Leadership
Two people can approve it. Neither of them will.
Most stalled decisions in a growing business are not contested: they are unowned, and the mechanism that creates them is easy to miss from the top.
Rialto Bridge
The bridge to the knowledge you need
Research, frameworks and market analysis from our consulting practice: written up for small and medium business owners and enterprise teams alike.
Free to read: all you need is an account.
Create a free account Sign in
Operations
The job spec says eight years. The work needs two.
Most roles are specified by their hardest task and consumed by their most common one, and the gap between the…
Technology
The system went live. Everyone still keeps the spreadsheet.
Eighteen months after go-live, the real answer still lives in a workbook on someone's desktop. That isn't a discipline problem,…
Operations
The unit price fell 6%. The order quantity tripled.
Volume discounts are the easiest saving in the business to evidence, and the hardest to work out whether you actually…
Operations
Utilisation is 87%. Nobody has a code for rework.
The most expensive activity in most service businesses is doing things a second time, and it is the one activity…
Operations
You’re 60% delivered. You’ve billed 30%.
A project can be profitable on every line of the P&L and still drain the bank account for four months.…
Leadership
The risk register has forty lines. None of them has changed a decision.
A risk register that has never altered a budget, a contract term or a refusal isn't governance: it's a document…
Pricing
The retainer went unused. That’s why they cancelled.
The client who consumed least was the easiest to serve, the best for margin, and the first to leave, and…
Market analysis
Your largest client is 40% of revenue. The risk isn’t losing them.
Concentration is usually insured against as a single catastrophic event. The costs it actually imposes arrive quietly, monthly, and long…
Pricing
You raised the day rate. They booked fewer days.
Every price has two parts: a number and a unit. Most margin conversations argue about the number, which is 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.