The Five Numbers: Metrics Behind Every $100K Month
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 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 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.
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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 five first. 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 10-12)
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.
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
Apply The System (Premium)
You’ve seen how the Five Numbers Framework works.
The Premium Toolkit gives you the templates and frameworks to implement it in under 90 minutes. Included in your $12/month Premium access—one lunch for a framework that can save $20K-$50K in wasted metric tracking time.
The Five Numbers System (160-page PDF)
Complete five-number diagnostic — Calculate lead flow (count qualification actions monthly), conversion rate (clients ÷ leads × 100), transaction value (revenue ÷ clients), retention (average months or repurchase %), capacity utilization (current ÷ maximum × 100)
Constraint identification matrix — Decision tree reveals bottleneck in under 10 minutes (capacity 85%+ = capacity constraint, retention <8 months = retention constraint, transaction value 20%+ below market = pricing constraint, conversion 8+ points below benchmark = conversion constraint, lead flow below minimum = lead flow constraint)
90-day target setting framework — Realistic improvement ranges by constraint type (lead flow +15-25%, conversion +6-12 points, transaction value +20-30%, retention +25-40%, capacity +25-40%), prevents unrealistic targets that create discouragement
Calculation worksheets for each number — Pre-built templates with formulas (lead flow tracking, conversion rate calculator, transaction value worksheet, retention measurement for ongoing vs one-time, capacity utilization assessment), includes filled examples showing exactly how to use them
Five constraint-specific playbooks — Lead flow improvement (15 tactics), conversion rate improvement (18 tactics), transaction value improvement (12 tactics), retention improvement (12 methods), capacity expansion (covered via cross-reference), each tactic includes when to use, implementation steps, expected results, and time to see impact
Before/after tracking template — Document baseline and 90-day results, calculate revenue impact, record what worked and what didn’t, identify new constraints after improvement
30-day tracking dashboard — Simple one-page weekly tracker (10 minutes to update), monitors constraint movement, flags when tactics aren’t working, includes tactic performance assessment
One-page monthly tracker — Minimal maintenance system (10 minutes monthly), tracks all five numbers, identifies new constraints as they shift, year-over-year comparison built in
Implementation checklist — Week 0 foundation setup (calculate baseline, identify constraint, select tactics), weeks 1-2 implementation phase, weeks 3-4 early signal monitoring, weeks 5-8 validation and pivot protocol, weeks 9-12 final push and new constraint identification, ongoing monthly and quarterly maintenance
Troubleshooting guide — 10 common problems with diagnostic questions and solutions (constraint not moving after 4 weeks, other numbers breaking, hit target early, too busy to implement, negative reactions, tactics worked but can’t maintain, market changes mid-cycle)
3 complete case studies — Course creator $108K→$149K fixing conversion (22%→31% in 90 days), agency $94K→$121K fixing transaction value ($5,200→$10,200 average), service business $102K→$122K fixing retention (5.8→8.2 months), each shows baseline, constraint identification, tactics used, week-by-week results, what worked and what failed
Resources and formulas reference — Core revenue formula, all five number calculations, benchmark ranges by business model, minimum lead flow calculator, opportunity cost calculation, constraint gap math, lifetime value increase from retention, quick reference card
Inside the System Audio (19 minutes)
Real case: Online educator at $98K with 89 leads monthly at 22% conversion, identified conversion constraint 10 points below 32% benchmark, rebuilt sales page with outcome focus, added case study video, implemented cohort caps for urgency, conversion improved to 31% in 6 weeks, revenue $108K→$149K in 90 days
The 3 tracking mistakes — Tracking derivatives instead of drivers (pipeline value doesn’t reveal which input broke), no constraint identification system (can’t tell which number to fix first costs $20K-$50K monthly in wasted effort), tracking daily when monthly is enough (390 hours yearly watching numbers that don’t change fast enough)
Five-number calculation walkthrough — Lead flow counts qualification actions only (not traffic or subscribers), conversion rate formula (clients ÷ leads × 100), transaction value (revenue ÷ clients or monthly fee × tenure), retention (average months or repurchase rate %), capacity utilization (current ÷ maximum), why these five and nothing else
Constraint identification in 10 minutes — Decision matrix sequence (check capacity 85%+, then retention <8 months or <50%, then transaction value 20%+ below market, then conversion 8+ points below benchmark, then lead flow below minimum), gap between current and possible reveals bottleneck worth $20K-$50K monthly
Implementation Checklist
Week 0 foundation (2-3 hours): Calculate five numbers from the last 90 days using diagnostic worksheets, identify constraints using a decision matrix, set a 90-day target within realistic ranges, select 2-3 tactics from the constraint playbook, set up a tracking dashboard, and block implementation time on the calendar
Weeks 1-2 implementation (10-15 hours): Deploy all selected tactics (lead flow: add channel or double down on best source, conversion: rebuild sales page and add proof, transaction value: research market rates and restructure pricing, retention: redesign onboarding and increase touch points, capacity: delegate or systematize), document what you did and time invested
Weeks 3-4 early signals (30 min weekly): Track constraint number weekly, check for directional movement, review if other numbers breaking, identify if tactics working or need pivot by week 4
Weeks 5-8 validation (30 min weekly): Calculate 4-week average, compare to 90-day target, double down on best-performing tactic, pivot by week 6 if no movement, optimize based on what’s working
Weeks 9-12 final push (1 hour): Record final 90-day performance vs target, calculate revenue impact, document what worked and failed, recalculate all five numbers, identify new constraint for next cycle
Ongoing maintenance: Update five numbers monthly (10 min), quarterly baseline recalculation (30 min), annual transformation review
Build-it-yourself cost: 8-12 hours researching metrics, building calculators, designing dashboards, testing tracking systems
Premium cost: Included in your $12/month subscription
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