Growth strategy
Nine referral partners are signed. Two have ever sent anything.
Most partner programmes fail for a reason that has nothing to do with the commission rate, and the signed agreements hide it.
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Leadership
Headcount went from 14 to 22. The org chart didn’t.
Nothing visibly broke when the team was fourteen. The mechanism that made those first hires feel free reverses quietly, and…
Operations
Every job gets delivered. One in six gets delivered twice.
Rework rarely appears as a line in the accounts: which is why it quietly funds itself out of margin, senior…
Pricing
Sales hit target. Gross margin fell four points.
When a commission plan pays on revenue, the seller and the business are not arguing about the same number, and…
Operations
The new hire started in March. They were billable in September.
Hiring is modelled as a step change in capacity. It arrives as a curve, and the gap between the two…
Growth strategy
The productised offer launched in January. Every client still gets something custom.
Fixed-price packages rarely fail at the point of sale. They fail three weeks into delivery, and for reasons the price…
Technology
The new system went live in April. The team still runs the spreadsheet.
A shadow spreadsheet surviving six months after go-live is telling you something specific about the system you bought, and it…
Growth strategy
Onboarding completes in six weeks. The cancellations cluster in month four.
When early-life churn spikes at a predictable point, the cause is almost never located there, and the metric that says…
Pricing
The retainer was scoped at 20 hours. Last month it took 41.
Recurring revenue hides margin erosion better than any other commercial arrangement, because the number that moves is never the one…
Leadership
Every quote over £10,000 crosses the founder’s desk. The exit is planned for three years’ time.
Owner dependency rarely shows up in the headline multiple. It shows up somewhere less visible, and usually too late to…
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.