Your board pack is probably lying to you. And you wrote it. Here’s what’s really in those numbers, and why the “so what?” question is the most important one you’re not asking.
There’s a moment most founders recognise, even if they’ve never said it out loud.
It’s the night before the board meeting. You open last month’s pack, possibly for the first time, move the numbers forward, tweak a few lines, and tell yourself you’ll do it properly next time. When there’s more time. When things have settled down.
The pack goes out. The meeting happens. Everyone says they’ve been too busy to deal with the actions they forgot to read. Someone around the table asks what sounds like a probing question. You can usually tell when it’s been rehearsed, there’s a slight pause when you ask what they mean, and a look that suggests they hadn’t quite planned for a follow-up.
More actions get noted. Most of them roll to next month. And then you do it all again.
“The board pack quietly becomes an admin task instead of a strategic one. You’re looking backwards at what you’ve already done, not forwards at what you can achieve.”
The vanity metric problem
Here’s what tends to fill those packs: the numbers that are easy to pull.
Revenue. Pipeline. Management accounts. Headcount. Activity: calls made, proposals sent, meetings booked, utilisation %.
They’re not wrong numbers. They’re just incomplete ones. Ask yourself: what do they actually tell you? The answer is probably not a lot, and when nobody around the table asks “so what?”, they start to feel like progress when they’re really just motion. Deep down, you know it.
I saw a good example of this just this week. A business launched a new product. Within the first week, they’d hit 16% of their sign-up target. The mood in the room was good. Plenty of back-slapping and genuine energy.
Nobody asked the obvious question.
16% means 84% remaining, and the launch window is already open. What’s the plan for the other 84%? What does the pipeline look like? What did the first 16% tell us about where the next cohort is coming from?
The number wasn’t bad news dressed as good news. It was just a number. The question is what you do with it. And in that room, nobody was asking.
Three metrics that look right and aren’t
I keep seeing the same three show up in board packs. Each one tells part of the story. None of them tells enough.
| Metric 1 | Metric 2 | Metric 3 |
| Revenue & pipeline Often deferral dressed as momentum | Headcount Hiring can signal something broken | Activity Busy isn’t a strategy |
Revenue and pipeline. The classic. Revenue isn’t going backwards, so the business is healthy. Pipeline looks full-ish, so next quarter is covered. Sometimes that’s true. Often, it’s deferral dressed as momentum.
When I was eighteen, I worked in an outbound call centre selling accidental death insurance. I was hitting my targets every shift. Everyone above me on the leaderboard was hitting multiples of target. Bells were being rung.
Except my cancellations were zero. Everyone else was leading with a free thirty-day trial, getting customers to accept just to end the call, and watching the commission claw back a month later. The revenue looked great until it didn’t. The leaderboard lied, and the people running it didn’t know, because nobody was asking the right question.
Headcount. Hiring feels like scaling. It carries optimism: we’re growing, we’re building, we’re investing. But in my experience, a hiring spike is just as often a signal that something underneath is broken. You’re adding people to a structure that was already straining rather than fixing what’s causing the strain.
Activity metrics. Proposals out, calls made, meetings booked, utilisation %. These feel like commercial health because they represent effort. The team is busy. Things are moving.
“Busy isn’t a strategy. Motion isn’t momentum. If the proposals aren’t converting, more proposals is not the fix.”
Why this keeps happening: no key stakeholder map
The reason these metrics keep filling board packs isn’t laziness. It’s that most founder-led businesses set their objectives without ever properly mapping who they’re trying to serve and what those people actually need.
So objectives default to what’s easy to count. Inside-out thinking, what can we measure from where we sit, rather than what actually matters to the people the business exists for.
Customers need to feel the value of what you’re delivering. Staff need to know what winning looks like. Investors or board members need a genuine read on commercial health, not a rehearsed presentation. Partners need to understand where they fit.
When you don’t map those stakeholders properly, you can’t set objectives that serve them. And when the objectives are wrong, everyone in the business optimises for the metric instead of the outcome.
Your staff feel this. They’re often closer to the real picture than the board pack suggests. They know which clients are happy and which are drifting. They know which pipeline deals are real and which have been sitting in the same stage for three months.
The fix isn’t a new reporting template. It’s building your objectives from the outside in. Start with your stakeholders. Understand what matters to each of them. Then build the metrics that tell you whether you’re actually delivering it.
When that’s in place, the board pack stops being a comfort blanket and starts being a genuine tool. The “so what?” question gets asked before the meeting, not avoided during it.
Work with Tom
The “so what?” question is worth asking
Key stakeholder mapping is one of the first things I work through with founders. Without it, you don’t have a strategy. Most businesses have never done it properly, and the gap between who they think they’re serving and what those people actually need is usually where the growth problem lives.
If you want to work through it, I’m happy to have that conversation. No agenda, just a useful 30 minutes. Or start with a free diagnostic, four tools built to surface exactly these patterns.
