Growth strategy
The reseller sells at 28% off list. The direct team keeps losing to it.
When your own channel becomes your toughest competitor, the problem is rarely the discount: it's what the discount was supposed to buy.
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Market analysis
The website lists eleven services. Three of them are 80% of revenue.
The long tail of service lines rarely loses money on paper. The cost shows up somewhere the profit and loss…
Pricing
Three estimators priced the same job. The spread was 22%.
Estimating error doesn't cancel out across a portfolio of jobs: it selects, and the selection runs against you.
Market analysis
The battlecards name three competitors. Two in five losses went to nobody.
Most competitive analysis studies the wrong opponent, and the tactics that win deals against a rival tend to make losses…
Pricing
The waiting list is eleven weeks. The price hasn’t moved in two years.
A long backlog feels like proof of demand. Often it is proof that someone else is deciding who gets served,…
Operations
The dashboard has thirty-one metrics. Last quarter, none of them changed a decision.
Most reporting packs are accurate, comprehensive and inert. The useful test isn't what a metric measures: it's what a different…
Growth strategy
Revenue grew 18% a year for four years. The offer was four times earnings.
Two businesses with identical revenue and identical profit can be worth very different sums, and the gap has little to…
Marketing
Cost per lead fell 31%. Cost per customer went up.
A cheaper enquiry is not a cheaper customer, and the gap between the two is where most acquisition budgets quietly…
Growth strategy
The proposal took eleven hours. One in five wins.
Pre-sales work is production capacity, consumed at scale and charged to nobody, and the blended win rate is usually hiding…
Operations
The new hire earns £48,000. The person training them earns £41,000.
Pay compression rarely announces itself. It arrives one necessary hire at a time, and the people it drives out are…
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.