Businesses with flat or falling margins
Revenue holding up while profit does not.
Business Advisory & Finance
Profit Improvement
Analysis of pricing, margins, overheads, labour costs and working capital to identify opportunities to improve profitability.
Overview
How we help with Profit Improvement
Revenue growth is the expensive way to make more profit. Most businesses have several percentage points sitting in pricing, mix and overhead that cost far less to recover.
We take your figures apart by product, service line, customer and channel to see where margin is genuinely made and where it is quietly lost. Underpriced work, unprofitable customers, discount leakage, labour utilisation and creeping overhead all show up in that analysis and rarely show up in the headline P&L.
You get a ranked list of opportunities with the value and difficulty attached to each, so the work starts with the ones that pay quickly.
What's included
Everything covered in this service
This is a focused diagnostic and action-planning service for pricing, mix, margin, overhead and operational profit drivers. It is not routine financial reporting and does not transfer management decisions to an adviser. Reliable trends may come from management accounts, selected measures can be tracked through KPI reporting, and ongoing senior decision support may fit a virtual finance director arrangement.
- Gross margin analysis by product, service, customer and channel
- Pricing review and discount leakage analysis
- Overhead and cost base review
- Labour cost, utilisation and productivity analysis
- Working capital and cash conversion review
- A ranked improvement plan with values and owners
Who it's for
Built around how you actually operate
Businesses with wide product ranges
Where averages hide very profitable and very unprofitable lines.
Service businesses
Consultancies and agencies where utilisation and scope creep drive the result.
FAQs
Profit Improvement: common questions
How long does a profit review take?
A focused review typically takes two to four weeks depending on the quality of the underlying data and the number of product or service lines involved.
What if our bookkeeping is not detailed enough?
That is common. Part of the work is often restructuring how income and cost are coded so margin can be seen properly going forward.
What do we receive from a profit-improvement review?
The agreed output can include analysis of margins and cost drivers, prioritised findings, measures to monitor and an action plan showing which assumptions need testing. It is separate from routine management reporting.
Who is responsible for implementing the recommendations?
Management retains responsibility for commercial decisions and implementation. We can help quantify options, track agreed measures and review results, but operational changes remain under the business's control.
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Let's talk about Profit Improvement
Tell us where profitability is under pressure, what decisions are available and how revenue and costs are currently analysed. We will agree the diagnostic scope, outputs and review point.
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