Provident Security is a successful Vancouver based security company that sets out to completely change the alarm business. In the article How to Turn an Industry on Its Head Become Masters of Delivering On Big Promises, Kevin Lawrence and I write about how Provident Security CEO Mike Jagger founded the company on the promise:
“We will be at the customer’s door within five minutes of an alarm going off — guaranteed.”
When serious security events happen, such as big wind storms, chaos erupts in the Provident operations center. To bring order to the chaos and to deliver on their five minute promise to customers, Mike identified key numbers that track the pulse of the business. In Provident’s operations center, all key indicators are displayed on large LCD monitors. All indicators are automatically updated in real time as events happen. KPIs are chosen so that zero is perfect. Employees talk about “Going for the doughnut”, that is going for zero.
Indicators are displayed in one of three colors:
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Yellow: Good
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Red: Coming up to deadline
- Flashing Red: Overdue
All organizations need a small number of forward looking key indicators that show whether the business is on track. Most businesses have either none or too many. Mike and his team have discovered the few key numbers that keep all employees focused with feedback systems that let everyone know how they are doing in real time.
What numbers do you use to measure your business?