Large corporations use business intelligence dashboards to track key indicators about a business. For good reason, since dashboards provide immediate clarity into how a business is performing.

However, small businesses usually cannot afford sophisticated dashboards. And considering that 70% to 80% of business intelligence projects fail, jumping in to using one can be daunting.

Why do so many fail? Research analysis firm Gartner said internal communications are at fault. Business executives and owners are unable to identify the most important things to measure.

I frequently saw this in practice while working as a BI consultant for the Janis Group, servicing the business intelligence dashboard needs of Fortune 500 companies.

An employee would return to Company X from a seminar on dashboards and ask for gauges, stoplights and graphs to represent data. I’d fly out to build a dashboard, and ask company leaders, “What would you like to the gauge to represent?” Without fail, they struggled to tell me the important metrics in their business.

Here’s my advice to small business and franchise owners looking to gain corporation-level clarity into their data by using a dashboard:

CREATE SIMPLE DASHBOARDS

By simple, I don’t mean basic or incomplete. I mean unambiguous and not cumbersome. Unless your business is Nascar, you don’t really need gauges on your dashboard.

The VW bug is a great example. With a small tachometer and gas gauge, the bug’s dashboard is almost bare—save for a large speedometer. You can see how fast you’re going and focus on the road. No distractions. This is the type of dashboard we want for our small businesses.

TRACK THE MOST IMPORTANT NUMBERS

When using a dashboard in your small business, choose a few KPIs—less than ten—that are critical to measuring how your business is doing. Good KPIs have a metric, a direction and a goal. Sales can be a great KPI if you have a target.

You may have other keys that you use occasionally, and that is fine, but for the purpose of your dashboard, narrow down your KPIs to anything you can’t live without.

At Plato’s Closet, a franchise I co-own, we buy and sell teenage clothing. People come in and sell clothes, or they buy clothes. What we found is that if those who sold clothes don’t leave with their money, but instead leave with items purchased at our store (we call it a trade percentage), our business does better. When the trade percentage increases, all the other good numbers go up, too. Trade percentage is an indicator of how well we are communicating with our customers and if we have good products. It’s the one metric I can’t do without.

MAKE YOUR DASHBOARD ACTIONABLE

Actionable is actually a legal term meaning that someone messed up so badly that you can take action against him or her. Make sure the metrics on your dashboard are so meaningful that you can take action against them.

Here’s a screenshot of my stores from last month. They did great. But the average number of transactions is down. I can act on that by creating a story for my staff. I can tell them “focus on selling a third item to every customer.”

Remember, watch the numbers that you want to grow, because what gets measured gets managed. And make sure that your dashboard is simple, important and actionable.