What is this Tool?
It is a 36-month rolling Profit & Loss Statement for your leadership team, inspired by Shannon Susko's Metronomics framework. It gives three views of every month side by side — what happened (Actual), where you are heading (Rolling Forecast) and what you committed to (Approved Budget). It works for both service businesses and manufacturing businesses.

Actual
Enter once the month is closed. These are your real, recorded numbers from your accounting system. Fill left to right as each month closes. Actual numbers never change after entry.

Rolling Forecast
Update every single month — this is the most important column. Your best current view of every future month based on actuals to date, pipeline and known commitments. It 'rolls' forward — always showing 36 months ahead. If your rolling forecast is diverging from your Approved Budget, act now.

Approved Budget
Enter once at the start of each financial year. This is your committed plan — the number you said you would achieve. It does not change during the year. The gap between Rolling and Approved is your early warning system.

Revenue
Total income earned in the period. For service businesses: fees, retainers, programme revenue. For manufacturing: product sales revenue. Use accrual basis — record when earned, not when cash is received.

Total Expenses
COGS + Operating Expenses = All costs combined into one line.

COGS (Cost of Goods Sold): Direct costs to deliver your product or service — raw materials, direct labour, associate fees, delivery costs.

Operating Expenses: Overhead costs that exist regardless of revenue — salaries, rent, marketing, technology, professional fees.

Combining both keeps the tool simple and leadership-friendly.

Operating Profit
Revenue − Total Expenses
What remains after all costs. This is your core business profitability before interest and tax. For most SME leadership discussions, this is the most relevant and actionable profit metric.

Cash
Closing Bank Balance = Actual cash in bank at month end. NOT the same as profit.

Forecast Cash = Opening Cash + Cash Received − Cash Paid Out

Cash Received = Actual payments collected from customers this month.

Cash Paid Out = All actual payments made — salaries, suppliers, rent, tax, loan EMIs, owner drawings — everything that left the bank.

Shannon's rule: Forecast cash first. A profitable business can go bankrupt from cash starvation. Know your runway at all times.

Widgets
Core Volume Metric

Your primary output unit — the one number that, when it moves, tells you the business is working. Replace 'Widgets' with your specific metric:
• Service business: Active clients, coachees, subscribers, patients
• Manufacturing: Units produced, orders shipped, SKUs sold
• Retail: Transactions, footfall, basket size
• Education: Enrolled students, graduates

Widgets is your Leading Indicator. Revenue and Profit are lagging. If widgets are on track, the financials will follow.

How to Forecast Cash First?
Shannon's method: Shannon does not mean you type Cash before Revenue. She means a mindset shift in what you prioritise:
1. Cash first: What is my bank balance today? What cash will I receive? What cash must I pay? What is my runway?
2. Widgets next: How many units / clients will drive that cash?
3. Then Revenue: What does that volume translate to?
4. Then Expenses: What will it cost?
5. Then Profit: What remains?

Cash and Widgets are leading indicators. Revenue and Profit are results.

​Let's keep learning, implementing and massively contributing to joyously lead ourselves, our health, our kids, our relationships, our people and our businesses from good to great, realise our dreams and have it all with ease and grace; while having lots of fun and adventure together along the way.

Loving you,
j.

How to Discover Top 5 Priorities to lead your Business from Good to Great and Top 1 of 5?

Top 5 Priorities are your 20% that will give you 80% outcomes, supporting you to Do Less to Create Massive (DLCM) positive impact.

Top 5 Priorities not being clearly articulated and not known by all our team members all the way to our people on the frontline is a clear sign that the business is not on the good to great journey. It is about survival and everyone is fire-fighting to travel from bad to good. Symptoms of a business on a bad to good journey are that there is stress, team members are working on the weekends, reaching home late with work consuming most of their time; leaving very little time for raising happy, confident, healthy kids, nurturing their relationship with spouse, parents and siblings, and nourishing good health and joyous well-being.

The business will stay on the bad to good journey and dance to the tune of mediocrity if, in every Annual Planning Meeting, time is not invested in co-discovering Top 5 Annual Priorities in alignment with your 3HAG (3 Years Highly Achievable Goal), BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) and Top 1 of 5; and if, in every Quarterly Planning Meeting, time is not invested in co-discovering Top 5 Quarterly Priorities in alignment with your 1HAG (1 Year Highly Achievable Goal) and Top 1 of 5.

Yes, co-discovering. Building a great business is a team sport, and the CEO and leadership team members are equal players, co-leading their business from good to great. Therefore, Top 5 Priorities are not imposed by the CEO but co-discovered.

The CEO is really the Chief Enrolment Officer — enrolling their team, their customers, their business partners, their investors, and their family (if it's a family business) to be on the good to great journey.

Shannon Susko has designed a beautiful step-by-step process for the CEO and the leadership team members to co-discover their Top 5 and their Top 1 of 5 to co-own their shared good to great journey, and strengthen not only the Aligned Execution System of the Business Good to Great Framework but also turn the dial on the Cohesive Team System, Nurturing Culture System, Winning Strategy System and Healthy Cashflow System.

Through the process explained in the above presentation, your coach will support you and your leadership team to co-discover your Business Top 5 Annual Priorities, Business Top 5 Quarterly Priorities, and based on these — the Individual Top 5 Quarterly Priorities for each member of your leadership team and you, through your Annual and Quarterly Planning meetings.

Download the following template on a shared Google Drive with access to your leadership team, your coach and to me, so that all of us stay aligned — enabling you and your leadership team to co-lead your business from good to great with greater ease, grace and velocity.

RYD Business Good to Great Framework is sourced in Verne Harnish's Scaling-up and Shannon Susko's Metronomics. It has 7 systems for leaders to lead themselves, their people and their business from good to great. 

1. Nurturing Culture System: The purpose of this system is to ensure that there is a clear, known culture that creates the team’s strong belief in the Core Purpose, team behavioural values, and the very long-term 10-year to 30-year goal for the organization. It’s the necessary foundation of all super-performing teams. It is a daily repeatable, behavioural system that ensures that a company’s culture is not something static on paper or up on the wall but something that pulses in the organization every day, starting with the CEO.

2. Cohesive Team System: All winning teams are highly cohesive. It takes time, discipline, and focus to develop a cohesive team. This is a practical system to ensure that team cohesiveness progresses and evolves every day in an organization, not just at an offsite two days per year.

3. People Excellence System: is a repeatable, practical, efficient system to ensure that all the functional roles the team requires to win are consistently filled with A-Players. A-Players ooze the company’s Core Values and consistently exceed performance expectations; they’re attracted to being measured and held accountable for the position they volunteered to own on behalf of the team in the company. They want to be coached and given the opportunity to grow.

4. Winning Strategy System: The Strategy System is a progression that ensures the leadership team collaborates to create the most differentiated, confident strategy for their business. It keeps the company in a unique and valuable position, making sure its set of differentiating activities remain relevant and appealing to Core Customers.

5. Aligned Execution System: ensures there are clear, specific, accountable priorities that are owned by leaders and measured for the company on the basis of a 1 Year Highly Achievable Goal or annual plan (1HAG) and a Quarterly Highly Achievable Goal (QHAG) or 90-day company plan. These company priorities are then aligned through the owners to other individuals on the team, who will commit and ensure that these priorities are completed before their own individual priorities.

Bringing this clarity together with a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual focus on the plan with the team ensures that leadership teams make better, faster decisions to get them to the outcomes they had set as goals.

6. Healthy Cashflow System: forecasts cash first. The forecast is owned by the whole leadership team, not just the finance team. The process is to forecast cash first and then the “widgets,” the non-fiscal things that flow through your business: the things in your business that your team controls. Forecasting widgets, which team members own and control, directly connect the team to a very achievable and realistic plan that in turn connects directly to the cash balance required to grow your business.

7. Coach Cascade System: The purpose of the Coach Cascade System is to grow all leaders into coaches themselves and their teams into high-performing teams connected through the corporate plan. This is a part of the secret sauce that creates exponential momentum in the team’s high-growth results.

The Coach Cascade System takes the leaders’ and the team’s behaviour to the next level. It takes the team’s cohesiveness to the next level of behavior and vulnerability, ensuring that every leader becomes a coach who can create other coaches within the organization: hence the Coach Cascade System. 

This Coach Cascade is easiest when you work with an expert CEO+Leadership team coach who coaches the CEO to coach the leaders, and coaches the leaders to coach their own teams, and so on. This is the progressive system that allows leaders to grow into a “Level 5 Leader,” as Jim Collins has coined it, or what Robert Anderson and William Adams call an “Integral Leader” in their book Scaling Leadership or Gear 5 leaders as we call them in RYD. 

In order to grow up our company, we must grow ourselves as CEOs first — and then our leaders and team — into humble coaches with a fierce commitment to the purpose and goal. Having the willingness and desire to get to this level will exponentially transform your company’s outcome and the life you live.

Let's keep learning, implementing and massively contributing to joyously lead ourselves, our kids, our relationships, our people and our businesses from good to great, realise our dreams and have it all with ease and grace; while having lots of fun and adventure together along the way.

Loving you,
j.
Source: Metronomics by Shannon Byrne Susko
#RYD Learning Bytes
Friday Theme: Business Excellence

​The greatest teams have 3 things in common:

1. A structured, repeatable process that all team members follow.

2. Clarity of expectations of each other and a willingness to work hard to develop and maintain high cohesiveness to achieve their team goal together.

3. A coach who is an expert at the repeatable process and who ensures the team has clarity of role and position, while keeping the team highly cohesive and focused on the team result.

One process of the Aligned Execution System of the RYD Business Good to Great Journey is the Daily Huddle.

The CEO and their Leadership Team meet daily for 15 minutes or less for the Daily Huddle; and each leader across all levels meets their team daily. Each leader attends 2 Daily Huddles, except the CEO.

Here's the agenda of the Daily Huddle. Each team member shares in round-robin fashion including the CEO / team leader. The CEO / team leader participates as an equal member of the huddle — answering the same questions as everyone else. This is deliberate. The huddle creates horizontal accountability and transparency across the team. The CEO modelling vulnerability — sharing their own stuck — is essential to making the culture real and the team more cohesive.

1. Good News
2. Metrics
3. #1 Thing to complete in the next 24 hours
4. Stucks, Support needed, Questions

Sharing good news with each other not only strengthens the culture but also increases team cohesiveness.

The following 3 agenda items contribute to making execution effortless, giving back the weekends to our family and unlocking an abundance of time for us to Have It Al:
i. Each leader's #1 metric linked to their Top 5 quarterly priorities. Identifying this alone will remove a lot of inefficiencies in execution.
ii. Each leader shares their #1 thing to complete in the next 24 hours.
iii. Where am I stuck? What support do I need? What are my questions? Removing stucks, on a daily basis, increases individual and team productivity with a compounding effect.

Doing a Daily Huddle daily ensures the weekly Strategy Execution meeting can focus on moving the business forward instead of fire-fighting.

We can be busy being busy, or we can follow a repeatable system with discipline for scaling the business to win the gold medal in the Olympics of Business.

Let's keep playing to be Love in each moment (Leadership Depth), playing to be a student in each moment (Craft Mastery) and playing to win in each moment leaving the outcome to the Universe (Business Excellence) to joyously lead ourselves, our kids, our relationships, our people and our businesses from good to great, realize our dreams and have it all with ease and grace; while having lots of fun and adventure together along the way.

Love and Light,
j.

Source: Metronomics by Shannon Byrne Susko, Scaling-up by Verne Harnish
RYD Learning Bytes
Friday Theme: Business Excellence