Selected Work
Metal fabrication, contract manufacturing, consumer goods, biotech, multi-site industrials. Margin floors, covenant exposure, work center rates, supplier cost leakage, quote cycles that force pricing by instinct. These are a sample, chosen because the numbers are concrete and the problems recur.
Reserves nobody could defend, a covenant test approaching, and cost data that told a different story at every site. Reserve methodology rebuilt from transaction evidence, cost logic unified across plants, governance written down, and QofE support on a $500M merger target.
The hardest pricing problem is not what to charge a new customer. It is raising price on an account you already have, mid-relationship, without losing it. A SKU-level, EBITDA-based volume-break framework gave the commercial team a floor they could defend in the room, with supply chain financing costs priced in rather than silently absorbed.
A single work center rate structure was setting product cost and driving pricing at the same time, compressing the margin curve, masking cost differences between factories, and quietly penalizing the capital investment it was meant to evaluate. Costing and pricing bifurcated; labor and overhead rebuilt from three systems.
$408K of purchase price variance in one quarter, traced to two failure modes. Then the payoff: the company's first customer-level P&L across 30–40 national retail accounts, built on bottom-up cost and taught to the sales team so they could dial in mix at their own retailer.
Capital equipment, recurring kits, and lab services on one balance sheet, with every physical shelf configured as its own inventory location. Consolidated to a two-location bin architecture, then costed the services line from the ground up and left the variance process documented so it runs without its author.
The opposite problem to repricing an existing account: unfamiliar, low-volume, high-mix inquiries where a defensible cost card took days and touched five functions, but the customer wanted a number this week. Item master rebuilt against ERP data tables, full cost burden into the quote, and a deal-level P&L surfaced before the number goes out.
A recurring finding
More often than not, a meaningful share of the work turns out to be cost architecture nobody had scoped as pricing work, because it had never been visible as a pricing problem. Standard costs stale in ways the organization had normalized. Overhead absorption defensible on paper and misleading in practice. Freight sitting in an expense account instead of the item it belongs to. Scenario planning living in unversioned spreadsheets on individual laptops.
The practical consequence is that the cost data has to be tested before a build can be scoped honestly. That is what the Margin Diagnostic exists to establish, in two to three weeks, for a fixed fee.
Client identities are withheld throughout. Figures reflect account and engagement outcomes, held jointly with client teams. Negotiation and the organizational commitment to hold price sit with sales and executive leadership. Pipeline figures reflect quoted value at time of submission.
Is the cost data retrievable, does the chart of accounts support attribution, and will someone own the price decision? Thirty minutes is usually enough to find out.