Operations
The offer is a product. Delivery still runs it as a project.
Most productisation efforts standardise the price and the pitch while leaving the cost curve untouched: a combination that can be worse than staying bespoke.
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Pricing
The average margin is 38%. Nothing you sell earns 38%.
Blended margin is an arithmetic artefact of your sales mix, and it can improve in the same quarter that every…
Marketing
The lead cost £40. Working it cost £400.
Cost per lead is not a cost. It is one component of a cost, and often the smaller one: which…
Operations
The contract renewed itself. Nobody chose to keep it.
Most supplier spend is not decided at signature or at renewal: it is decided by a date in a clause…
Pricing
You offered 2% for early payment. They took the 2% and paid in forty days.
Early settlement discounts are the one price cut most businesses hand over without negotiating anything in return, and usually to…
Leadership
The room agreed with you. You spoke first.
Consensus that arrives quickly is often a report on the order people spoke in, not on what the group actually…
Operations
You’re 90% booked. That’s why the work is late.
Chronic lateness in a busy firm is rarely a discipline problem. Past a certain level of utilisation, the arithmetic turns…
Operations
The contract was signed in March. The renewal was decided in April.
Churn gets dated to the month a customer leaves. The decision usually belongs to a much earlier period, when everything…
Pricing
You fixed the scope. The client still sets the cost.
Productised services promise repeatable margin on a fixed deliverable, yet the same product delivered twice can cost wildly different amounts.…
Pricing
You lost on price. It was the cheapest thing for them to tell you.
Price is the most frequently recorded reason for a lost deal and the least informative one, and acting on it…
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.