AI Work
One Small Business Dashboard for Five Companies: Why No Product Would Hold Them
Monday and Trello are good tools. Neither of them can put five companies on one page without breaking something.
Monday is a good product. So is Trello. I have used both, I have nothing bad to say about either, and I want to start there because the reason I do not use them for this has nothing to do with their quality.
Here is what they do well, and what any page that replaced them had to keep. I can get my work done inside two or three windows instead of a dozen. And I know what comes next, which means less time spent standing in the doorway between one thing and the next. Reduced liminality, if you want the word for it. That is most of what a board tool is for and they deliver it.
What neither of them could do is hold five companies at once.
Why not
Two reasons, and both of them are about ownership rather than software.
The first is account terms. A seat in most of these products covers an organization. Running several separate legal entities through one seat is either against the terms I agreed to or requires a larger plan sold for a different purpose.
The second is more important and it is the one accountants care about. If one company pays for the tool that runs all of them, that company is subsidizing the others. That is a real transaction and it belongs in somebody’s books. I hold a nonprofit among these organizations, and blurring who paid for what is exactly the kind of thing I cannot afford to be casual about.
So the shape of the problem is not that the products lack a feature. It is that the thing I need is one view across several entities, and a bought product either cannot span them or can only span them by muddying who is paying.
What the page does instead
Every organization gets the same blocks in the same order, and the order is deliberate.
Its funnel comes first, then its money. Both of those describe where the company is right now, which is the thing I need before I can decide anything.
Then what is waiting on me. Everything still open, sorted into four boxes by urgent and important. The split is Dwight Eisenhower’s, from a line he quoted about the urgent and the important seldom being the same thing; Stephen Covey popularized it decades later.
Where each company is going does not live on this page. It lives in that company’s vision and strategic plan, written down once and consulted when it needs to be, and it does not need to be restated every morning. Where each company has been lives in its log. The morning page is for the present and for what the present is asking of me.
What answering actually is
The items are numbered, and I answer by typing numbers into a chat window. That part is simple and it is not the interesting part.
The interesting part is what an answer turns out to be. In practice every one of mine is one of five things.
- I prompt an AI to do the next thing on a task.
- I email a team member something that has to be done by a person.
- I do the things only I can do, by reason of authority, responsibility or ability.
- I think about how to build somebody else up in their ability, their responsibility or their authority.
- I defer what is left, knowing I have put in an honest day’s work.
The fourth one is the reason the four boxes matter. Growing the people I lead and serve is almost never the loudest thing on the page, and it is one of the most strategic. A sorting that only surfaced what was on fire would bury it every single day.
The thing it actually fixed
Before this page, the end of a day had three questions in it that I could not answer.
Did I put my hours into the most strategic thing, or did I get lost in busy work in one company and putting out fires in another. What did I forget. And which ball got dropped.
The third one cost me sleep.
Balls still get dropped, because I am human, the fall is still real, and Jesus has not returned. But it seems to me that fewer are getting dropped since I started working this way, and that the damage when one does drop is less severe. I cannot show you a number for that. I am telling you what it seems like from inside it, which is the only honest way I have to report it.
The part I did not expect
Every one of these companies now has a better record of its own activity, and not just its bookkeeping. Each has a clearer picture of where it is going and where it stands.
That did not come from the page being clever. It came from finally having somewhere to put what was in my head. Once there was a place for it, it went there instead of staying in my head, and what was in my head was the only copy.
- 5 organizations on one page, each asked the same questions in the same order
- 4 boxes, urgent against important, for everything still open
- 5 kinds of thing an answer turns out to be
- 0 project tool subscriptions spanning the group
- 1 place where what used to live only in my head now lives
The page itself is described in the artifact page.
What the page is actually made of
- One section per organization, each carrying the same blocks in the same order, so my eye knows where to go before it has read anything.
- Where it stands: its funnel, then its money, computed from its own records.
- How full the people are. For the counseling organization that means each clinician’s caseload against what that clinician can carry, which is the figure the rest of it exists to serve.
- Everything open, sorted into four boxes by urgent and important.
- Where a company is going is not here. That lives in its vision and strategic plan. Where it has been lives in its log.
- Numbered items, frozen for the day, which I answer by typing their numbers into a chat window.
- A separate step that files each answer into the right company’s own log afterward.
What one organization’s block looks like
Below is the counseling organization’s part of the page, as a sample. The practice, the people and every number in it are invented. The shape is the real one.
Sample page. Invented practice, invented people, invented figures.
A. Keep in touch
Items 1 to 12. Grouped by how often I said I would reach out, longest debt first.
| Due for a touch | Who | Last spoke | Overdue by |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Rosalind Adeyemi | Peer therapist | 2026-02-11 | 216 days |
| 2. Caleb Whitfield | Referring physician | 2025-12-02 | 287 days |
| 3. Marisol Duarte | Supervisee, monthly | 2026-01-20 | 238 days |
| 4. Henrik Oyelaran | Former colleague | 2026-03-30 | 169 days |
C. Funnel
Thirty days, against the thirty before them.
| Stage | Count | Step conversion | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Appeared in a search | 6,120 | ▲ 12% | |
| Visits to the website | 540 | 8.8% | ▲ 9% |
| Consults booked | 31 | 5.7% | ▼ 18% |
| Consults actually held | 27 | 87.1% | ▼ 21% |
| Became clients | 11 | 40.7% | ▲ 38% |
D. Money
Year to date, against the same stretch last year.
| Figure | Change | |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $214,900 | ▲ 8.2% |
| Profit | $12,480 | ▲ 21.0% |
| Cash flow | $3,160 | ▼ 14.5% |
E. How full the people are
Sessions held each week against what each person can carry.
| Clinician | Held each week | Can carry | Full | Booked, next 4 weeks |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Marguerite | 13.5 | 16 | 84% | 61 (95%) |
| Wendell | 11.8 | 15 | 79% | 55 (92%) |
| Theo | 9.0 | 14 | 64% | 44 (79%) |
| Priya | 4.2 | 12 | 35% | 21 (44%) |
Held 68 percent of what the practice can carry. Below 80 percent, so this week goes to finding clients rather than to writing and speaking.
F. Waiting on me
Items 13 to 24, sorted by urgent against important.
- 13Urgent and importantConfirm the training room for the October team day. The rate goes up at the end of this month.
- 14Urgent and importantTwo thirds of what insurers owe us is now more than ninety days old. Decide whether this goes to a collections agency or stays in house.
- 15Urgent, not importantA card on file expired. Three subscriptions failed quietly last week and nobody noticed.
- 16Important, not urgentDecide whether Thursday evening becomes a second intake window, now that Priya has room.
I answer that page by typing numbers. Fourteen, going to collections. Fifteen, not this week. Sixteen is Marguerite’s call rather than mine.
Where it stands
Running every morning. Two of the organizations in it are separate from the rest and the page has no access to either; each prepares its own figures and sends them over, and my answers go back for that organization to file in its own records.
The bottom of the counseling funnel is the one part that is not automatic. The system holding our client records offers no way in for another program, and its terms forbid automated browsing even by software covered by a signed privacy agreement. So I export that part myself, once a week, and the page says plainly which half is fresh and which half is seven days old.
It has not yet told me anything I did not expect. It has confirmed rather than surprised.
By the numbers
- 17 lettered sections on the one page, and 72 item numbers reserved; the 2026-09-01 build filled 51
- 0 calls out to the internet in the finished page; the buttons it does have only open detail that is already on it
- 72 checks guarding the numbering, all passing, including four rounds of answers with a full rebuild between each
- 1,064 lines removed in the rewrite, among them a small program on my own machine that would run any command I typed when a button was clicked
- 2 points where anything identifying a person is reduced to a count before it is written down
- 1 full close-of-business run: 26 answers, 6 filed here, 20 handed to the two organizations that keep their own records