Pricing
The rebate arrives in January. It is most of the year’s profit.
Retrospective supplier rebates rarely show up where the decisions are made, and by the time they land the pricing that earned them is already a year old.
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Operations
The deposit is 50%. The float has been paying the wages.
Customer prepayments feel like cash strength right up to the point the order book flattens, when the same mechanism unwinds…
Operations
The contract renews itself every year. The notice window closed in March.
Automatic renewal is not an administrative detail. It is a pricing mechanism, and it works quietly in favour of whoever…
Growth strategy
The plan has one revenue number. The cost base was committed against it.
A forecast is a guess about the world. A cost base is a decision you have already made. Most annual…
Growth strategy
Every customer pays back in six months. The faster it grows, the tighter cash gets.
Payback period describes the health of one customer. It says almost nothing about whether the business can afford to acquire…
Pricing
The price list went up 5%. What customers actually paid went up 1%.
Between the published price and the cash that lands there sit a dozen small deductions, each individually defensible, and together…
Growth strategy
The partner signed twelve months ago. It has sold three units.
Signing a channel partner is cheap and feels like distribution. Whether they ever sell anything is largely decided before the…
Growth strategy
The pipeline is three times target. The quarter still closes short.
Weighted pipeline is an average across a portfolio most sales teams do not actually have, and the miss is usually…
Growth strategy
Ninety per cent of revenue is repeat. None of it is contracted.
Repeat business and contracted business look identical in the accounts and behave completely differently the moment somebody else has to…
Technology
The system went live in January. The spreadsheet is still open.
When a team keeps a parallel record after a new system goes live, the problem is rarely training, and banning…
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.