Operations
The hire started in March. The capacity arrived in October.
Most hiring plans quietly assume a new person is useful from day one, and the gap between start date and real capacity is where growth plans tend to break.
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Technology
The system went live eighteen months ago. The spreadsheet is still the version people trust.
Shadow spreadsheets are rarely indiscipline. They are a precise map of what the implementation failed to capture, and reading that…
Growth strategy
The multiple was fine. The earn-out was three years.
Owner dependence rarely shows up as a lower valuation. It shows up somewhere far less visible, and by then it…
Market analysis
Your competitive set has four names. Your customer’s shortlist had two of them and a spreadsheet.
Most competitor lists are drawn from the supply side: firms that look like yours. Buyers draw theirs differently, and the…
Pricing
Two-thirds of the book renews in April. That’s why the price rise was 3%.
Renewal dates cluster for accidental reasons, and once they do, the calendar quietly decides how much you are allowed to…
Market analysis
The market is worth £4bn. The list of companies who could buy from you runs to 300 names.
Top-down market sizing almost never constrains a plan. Counting the accounts that could actually buy tends to change the growth…
Pricing
All four service lines return 38% margin. The allocation made them equal.
When overhead is spread across revenue, the margin ranking you get back is just your direct costs rearranged, and the…
Pricing
Every quote was bespoke. So every loss is an anecdote.
A one-in-three win rate tells you almost nothing if no two proposals were comparable, and "we lost on price" is…
Growth strategy
Nobody churned. The account is worth half what it was.
Logo retention can look immaculate while revenue quietly drains out of the accounts you kept, and the leak usually has…
Growth strategy
You call it recurring revenue. Your customer calls it a monthly decision.
Revenue that repeats and revenue that recurs look identical on the P&L, and behave completely differently the moment a customer…
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.