Rung 01
Margin Diagnostic
2–3 weeks · fixed fee
A scoped read of your pricing and cost data: what is knowable, what is broken, and what the margin opportunity actually looks like once the numbers are trustworthy.
Pricing · Cost Intelligence · Commercial Finance
Most manufacturers cannot see the margin on their own products.
Cedar Faire builds SKU-level pricing frameworks and cost intelligence systems for PE-backed manufacturers and CDMOs in the $50M–$500M range — constructed directly against your ERP transaction data, not assembled on top of a slide.
Representative outcome
A $650M PE-backed global CDMO, largest strategic account.
26% → 36.2%
Gross margin on a $32M strategic account, following adoption of an EBITDA-based volume-break framework.
~$5.1M
Estimated annual recurring gross profit impact across the account.
9% → 23%
Gross margin on a second portfolio, same framework applied.
Figures reflect account outcomes, not sole individual contribution. Contract negotiation and the organizational commitment to hold price were led by sales and executive leadership. What the framework provided was the defensible, data-backed floor that made those decisions possible to make — and possible to hold.
The problem
Your ERP was configured for accounting, not for pricing.
Native ERP reporting rolls cost up to a level that is useless for a commercial decision. Overhead absorption is stale. Supply chain financing terms get absorbed silently into margin instead of priced into the contract. Standard costs were last updated when the tariff schedule looked different.
So pricing gets made on instinct, defended with a spreadsheet nobody trusts, and renegotiated from a position of weakness. Then a raw material line moves 14% and there is no mechanism to pass it through.
This is not a strategy problem. It is a data architecture problem wearing a strategy costume.
What Cedar Faire does
Three engagements. Each one leaves a working system behind.
Rung 02
Pricing Framework Build
8–12 weeks · fixed fee
The full build: SKU-level pricing model, EBITDA volume-break formula, cost intelligence layer against ERP transaction data, and implementation support with your commercial team.
Rung 03
Fractional Commercial Finance
Monthly retainer
Ongoing pricing governance, quarterly re-forecasting, and commercial decision support — senior judgment on retainer without a senior headcount on the org chart.
Why this is different
Most pricing advice arrives as a recommendation. This arrives as infrastructure.
Financial models do not build controls. Excel does not fix a broken cost structure. The gap between what the deal thesis promised and what the business can actually execute is where value gets created or destroyed.
Cedar Faire's principal has spent fifteen years inside the ERP, not adjacent to it — designing cost-intelligence repositories with governed schemas, building unit-economics platforms that executives actually open, and standing up pricing engines that survive contact with a sales team under quota pressure.
That matters for one reason: a consultant who cannot build the system will hand you a deck describing the system. You will then spend nine months and a systems integrator's fee discovering the deck was wrong about your chart of accounts.
Every Cedar Faire engagement ends with something operable in your environment, documented well enough that your controller can defend it to a board, an auditor, or a lender in diligence.
Built for
- PE-backed manufacturers and CDMOs, $50M–$500M revenue
- Sponsors in the first 90–180 days post-close, establishing financial credibility
- CFOs and CCOs who cannot get product-level margin out of their current stack
- Commercial teams renegotiating a strategic account without a defensible floor
- Businesses absorbing tariff, FX, or raw-material moves they cannot pass through
Not built for
- Companies looking for a benchmark study or a market-pricing survey
- Organizations that want a recommendation without a data build behind it
- Engagements where no one at the executive table will own the price decision
- Pre-revenue or sub-$25M businesses — the fee will not pay for itself
Start with the diagnostic.
Thirty minutes, no deck. Bring your ERP, your cost structure, and the account that is bleeding. You will leave the call knowing whether this is a data problem, a governance problem, or a negotiation problem — whether or not you engage Cedar Faire.