Your Team Can’t Hit a Target They Can’t See

Sharing financials with your team builds trust and accountability, ensuring everyone knows their targets and can work towards achieving them together.

There’s a question that comes up fairly frequently from my coaching clients: "Should I share our financials with my team?"

The short answer is yes. I am a big believer in transparency, but with an asterisk.

The level of transparency should vary based on the position. My guiding principle is this: Whatever number you want a team member to be responsible for, that is the number they should see.

Transparency by Role

If you have a General Manager who is responsible for the full P&L, from the top line all the way down to net profit, and they have the influence to control those outcomes, then they should see those numbers. How else can they manage them?

For a Reconstruction Manager, I would share the numbers related to the specific jobs they own. If they are running five or eight jobs and are expected to hit a certain gross profit, they need visibility into those job costs.

When you scale and have a Director of Reconstruction overseeing multiple managers, they should have visibility into the entire division. Again, it comes back to accountability. We are holding them accountable for the results of that division, so they need the data to back it up.

Even at the Technician level, the same logic applies. For a Lead Tech, I would show them what they have control over, specifically labor. We don't need to show them overhead costs or equipment loans, but they should see the revenue versus the labor cost for their specific jobs so they know exactly what their target is.

The Target Principle

If your team doesn’t know what the target is, how could they possibly hit it?

Sharing these numbers builds trust and gives your people something to shoot for. Without that data, they are flying blind.

The "Bottom Line" Conversation

When it comes to a monthly P&L review with your leadership team, you might decide to show the top two sections, Income and Cost of Goods Sold (COGS), but keep the fixed expenses private.

There are different reasons for this. Maybe you run personal expenses through the business, or maybe you aren't comfortable sharing the net profit number yet. If you do decide to show the entire P&L, you have to help your team understand that net profit does not equal cash in your pocket.

As many of you know, principal payments on debt service (like truck loans, equipment notes, or EIDL loans) do not show up on a P&L. You might show a net profit of $200,000, but if you have $10,000 a month in debt service, that’s $120,000 of that profit already spoken for. Without explaining that, your team might think you are making much more than you actually are.

A Leap of Faith

I understand that sharing financials feels like a leap of faith. It can be uncomfortable at first. But in my experience, both in my own businesses and with my clients, transparency is a massive driver of engagement.

If you want your team to act like owners, you have to give them the information owners use to make decisions.