Growth strategy
The new service was 30% of the plan. It’s 4% of revenue.
When a launch stalls, the market usually gets the blame. More often the offer never reached a buyer at all, and the reason sits in the sales team's diary.
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Technology
The system went live in March. The spreadsheet still decides.
When a shadow spreadsheet survives a system implementation, it is rarely defiance: it is usually a diagnosis of the system,…
Pricing
The price list has one line. The invoices have three hundred prices.
Most firms can tell you their list price and their average discount. The distance between those two facts is where…
Pricing
The increase was 6%. Not one customer pushed back.
Silence after a price rise feels like vindication. More often it is the most expensive signal a business can misread.
Operations
The customer left in month fourteen. The reason was set in week three.
Exit interviews explain the trigger, not the cause. Most of what decides a renewal is already in place long before…
Operations
Stock turns four times a year. Half the cash sits in lines that turn once.
Aggregate inventory ratios are weighted averages, and the weighting quietly hides the money, usually in the lines nobody has looked…
Leadership
The decision took eleven weeks. The thinking took two days.
Most slow decisions in a small business are not slow because they are hard. They are slow because they are…
Operations
Headcount grew 30%. Output grew 12%.
Adding people to a busy team rarely adds proportionate capacity, and the reason usually sits in the arithmetic, not the…
Pricing
The discount cost the seller 10% of commission. It cost you 25% of the profit.
Discount authority is usually delegated to the person least exposed to its consequences, and the arithmetic of that gap is…
Growth strategy
The pipeline is 3× target. The forecast misses anyway.
Coverage ratios feel like reassurance. They only work if the pipeline behaves like the one the ratio was calculated from,…
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.