How to build an agency dashboard — so you can stop worrying about your business

This week, I finally did something that’s been on my list for months:

I upgraded our agency scorecard from a primitive spreadsheet into a full-blown dashboard application — and it's awesome.

But before I get into what we built, let me explain why this matters.

If you’re running an agency and trying to step out of the day-to-day without the whole thing falling apart, you need a scorecard.

Not a “vision board.”
Not a goals doc.
An actual, weekly-updated, trackable scorecard. A single source of truth for you business. 1 document that you can review that will tell you how your business is doing.

If you have a great scorecard, you free yourself up from having to micro-manage the team without having to worry that it's all going to shit.

Let me give you an example.

What Our Scorecard Tracks

Everyone's scorecard will be different, but at Paperboy, here’s what we wanted to monitor:

1. Client performance (Are we getting our clients the results we promise?):
   • CPA by channel
   • Total ad spend vs. target
   • Open rates + click rates
   • Revenue generated from paid campaigns
2. Service delivery (Are we providing the quality of service we promise?):
   • Were the weekly status updates sent on time?
   • Were the Friday results snapshots sent?
   • % of overdue tasks in our PM tool
   • Account manager’s gut-check client satisfaction score

That's the basics. Pretty simple. But extremely powerful.

How it works:

Each account manager would fill this out weekly—one row per client. We added conditional formatting, so if anything was off-track (CPAs too high, emails late, etc.), it turned red.

This made it super easy for me to:

• Skim the sheet anytime and spot problems fast
• Keep a pulse on how we were doing
• Hold the team accountable without micromanaging

Why We Upgraded

This spreadsheet worked fine for two years. But it had limitations:

• It was hard to see trends across clients
• Weekly data was hard to visualize over time
• It wasn’t fun to use

So I spent last week building a custom dashboard.

Now I can see:

• Which clients are improving week-over-week
• How the whole portfolio is trending across all clients
• Where things are slipping before they become a problem

And yes, it looks way cooler than a Google Sheet.

The only reason I could finally build this was because I’m not stuck inside the client work anymore. I had the mental space AND time in the day to actually make something useful.

You don’t need a fancy tool on day one.

Start with a spreadsheet. Track what matters. Color-code the bad stuff. Review it weekly. That alone will level up your operations.

But once you’ve got that foundation—and a little breathing room—it’s worth leveling up.

Because when you have visibility, you don’t need to micromanage.

And when you don’t need to micromanage, you can actually run the business.

Hope this one helped, have a great week.

Shane