The Five Numbers: The Metrics Behind Every $100K Month for $80K–$100K Operators
Most founders at $100K aren’t failing from lack of data—they’re drowning in metrics that don’t matter while ignoring the five that do. Here’s what to track and why everything else is noise.
The Executive Summary
$100K-month founders risk wasting 9+ work weeks a year on dashboards that don’t change decisions; tracking just five core numbers turns noise into a clear, repeatable path to $150K+ months.
Who this is for: Founders and operators around $95K–$115K/month who track 15–25 metrics, spend 7.5 hours weekly in dashboards, and still can’t say which lever will add the next $20K–$40K in monthly revenue.
The Dashboard Problem: One online educator at $98K/month tracked 23 metrics and spent 390 hours yearly reviewing data, yet stayed flat for 7 months—and a service business at $104K/month lost $18K while hunting through 17 metrics to spot a simple conversion drop from 42% to 31%.
What you’ll learn: You’ll learn the Five Numbers Framework—Lead Flow, Conversion Rate, Average Transaction Value, Client Retention, and Delivery Capacity—plus the three-move process to calculate your last 90 days, find your single constraint, and set a 15–35% 90-day improvement target.
What changes if you apply it: You replace metric overload with a one-page dashboard, free 7+ hours weekly from analysis loops, and make focused moves like raising prices from $5,200 to $7,500 or lifting conversion from 22% to 31%, creating jumps such as $94K → $121K or $108K → $149K in 90 days without more leads.
Time to implement: It takes 3–4 hours one time to calculate your five numbers and build the tracker, then 10–30 minutes monthly to maintain it—freeing 364+ hours a year and typically unlocking $20K–$50K/month by fixing the real constraint instead of optimizing vanity metrics.
Written by Nour Boustani for $95K–$115K/month founders and operators who want $150K+ revenue decisions from five numbers—not 23, not 17—without spending 9 work weeks a year staring at dashboards that don’t move the needle.
Most founders at $100K aren’t failing from lack of data—they’re failing from tracking the wrong metrics. Upgrade to premium and run your business on the five numbers that actually move $150K+.
The Dashboard Problem
You hit $100K/month. Revenue’s strong. Business runs.
You open your dashboard. Seventeen metrics stare back.
Traffic.
Engagement rate.
Email opens.
Click-through rate.
Social followers.
Cost per lead.
Lead velocity.
Pipeline value.
Close rate.
Average deal size.
Client lifetime value.
Churn rate.
Monthly recurring revenue.
Cash reserves.
Profit margin.
Team utilization.
Customer satisfaction score.
Seventeen numbers. Which one needs attention today?
You don’t know. So you check them all. Then check again tomorrow. And the next day.
An online educator at $98K/month tracked twenty-three different metrics. Built custom dashboards.
Spent 90 minutes daily reviewing data.
Always informed.
Rarely acted.
The math: 90 minutes daily = 7.5 hours weekly = 390 hours yearly = 9.75 work weeks, looking at numbers that don’t change decisions.
Revenue stayed flat at $98K for seven months. Not from lack of information. From information overload masking as insight.
Here’s what she missed: at $100K/month, only five numbers actually matter. Everything else is derivative (calculated from those five) or a distraction (interesting but not actionable).
The shift to $150K doesn’t come from tracking more metrics. It comes from tracking the right five and ignoring everything else.
The Pattern at $100K
Across 42 businesses audited at $95K-$115K monthly, here’s what shows up:
The metric collector: Founder tracks 15-25 metrics, reviews dashboards daily, but can’t identify which number to improve first. Analysis paralysis disguised as data-driven decision-making.
The vanity tracker: Founder watches follower count, engagement rate, and email list size climb while revenue stays flat. Feel-good metrics that don’t connect to money.
The gut operator: Founder ignores all metrics, makes decisions by feel, then wonders why growth stalled. Flying blind and calling it intuition.
All three patterns share the same outcome: revenue plateaus because the founder doesn’t know which lever to pull.
A service business at $104K/month spent three weeks “analyzing why growth stalled.”
Built spreadsheets. Compared quarters. Studied trends.
The actual issue: lead-to-client conversion dropped from 42% to 31%. That’s it. That one number explained everything.
But it took three weeks to find because it was buried in seventeen other metrics that looked fine. By the time he identified it, $18K in potential revenue had leaked through the gap.
The cost of wrong metrics: time spent analyzing noise instead of fixing the signal.
Here’s what fixes it.
The Five Numbers Framework
At $100K/month, your entire revenue engine runs on five metrics. Not seventeen. Not twenty-three. Five.
Track these. Ignore everything else (or delegate someone else to watch it).
Number 1: Lead Flow
How many qualified leads entered your business this month?Number 2: Conversion Rate
What percentage of leads became paying clients?Number 3: Average Transaction Value
What’s the average amount a client pays?Number 4: Client Retention
How many months does an average client stay?Number 5: Delivery Capacity
How many clients can you serve excellently this month?
Everything else—traffic, followers, engagement, email opens—either feeds into these five or doesn’t matter.
Here’s why these five: they’re the only numbers you can directly improve through action, and each one mathematically drives revenue.
Revenue = Lead Flow × Conversion Rate × Transaction Value × (Retention impact on LTV)
Constrained by = Delivery Capacity
Change any of the five, and revenue changes predictably. Change anything else, maybe revenue moves, maybe it doesn’t.
Let’s see how this works in practice.
Move 1: Identify Your Current Five
Before you can optimize the five numbers, you need to know what they actually are right now.
Most founders guess. Guesses are wrong 70% of the time.
Calculate each number for the last 90 days:
Lead Flow:
Count every person who took a qualification step (booked a call, filled an application, requested a proposal, joined a waitlist). Not website visitors. Not email subscribers. Qualified leads.
Conversion Rate:
Paying clients ÷ Qualified leads × 100
Average Transaction Value:
Total revenue ÷ Number of transactions (or new clients)
Client Retention:
Average months a client stays (for ongoing services) or repurchase rate (for one-time offers)
Delivery Capacity:
The maximum clients you can serve excellently without a quality drop
A coaching business at $112K/month calculated her five:
Lead Flow: 87 leads over 90 days (from discovery calls + application fills)
Conversion Rate: 24 clients ÷ 87 leads = 27.6%
Average Transaction Value: $336K revenue (90 days) ÷ 24 clients = $14,000 per client
Client Retention: Average client stays 11 months
Delivery Capacity: Can serve 32 active clients excellently (currently at 29)
Now she had her baseline. Five numbers. Complete picture of revenue engine.
Before this, she tracked 19 metrics and couldn’t identify why growth slowed. After this, she knew exactly where leverage lived.
The pattern: most founders at $100K know their revenue number but don’t know the five inputs that create it. You can’t optimize what you can’t measure.
Calculate your first five. Actual numbers, not estimates.
Move 2: Find Your Constraint
Once you know the five numbers, one of them is your constraint—the bottleneck limiting next-level revenue.
The constraint isn’t the worst number. It’s the number with the biggest gap between current and possible.
Use this framework:
Lead Flow constraint: You’re converting well, pricing well, retaining well, but not enough leads enter the system.
Conversion constraint: Plenty of leads, but too few become clients.
Transaction Value constraint: High lead flow, good conversion, but pricing is below market or offer structure caps revenue.
Retention constraint: Clients come in but don’t stay long enough or don’t buy again.
Capacity constraint: All other numbers are strong, but you physically can’t serve more clients without a quality drop.
An agency owner at $94K/month identified his constraint:
Lead Flow: 142 leads (90 days) - Strong
Conversion Rate: 38% - Strong
Average Transaction Value: $5,200 per project - Below market (competitors at $7,500-$9,000)
Client Retention: 68% repurchase within 12 months - Strong
Delivery Capacity: Can serve 15 concurrent projects (currently at 11) - Room to grow
Constraint: Transaction Value. If he raised prices to $7,500 (still below top competitors), revenue would jump from $94K to $135K monthly without changing anything else.
The math: 54 clients yearly (current) × $7,500 (new price) = $405K yearly, about $33,750 monthly (with existing client mix pushing totals higher).
He raised prices in two weeks. Three months later: $94K → $121K monthly (not quite $135K because some clients were on the old pricing, but still a 29% increase).
Here’s the edge case: “What if I have two constraints?”
You probably don’t. One number is usually the obvious bottleneck. But if genuinely tied, fix the one with faster implementation time first. Conversion rate fixes (better sales process) happen faster than lead flow fixes (build new channel).
Find your constraint. That’s where your next $20K-$40K monthly lives.
Move 3: Set a 90-Day Target
Once you know your constraint, set one specific target for 90 days. Not five targets. One.
Most founders try to improve all five simultaneously. Diffused effort, minimal results.
The focus rule: improve your constraint by 15-35% in 90 days while maintaining the other four.
If Lead Flow is constrained:
Target: Increase from X leads/month to 1.2X leads/month (20% increase)
How: Add one new lead source or double down on the best existing channel
If Conversion is constrained:
Target: Increase from X% to X+8-12% (e.g., 28% → 36%)
How: Fix sales process, improve qualification, strengthen positioning
If Transaction Value is constrained:
Target: Increase from $X to $1.25X (25% increase)
How: Repricing, offer restructuring, or value-add bundling
If Retention is constrained:
Target: Increase average stay from X months to X+2 months or repurchase from X% to X+15%
How: Fix delivery experience, add continuation offers, implement retention system
If Capacity is constrained:
Target: Increase from X clients to 1.3X clients without quality drop
How: Delegation, systems, or team expansion (covered in Articles 10,11,12)
A course creator at $108K/month set her target:
Constraint: Conversion Rate (currently 22%, market average 32%)
90-Day Target: Increase to 30% (8-point improvement)
How: Rebuild sales page, add case study video, implement urgency mechanism
Implementation took 6 weeks (within protected fence time from Article 15). New conversion rate: 31%.
Revenue math:
Before: 89 leads monthly × 22% = 19.6 clients × $5,500 = $107,800
After: 89 leads monthly × 31% = 27.6 clients × $5,500 = $151,800
Revenue jumped $108K → $149K monthly in 90 days. Same lead flow. Same offer. Better conversion.
The pattern: focused improvement on one constraint beats diffused effort on five metrics. Always.
Set your 90-day target on your constraint. Ignore the other four unless they break.
The Hidden Leverage in Retention
Here’s what most founders at $100K miss: retention is the only number that compounds over time.
Lead flow is linear. You get X leads this month, you get X leads next month (roughly).
Conversion is linear. You close Y% this month, you close Y% next month (roughly).
Retention multiplies everything backward. Keep clients 1 month longer on average, and every past client acquisition becomes more valuable.
A service business calculated her retention impact:
Current: Average client stays 6 months at $8,000 monthly
Lifetime value: 6 × $8,000 = $48,000 per client
She improved retention from 6 months to 8 months (33% increase):
New lifetime value: 8 × $8,000 = $64,000 per client
Impact: Every client she ever acquired became worth $16,000 more. Retroactive value creation.
With 42 clients yearly, that’s 42 × $16,000 = $672,000 in additional lifetime revenue from the same lead flow and conversion rate.
Retention improvements take 3-6 months to show in revenue (because you’re extending existing clients), but once they compound, they never stop paying.
If your retention is below 8 months (services) or 50% repurchase (one-time offers), fix it before optimizing anything else. It’s the only number that makes everything else work harder.
What Most Dashboards Hide
Here’s why tracking seventeen metrics fails: most of them are derivatives, not drivers.
Email open rate? Doesn’t matter if leads don’t convert.
Social followers? Doesn’t matter if they don’t become leads.
Website traffic? Doesn’t matter if visitors don’t qualify.
Pipeline value? That’s just lead flow × average deal size × estimated close rate—three numbers you already have.
Profit margin? Matters, but it’s revenue minus costs—you already know revenue.
Strip away derivatives and vanity metrics, you’re left with the five that actually move the business.
A consultant went from 22 tracked metrics to 5 and described the shift: “Before, I felt informed but paralyzed. Now I feel focused and clear. Revenue followed clarity.”
The rule: if a metric doesn’t directly connect to one of the five numbers, stop tracking it. Or delegate someone else to watch it while you focus on the five.
At $100K/month, your time is worth $250-$350/hour. Spending 90 minutes daily reviewing irrelevant metrics costs $375-$525 per day = $7,500-$10,500 per month in opportunity cost.
That’s enough to hire someone to manage the other metrics while you focus on leverage.
What Changes and What It Costs
Moving from dashboard overload to the five-number system requires two shifts:
Shift 1: Calculate Your Five
Pull 90 days of data. Calculate lead flow, conversion, transaction value, retention, and capacity. Takes 2-3 hours one-time, 30 minutes monthly to update.
Shift 2: Build Simple Tracker
Create a one-page dashboard with only five numbers. Update weekly or monthly (not daily). Takes 45 minutes to build, 10 minutes monthly to maintain.
Total setup: 3-4 hours, one-time investment.
Weekly maintenance: 10 minutes (vs. 7.5 hours reviewing bloated dashboards).
Time saved: 7+ hours weekly = 364+ hours yearly = 9+ work weeks of redirected focus.
For a founder at $100K/month, that redirected focus typically unlocks $20K-$50K monthly within 90 days by targeting the actual constraint instead of optimizing noise.
One founder’s feedback after 60 days: “I thought tracking fewer metrics would make me less informed. Instead, it made me more decisive. Revenue moved because I finally knew which number to fix.”
Your Turn
Calculate your five numbers for the last 90 days. Not estimates—actual numbers from your business.
Identify your constraint. Which of the five has the biggest gap between current and possible?
Set one 90-day target on your constraint. Improve it by 15-35% while maintaining the other four.
The shift from metric overload to focused tracking typically shows measurable impact within 4-6 weeks: faster decisions, clearer priorities, accelerated revenue growth.
Up Next: The 3% Lever
Next article covers “The 3% Lever: Tiny Shifts That 10X Revenue Over 12 Months.” I will show you how small improvements in each of your five numbers create exponential results.
FAQ: Five Numbers $100K Metrics System
Q: How does the Five Numbers Framework turn $95K–$115K months into $150K+ without more dashboards?
A: It replaces 15–25 metrics with five core numbers, frees 7.5 hours weekly from analysis loops, and focuses moves like raising prices from $5,200 to $7,500 or lifting conversion from 22% to 31%, creating jumps such as $94K → $121K or $108K → $149K in 90 days.
Q: How do I calculate my five numbers for the last 90 days before changing anything?
A: Pull actual data to compute qualified Lead Flow, Conversion Rate, Average Transaction Value, Client Retention, and Delivery Capacity—using totals like 87 leads, 24 clients, $336K revenue, and 32 active-client capacity instead of guesses that are wrong 70% of the time.
Q: How do I use the Five Numbers Framework with its constraint step before setting new revenue goals?
A: After calculating the five, identify which has the biggest gap—for example Transaction Value stuck at $5,200 vs peers at $7,500–$9,000 or Conversion sliding from 42% to 31%—then make that single constraint the focus of your next 90 days rather than trying to improve all five at once.
Q: What happens if I keep tracking 17–23 metrics instead of just the five that drive $150K+?
A: You repeat patterns like a $98K/month educator spending 390 hours yearly and 9.75 work weeks in dashboards while revenue stays flat for seven months, or a $104K/month service business taking three weeks to notice conversion dropped from 42% to 31%, leaking $18K before acting.
Q: How much time and decision clarity do I gain by switching to a one-page five-number dashboard?
A: Setup takes 3–4 hours once and 10–30 minutes monthly to maintain, which frees over 364 hours per year compared to 90 minutes daily of metric reviews and gives you a single-page view where one constraint—like lead flow or retention—clearly tells you what to fix next.
Q: How do I know whether my constraint is lead flow, conversion, transaction value, retention, or capacity at around $100K/month?
A: Compare your current numbers against what’s possible—like 142 leads and 38% conversion being strong but $5,200 pricing lagging behind $7,500–$9,000 competitors, or an 11‑month retention and 32‑client capacity being solid while conversion at 22% clearly underperforms a 32% market average.
Q: How do I set a 90-day target using the Five Numbers Framework so my next $20K–$40K is realistic?
A: Choose a 15–35% improvement for your constraint, such as raising conversion from 22% to 30% or transaction value by 25%, then design one focused project—like rebuilding a sales page or repricing offers—that can be done in 6 weeks and measured over the next 90 days.
Q: What happens to revenue when I improve only conversion while keeping leads and pricing the same?
A: As shown with 89 leads monthly and price at $5,500, moving conversion from 22% to 31% lifted results from about 19.6 to 27.6 clients and shifted revenue from $107,800 to $151,800, turning a $108K → $149K monthly jump in 90 days without buying more traffic.
Q: How does improving client retention by a couple of months change my business compared to focusing only on new leads?
A: Extending average stay from 6 to 8 months at $8,000 monthly raises lifetime value from $48,000 to $64,000 per client, so with 42 clients yearly you add $672,000 in total LTV—value that compounds across past and future clients without increasing lead flow.
Q: What happens if I never simplify my metrics and keep operating from either gut feel or vanity dashboards?
A: You stay stuck in patterns where follower counts, engagement, and open rates look good but don’t translate into money, decisions drag for weeks, and opportunity costs pile up at $7,500–$10,500 per month in founder time that could have been used to move a single number that actually drives revenue.
Navigate The Clear Edge OS
Start here: The Complete Clear Edge OS — Your roadmap from $5K to $150K with a 60-second constraint diagnostic.
Use daily: The Clear Edge Daily OS — Daily checklists, actions, and habits for all 26 systems.
LAYER 1: SIGNAL (What to Optimize)
The Signal Grid • The Bottleneck Audit • The Five Numbers
LAYER 2: EXECUTION (How to Optimize)
The Momentum Formula • The One-Build System • The Revenue Multiplier • The Repeatable Sale • Delivery That Sells • The 3% Lever • The Offer Stack • The Next Ceiling
LAYER 3: CAPACITY (Who Optimizes)
The Delegation Map • The Quality Transfer • The 30-Hour Week • The Exit-Ready Business • The Designer Shift
LAYER 4: TIME (When to Optimize)
Focus That Pays • The Time Fence
LAYER 5: ENERGY (How to Sustain)
The Founder Fuel System • $100K Without Burnout
INTEGRATION & MASTERY
The Founder’s OS • The Quarterly Wealth Reset
AMPLIFICATION (AI & Automation)
The Automation Audit • The Automation Stack
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What this prevents: Burning 9.75 work weeks and leaking $18K–$672K by drowning in 17–23 metrics instead of five.
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