For founders and leadership teams who are growing, hiring and delivering more work, but not seeing enough of it reach the bottom line. These examples show how I find where profit is being absorbed, model the commercial choices, and help turn growth into margin that holds.
Client names withheld where appropriate. References and figures available in discussion.
The business was busy. Demand was real, the delivery team was capable, and revenue kept coming in. Profit still went backwards. The instinct was to sell harder, but the numbers showed more revenue would not fix the problem unless the business changed what it was carrying.
Profit was being lost in several places at once: utilisation running below plan, pricing assumptions that flattered the work, delivery performance, hiring decisions and the economics of individual departments. No single lever explained it, which is why it kept being misread as a sales problem.
Built the evidence base showing where profit was actually going and where the strongest path back was, connecting revenue, cost, utilisation, pricing, delivery performance, hiring impact and departmental economics into one view.
Then put the findings in front of the founders as clear choices: what to fix quickly, what to stop, where to hold the line and where to double down.
The founders made the hard calls. The business refocused on its strongest commercial capabilities and stopped carrying work that could not pay its way. Profit moved from -6% to 11% in one year.
— One-year profit turnaround from -6% to 11%, driven by profitability modelling, sharper founder decisions, and a refocus on the business's strongest commercial capabilities.
The business was treating growth as the answer: more clients, more revenue, more people. The P&L was telling a different story. Pricing was set on market rates, instinct and best-case assumptions, and new work risked being absorbed by the cost base almost as quickly as it came in.
Revenue was up, operating profit was down, and the causes were compounding rather than singular: people costs, contractor spend, utilisation and pricing assumptions all moving against margin at the same time.
The business was finding out whether work was commercially sound halfway through delivering it. Everyone was busy, and the profit still was not hitting the P&L.
Built the commercial baseline from actuals, not aspiration: fully loaded cost per person, real working days and median utilisation by department rather than best months or best people. The model turned that into a cost per billable day, showing exactly what a rate had to cover before margin existed.
Then built scenario modelling on top of it, connecting revenue, people costs, contractor spend, utilisation, hiring impact and operating margin into one view, and tested the real choices in front of the business: hold the current structure, grow and hire, grow faster, or fix the cost structure before chasing more revenue.
The conversation moved from "we need more sales" to "we need better profit conversion." The modelling showed that adding people to chase growth could make the business bigger, busier and less profitable.
It also created a pre-sale decision point. Before a proposal went out, leadership could see the trade-offs clearly: price, scope, team mix, utilisation and capacity. Hold rate, change scope, adjust the team, discount deliberately or walk away. The commercial call was made at the start, not discovered under pressure.
The path became clear: fix the base first, then grow from it.
— One model, two jobs: the scenario evidence that reframed growth, and the pre-sale commercial checkpoint for every pricing, proposal and capacity decision since.
The client was coming out of a difficult experience with a previous software partner. They did not need more promises. They needed a commercial and delivery model they could trust.
A program with multiple stakeholders, competing priorities and real investment accountability. Trust had to be rebuilt through predictability, not reassurance.
Put commercial delivery governance in place. Scope, capacity, budget, risk and decisions were managed together rather than separately, and commercial and delivery decisions were made together, not in separate conversations.
The client had visibility of what was committed, what was changing and what trade-offs were required, before issues became surprises.
Decisions were made early, transparently and with the right context. Across three annual planning cycles, work was delivered under investment target, with additional value found inside the budget rather than added on top.
— Three annual plans delivered under investment target. Written client reference available on request.
Thirty minutes. If there’s no margin to find, I’ll say so.