a forecast. ### Is there a V/TO template? The official form belongs to EOS Worldwide and comes with their materials, so there is no copy of it here. You do not need theirs to start. Every box is described on this page, and the eight headings in a shared document are enough for a first pass. The worksheet higher up this page is our version of that pass, with a word limit on each box and a checkbox for the answers the room fudged. Book the time before you go looking for a file. The questions are simple to read and hard to answer, so the form was never the constraint. For a cheap first pass, put the eight headings on a whiteboard, give each one twenty minutes with a timer, and mark the ones that produced an argument. Those are the boxes the two days are really for. ### How many pages is a V/TO? Two, and the number is the point. Five boxes on the front, three on the back. Teams whose version runs to five pages have usually written paragraphs where a box asks for three lines. The fix is not a bigger form. Read the long boxes out loud and cut whatever nobody in the room would defend. The one fair exception is the picture three years out, which runs to roughly fifteen bullets and does sometimes spill. Everything else fits, and a document a leadership team cannot recite has already lost the argument for being short. ### What if the plan changes in the middle of a quarter? Put it on the issues list and leave the priorities where they are until the ninety days are up. That is the discipline the bottom half exists to enforce, and it is the one most teams break in month two. A genuine emergency, such as a lost anchor customer or a funding round that fell through, earns an off-cycle session where the traction page gets redrawn deliberately with everyone present. Quietly swapping one priority for another because a good opportunity turned up is the version that does damage: after two of those, nobody can tell you what the quarter was for. ### We already have a business plan. Do we need this too? Probably not both. The test is whether anyone can recite the one you have. Bring the existing plan into the session and put its answers in the eight boxes. Most will fit, and the exercise becomes an edit, which moves far faster than a blank page. What tends to show up is a plan that is strong on numbers and thin on the two boxes that govern behavior: which people you would keep, and what work you refuse. If every box fills cleanly and the leadership team can already say the answers from memory, you have what this form produces and the form itself adds nothing. ## About to write your first one? Tell us how big your leadership team is, whether anyone in the room has run a session like this before, and which box you already expect to argue about. We will tell you how the two days usually go at your size, what to agree before you start, and whether a facilitator earns their fee on a first pass. A person reads it and replies, usually the same working day. [Ask about getting started](/contact?reason=get_started) _Updated 2026-09-07_ --- # The People Analyzer: scoring people against your values Most leadership teams write down a handful of core values and then never rate a single person against them, which leaves a manager with a nagging doubt about somebody and no words for it. This page covers the grid that fixes that: the three-point scale, the bar the room agrees before any name goes in, why the leaders get scored first, and what actually happens to the people who land under the line. ## What the People Analyzer is The People Analyzer® is a grid. Names run down the left, core values run across the top, and each cell gets one of three scores: plus, plus-minus or minus. The bar sits underneath, agreed by the room before a single name goes in. The grid does not produce a verdict. It produces the short list of conversations somebody has been avoiding. Names go down the left side and values go across the top. Five values and eleven people make fifty-five cells, usually about forty minutes of argument. Out of it comes a column of scores per person and a line across the sheet, with most names above it and, on a first run, one or two below. In EOS® it sits in the people component, next to the seat questions and the quarterly one-to-ones. Nothing stops a company from borrowing only this piece. What it needs first is a values list clear enough that you would let somebody go over one. Score people against three words nobody can define and you get a sheet of pluses and a wasted afternoon. The number worth reading is not any individual score but how many names sit under the line. One or two is normal the first time a company does this. If a third of the room falls underneath, the values probably describe an ambition. The people already in the building are the test, and the honest fix is to go back and rewrite the list. ## Agreeing the bar before anyone is scored The bar is the standard, and it gets set while the sheet is still blank. A common bar is a plus in every value with one plus-minus allowed. Set it afterward and the line will happen to save whoever you already like, which everybody can feel. Agree it first, and the scoring stops being a negotiation about individuals. A lower bar is not kinder. It is a statement about the values themselves. If a team decides two minuses are survivable, it has said out loud that two of its values are decorative. That finding belongs on the Issues List, not inside the bar. Some teams try to weight the values so the important ones count double. It rarely survives contact with a real sheet. Weighting is usually a way of admitting that two of the five were never values at all, and cutting the list is a cleaner answer than scoring it with arithmetic. Put the bar somewhere visible before the first name goes on the screen. Say it out loud too. Six months later, when a manager argues that somebody's second middle score does not really count, the line the room agreed in advance is the only thing that settles it. ## Why the leadership team scores itself first Start with the leaders, because a scoring tool aimed downward first becomes a weapon and everybody below can see it. They sit in one room, score each other on a screen, and read the numbers out loud. It is uncomfortable for about twenty minutes. That discomfort buys the right to ask a supervisor to do the same next quarter without being laughed at. Do it live. A survey collects the same numbers, but none of the argument. Each person scores the others privately for five minutes, then the sheet goes on the screen and the disagreements get worked one cell at a time. A founder who reads a middle score next to their own name and asks what it was about has done more for the tool's standing than any explanation of the method. This most often breaks at the founder. Plenty of leadership teams score everybody except the person who signs the checks, and the exercise quietly turns into the thing it was meant to prevent. If the owner will not be scored, run it anyway and be honest about what you now have: a management report, not a shared standard. ## Plus, plus-minus, minus, in our words Three scores are enough, and the middle one carries most of the weight. A plus means the person lives the value nearly all the time. A minus means they do not. The middle score means most of the time. It is where the useful conversations sit, because it names a pattern somebody can still change, not a verdict about who they are. Read the middle column as a frequency, not a grade. The question is never whether somebody is a good person. It is how often the behavior shows up when it is inconvenient, which is the only time a value costs anything. Caption: The three scores as we describe them, against a value about covering for other departments | Score | Means | Example | | --- | --- | --- | | Plus | Lives the value almost every time, including when it costs them something. | Takes the Saturday callout for the install crew during a bad week, and never brings it up afterward. | | Plus-minus | Lives it most of the time, and there is a visible pattern in the exceptions. | Covers for the two technicians they trained, but has never once offered the dispatch desk a hand. | | Minus | Does not live it, and the people nearby have started working around them. | Turned down three dispatch requests this quarter, each time citing a deadline that later moved. | Nobody scores a plus on every value every week. A sheet full of pluses means the room is being polite. On a first pass, expect the middle score to be the most common one on the page. ## Score your own team on the grid This is our version of the grid, not the official form. Set the bar first. Then type your values across the top, add people down the side, and score each cell plus, plus-minus or minus. The result column sorts people into Above the bar, Below the bar and Not fully scored. Copy the grid as CSV, or email it to yourself so someone here can read it too. Put it on a shared screen. Let one person type while the room argues about each cell. Start with the leadership team, for the reason the leadership section above gives. The two dropdowns come before the first score goes in, because once the names are up the bar gets easier to bend. A values grid, our own version. List up to 7 core values across the top and up to 12 names down the side, then score each cell plus, plus-minus or minus. Agree the bar before you score: how many plus-minus scores and how many minus scores a person can carry and still sit above it. The default is one plus-minus and no minus. The grid then names who is above the bar, below it or not fully scored yet, and it copies as CSV. We store nothing unless you email the result to yourself. ## Running it before a quarterly conversation The manager fills the grid in first, alone, and spends about ten minutes on it. Then the conversation starts, with the scores as the opener. Anything the manager cannot settle in that room, a seat that has outgrown the person or a value nobody can define, goes onto the Issues List and gets worked where it can be. Order matters more than length here. A manager who scores after the conversation is writing down an impression formed in the room, which records the meeting when the point was to check it. Scoring first forces the manager to commit to a view and then defend it to the person's face, which is the point of the exercise. Show the grid. A conversation about a rating the employee never sees is a conversation about a hunch, and people work that out fast. Put the row on the table, say which value produced the middle score and which two incidents you had in mind, then stop talking and let them answer. - [The Quarterly Conversation™](/glossary/quarterly-conversation): The short one-to-one every ninety days that the scoring is prepared for, and what belongs on its agenda. - [Core values](/glossary/core-values): How the handful of behaviors at the top of the grid get found, and the test for whether one is real. ## What happens below the bar Nobody is fired on the strength of a grid. Say that out loud at the start. What follows is a short series of honest conversations, usually a month apart, so the person has time to change something and the manager has time to notice. The first names the value and the last two times it went missing. The third is where it turns into a different conversation. The gap between the conversations is what separates this from a manager who has already decided and is now building a file. One week is too little time for anyone to prove a change. Wait a quarter and both sides have forgotten the first conversation. About a month is where most teams land, so three of them take a season. Say the stakes plainly the first time. People hear a gentle conversation as feedback and are then genuinely shocked at the third. The sentence that does the work is a dull one: this is about a value, here are the two times it went missing, and if it does not change we will be talking about whether this is the right place for you. It becomes a firing when the behavior has not moved and the manager has run out of new things to say. Fewer people end up there than most owners expect. In the ordinary case the person does not know, changes what they do, and by the following quarter the row reads differently without any of this being dramatic. Picture a commercial HVAC contractor. The name under the line is the service manager, and the value is covering for other departments: every request from dispatch that year turned down, each time for a reason that sounded fair on the day. The first conversation names the value and the two most recent refusals. By the second, a technician is going over to dispatch on Mondays. ## How it differs from GWC and from a performance review Three different questions that managers collapse into one word about attitude. The grid asks whether somebody fits how this company behaves. GWC™ asks whether they fit this particular seat: do they get it, want it, and have the capacity for it. A performance review asks what they produced last quarter. Values and seat fit come first, because output fixes neither. The practical difference is what each result tells you to do next. Values trouble usually ends in a leaving conversation, because nobody gets trained into caring about what a company cares about. A seat problem is often a move, and a good one: the same person in a different job for another six years. Keep all of it away from pay. The moment a score changes a bonus, everybody in the company learns to score for the bonus, and within two cycles the grid is full of pluses and tells you nothing. This is a conversation tool. Compensation belongs in its own process, with its own numbers. - [GWC](/glossary/gwc): The seat test that runs alongside the values scoring, and what a no on each letter means. - [Right person, right seat](/glossary/right-person-right-seat): The two-part question this grid answers half of, and why the halves need opposite responses. ## A caution This is a values tool, not documentation. The grid records one manager's judgment on one afternoon, in shorthand nobody outside the room can read. Keep it apart from the employment file, which needs dates, specifics and the employee's own account. We are not lawyers, and the rules where you operate are the ones that decide. A sheet of minus signs makes a poor exhibit and a good prompt. If a conversation is heading toward somebody leaving, write the record the way you would have written it without the grid: what happened, when, who was there, what was said, and what the person said back. The scores can inform that record. They cannot be the record. When the two get mixed together, it is usually because the grid was the first honest thing anybody had written down about a long-running problem. That is worth noticing on its own. It means the conversations were about a year overdue. The tool did not cause the problem. It only made it impossible to keep ignoring. ## FAQ ### What is the People Analyzer? A grid that scores everyone on a team against your core values, one cell per person per value: a plus, a plus-minus or a minus. The room agrees on a bar before any name goes in. A common one is a plus on every value with a single middle score allowed. It is described in Traction (Wickman), and in more managerial detail in How to Be a Great Boss (Wickman and Boer). The output is a short list of people under the line and the conversations that go with them. ### What is the bar? The line the room agrees before scoring starts. A common bar is a plus on every value with one middle score tolerated, which sounds strict until you remember that the middle score already means most of the time. Set it while the sheet is blank. A bar chosen after the numbers are up is a bar chosen to protect whoever sits under it, and the rest of the company will read it exactly that way. ### Who gets scored first? The leadership team, on itself, in the room. That order is not a courtesy. It is the only thing that stops the grid becoming something managers do to their staff, and it is the first question a skeptical employee asks. If the owner has not been scored, expect the tool to be treated as a threat wherever it goes next, however carefully anyone introduces it. ### How often is it run? Once a quarter for most teams, ahead of the one-to-ones, with a fuller pass at the annual session. More often than that and nothing has changed between readings, so the scores stop carrying information. Less often and a problem gets a year to settle in. Some teams also run it on a single department when a manager is stuck, which is a fair use of an afternoon. ### Is it a performance review? No, and keeping the two apart is what makes it work. A review looks at what somebody produced. This looks at how they behave when the behavior costs them something, which is a separate question with a separate answer. Tie it to pay and it is ruined inside two cycles, because everybody learns to score for the money and the sheet fills up with pluses. ### Can an employee see their score? They should. A conversation about a rating somebody is not allowed to look at is worse than no conversation at all, and people work out that it happened anyway. Show the row, name the value that produced the middle score, give the two incidents you had in mind, and let them answer. Teams that keep the sheet private are usually protecting the full team grid, which is a fair line to draw. One person's own row is a different matter. ## Thinking about running one? Tell us how many people are on your leadership team, whether your values are written down, and whether anybody has ever been rated against them. We will tell you how a first pass usually goes at your size, what to settle before you start, and which implementers near you have run the session more than once. Someone reads every message and usually answers the same working day. [Find someone who has run one](/contact?reason=find_implementer) _Updated 2026-09-07_