Operations
Every function hit its target. The company missed.
When every departmental number is green and the consolidated result isn't, the fault is rarely effort: it's usually in how the target was divided up.
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Growth strategy
The pipeline is 3x covered. Two-thirds of it stopped moving in March.
Pipeline coverage measures how much is open, not how much is moving, and the gap between those two things is…
Operations
The lead time averages four weeks. Your customer plans for seven.
Hitting your average delivery time can still leave customers treating you as unreliable, and quietly pricing that unreliability into what…
Pricing
The contract rises with inflation. Your costs rise with wages.
Indexed contracts feel like protection against inflation. In a labour-heavy business, the index and the cost base drift apart every…
Pricing
You fixed the fee. Nobody fixed the inputs.
Productising a service moves delivery risk onto your side of the table, while the largest driver of that risk stays…
Operations
Onboarding is free. It’s the reason delivery is at capacity.
The cost of getting a new customer working is paid by the delivery team, which is why it never appears…
Growth strategy
The client left in month eleven. The decision was made in week two.
Churn is a lagging indicator with an unusually long fuse: which is why the reason you recorded is rarely the…
Pricing
You offered 2% for ten days. The people who took it were never going to be late.
An early-payment discount looks like a cash flow fix. Its arithmetic points the other way, and it tends to be…
Market analysis
Satisfaction is up. The unhappy customers stopped answering.
A rising satisfaction score with a falling response rate is not good news: it is often the first clean signal…
Growth strategy
The pilot worked. It was staffed by the two people you can’t clone.
A successful pilot is often the weakest evidence in the pack, and the number most rollout pricing quietly gets built…
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.