Operations
The bank balance has never been higher. Two thirds of it belongs to customers.
Deposits and prepayments can make a fragile business look liquid, and the moment the illusion breaks is rarely the moment anyone expects.
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Operations
Utilisation is 92%. Nothing arrives on time.
When a business pushes its people closer to fully booked, delivery dates stop slipping gradually and start slipping all at…
Market analysis
Two customers are 45% of gross profit. The risk is not that they leave.
Concentration is usually measured as a departure risk. The damage tends to arrive years earlier, through the price and the…
Pricing
The win rate is 60%. It was 60% at the old price too.
A stable win rate feels like proof the price is right. More often it is evidence that something else moved…
Pricing
Every job is priced at cost plus 32%. The overhead rate behind it was set in 2019.
A markup is not a margin policy but an arithmetic claim about overhead and volume, and both halves of it…
Growth strategy
The account hasn’t complained in a year. It also hasn’t called.
Quiet clients get read as happy clients. Sometimes they are. More often, silence is the last stage before an exit…
Growth strategy
The pipeline is three times target. The quarter missed by 20%.
Pipeline coverage is the most quoted number in sales management and one of the least informative. Here is what it…
Pricing
The list price hasn’t changed in three years. The realised price falls every quarter.
Price erosion rarely arrives as a decision. It accumulates one concession at a time, in places the price list never…
Operations
One supplier is 60% of cost of sales. The relationship runs on purchase orders.
Concentrated supply is not automatically a problem. What matters is whether the concentration was chosen, and what the arrangement looks…
Pricing
The quote is valid for 90 days. The supplier’s price holds for 14.
An open quote is an option written for free, and the customers who take their time exercising it are rarely…
Take it further
This is the general pattern. Your business is the specific case.
Everything here is free to read with an account, and always will be. What it cannot do is tell you which of these applies to your numbers, your market and your constraints. That is the work we do with clients.