Operations
Revenue is up 30%. Cash is down.
Profitable businesses run out of cash most often while they are growing: the mechanism is arithmetic, not mismanagement, and it has a ceiling worth calculating.
Rialto Bridge
Operations
Articles on operations.
Operations
Every KPI is green. Revenue is flat.
When the dashboard reports success and the P&L doesn't, the problem is rarely effort: it is usually the way the…
Operations
Debtor days are 45. The invoice went out twelve days after the job finished.
Collections gets the attention because it is the only part of the cash cycle most businesses measure. The expensive days…
Operations
The margin looks healthy. The rework is booked as overhead.
Every job clears its target margin, yet the profit never arrives. The gap is usually sitting in a cost line…
Operations
Headcount is up 40%. Billable hours are up 12%.
When a delivery team grows fast, output almost never grows in step, and the missing capacity is usually hiding in…
Operations
Utilisation is 85%. Lead times have doubled.
Nobody added work and nobody left, yet the queue keeps growing, because the line between how busy a team is…
Operations
One supplier is 40% of cost of sales. The last time you tested the price was 2019.
Concentrated supply rarely fails loudly. It fails by quietly removing your ability to know what anything should cost.
Operations
Every project is bespoke. The last twelve were 80% the same.
Service firms defend customisation they don't sell and can't price. The interesting question is which fifth of the work actually…
Operations
The role has been open five months. The spec has eleven must-haves.
A long requirements list feels like rigour. Arithmetically it is a decision to stay unstaffed, and it rarely improves who…
Operations
Stock cover is 14 weeks. Nine SKUs are 80% of sales.
Aggregate stock turns can look respectable while most of the cash sits in lines that barely move, and the usual…
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.