IdeaSmall business

One number

A single screen for a small business. Not forty charts. One number, and why it moved.

By Danny · 10 June 2026

Dashboards fail for small businesses because they answer questions nobody asked. Forty charts is forty decisions about what to look at, made every morning, by someone who has a van to load.

So: one number. The one that would make you change what you do today. Underneath it, in a sentence, why it moved since last week.

What's your one number?

If this is a bit close to home, you might recognise some of the things we've built or the tools we tend to reach for.

Also on the bench

Question

When did everyone stop believing the CRM?

The biggest CRM problem might not be bad data. It might be that nobody quite believes the data that's already there. We're trying to work out how common that is.

Note

Nobody actually wants an AI receptionist

They want the phone answered when everyone's up a ladder. That's a different thing, and it's a much smaller thing to build.

Experiment

Process X-ray

Describe how your team does something in plain English. Get back a map of every step, and a shortlist of the ones worth deleting.