Operations
You said yes once. It’s a product line now.
Variety gets added one customer at a time and paid for all at once, in lead times, quoting errors, and the attention of the people you can least spare.
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Growth strategy
Your biggest customer is a third of revenue and most of the discount
Concentration costs more value than the percentage suggests, and two businesses with identical exposure can be priced very differently.
Operations
Your worst ten jobs wrote your reputation
Reputation isn't an average of your work: it's a sample drawn from the extremes, which changes which improvements are worth…
Operations
The metric predicted revenue until you started paying for it
A leading indicator that worked for two years can stop working the week it lands in a bonus plan, and…
Operations
You bill in thirds. Your costs don’t arrive in thirds.
Milestone billing is usually set by convention. The cost curve underneath it is set by the work, and the gap…
Marketing
The channel that closed the sale didn’t create it
Your cheapest acquisition channel may simply be the one standing closest to the decision, and the reporting that flatters it…
Pricing
Your three tiers have one real price
Almost everyone buys the middle package. That looks like product-market fit, and it is usually something else entirely.
Operations
You set the utilisation target at 90%. The queue set the delivery date.
Billable utilisation and delivery reliability are usually treated as separate metrics. In practice, one of them quietly determines the other,…
Market analysis
Everyone on the shortlist is reliable
Firms often invest hardest in the attribute that only earns them a place on the list, and treat the thing…
Pricing
You sold certainty and charged for effort
Every fixed price is an insurance policy written by the supplier, and most quotes contain no premium for the risk…
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.