Pricing
The scope changed in week three. The invoice didn’t.
Unbilled scope change rarely shows up as a loss. It shows up as a job that ran long, a customer who is oddly hard to make money on, and a quote that no longer…
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Leadership
The approval limit is £5,000. It was set when the average job was £3,000.
A threshold that once caught the exceptions now catches most of the work, and somewhere along the way the control…
Operations
One supplier is 41% of cost of sales. Nobody in the business owns the relationship.
Customer concentration gets a board discussion. The same concentration on the buying side is usually filed as an operational detail,…
Operations
The unit price came down 6%. The lead time went from three weeks to nine.
A procurement win that shows up in one department's numbers and a cost that shows up in three others, and…
Marketing
The enquiry arrived at 4:10 on Friday. The call went out on Tuesday.
Most businesses treat slow response to inbound enquiries as a discipline problem. It is usually a queueing problem, and the…
Pricing
The order book is full to March. The price list is from last year.
A stretched lead time is a pricing signal that most businesses file as a scheduling problem, and the mistranslation quietly…
Operations
Stock turns 4.1 times a year. Half the cash sits in lines that turn once.
Blended inventory turnover is an average of a very uneven distribution, and the average is precisely what keeps the trapped…
Growth strategy
The buyer said yes in week two. The contract was signed in week thirteen.
Between the commercial yes and the countersigned contract sits a stage most businesses never measure, nobody owns, and money quietly…
Leadership
The board pack runs 38 pages. Three numbers would have changed a decision.
Most management reporting grows by addition and never by subtraction: which is why the pack gets longer as it gets…
Market analysis
The NPS is 62. It rose the quarter you lost four accounts.
Satisfaction scores have a habit of improving as the customer base deteriorates, and the arithmetic behind that is worth understanding…
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.