Operations
You were flat out in February. The pipeline is empty in May.
The busy-quiet cycle most owner-led firms treat as seasonality is usually something else entirely, and it is generated inside the business.
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Growth strategy
The two-week holiday went fine. The buyer prices the six-month absence.
Nothing broke while the owner was away: which tells you less about transferable value than most owners assume, and almost…
Operations
The team is 85% utilised. Lead times have doubled.
Utilisation and lead time don't trade off in a straight line, and the last ten points of capacity cost far…
Pricing
The supplier has been with you nine years. The last competitive quote was 2016.
Most firms defend their own prices line by line, then wave through a supplier's annual uplift without a conversation. The…
Growth strategy
The pilot met every success criterion. Nine months later there’s still no contract.
Pilots that succeed technically and fail commercially usually share a single design flaw, and it is fixed before the pilot…
Market analysis
Your competitor list has four names. The option that wins most often isn’t on it.
The rival that beats you most often has no website, no sales team and no price, and most win/loss records…
Operations
The service is productised. Delivery still starts with a blank page.
Naming an offer and fixing its price is the easy half of productisation. The half that decides your margin happens…
Growth strategy
The programme has fourteen partners. Two of them send work.
Signing a partner is not the same as acquiring distribution, and the gap between the two explains most disappointing channel…
Pricing
Price is 40% of the score. It decided 80% of the outcome.
Weighted tender scoring rarely behaves the way the weightings suggest, and the arithmetic that actually decides awards sits somewhere most…
Pricing
The scope changed four times. The price changed once.
Most service businesses have a contractual right to charge for scope changes and lose most of the money anyway. The…
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.