Pricing
You gave the discount once. It renewed four times.
A concession granted for one quarter, for one reason, quietly becomes the account's permanent price, and nobody in the building can say why.
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Growth strategy
The proposal ran to thirty pages. The person who decided read the email it was attached to.
Most proposals are written for the person you met. The decision is usually made by someone who wasn't in the…
Growth strategy
You signed twelve partners. Two of them send everything.
Partner programmes rarely fail at recruitment. They fail because signing an agreement documents a referral habit rather than creating one.
Marketing
The positioning changed. The client mix didn’t.
Narrowing your marketing without narrowing your delivery calendar buys you every cost of specialisation and none of the compounding.
Operations
You consolidated to one supplier for the rebate. The rebate is now the switching cost.
Volume rebates are usually priced as a discount. Structurally, most of them are something else entirely, and the difference shows…
Marketing
Both channels report the same CAC. One of them is buying customers you already had.
Attribution reports allocate credit for sales that happened. They are close to silent on which sales would have happened anyway,…
Operations
Revenue grew 40%. That’s why the cash ran out.
Profitable growth still has to be paid for in advance, and the bill usually arrives about two months after the…
Operations
You dual-sourced the component. Both suppliers buy from the same plant.
Two invoices from two vendors can hide a single point of failure, and the tell usually shows up in their…
Operations
The bottleneck moved. The hiring plan didn’t.
Adding people to the wrong step doesn't raise output, and in service businesses it can quietly lower it. The tell…
Growth strategy
The first city took nine years to fill. You gave the second one twelve months.
Most expansion plans budget carefully for the new office and not at all for rebuilding the thing that actually filled…
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.