Real businesses, real margin

What I did

1. Brought five years of sales together in one place.
2. Costed 600 product lines, including staff time and machine costs.
3. Built a dashboard for the team and a list of opportunities.
4. Costed every task for a year, to show where machinery would pay back.
5. Put carriage on small orders: about £100k a year of extra sales, against a delivery cost they were already paying.
6. Built a phone app for the sales team: customer scores, upsell lists and new prospects.
7. Quarterly margin reviews.

Client-reported. Built from the client's invoice data and checked by the owner. It excludes stock movements, so it won't match the statutory accounts exactly.

Portion control fixed, low-margin best-sellers reworked, and head-office costs brought back in line with the size of the business, with a new system to run it.

Roland was enthusiastic, knowledgeable and always on the end of the phone or an email for support and guidance. Brilliant man.Duncan McGregor, Managing Director. Roland is my full name.

Every line costed down to the sub-recipe. The gift lines made 8 points more margin at production (MAP) than the rest of the range, so gifting became the focus, and six clear priorities followed.

Two production units brought into one, tighter shop staffing, and the range moved towards products that pay once staff time is counted, like the doughnuts. Its figures stay private.

Live cost tracking used to re-set the prices, and a new TV shopping channel won, worth about £10k a year in sales.