We had been losing money on a product line for two years without realising it. The diagnostic flagged it on day one. By the end of the engagement we had dropped four SKUs, renegotiated our packaging supplier, and added £180,000 to our annual gross margin. I wish we had called them sooner.
Rachel Thornton
Managing director, Thornton Packaging Ltd, Stockport
They spent a full week in our warehouse before making a single recommendation. The changes were simple: new pick routes, consolidated deliveries from three suppliers into one, and a revised shift pattern. Our cost per order dropped 22 per cent in the first quarter after implementation.
David Eccles
Operations manager, NorthWest Parts Distribution, Warrington
The diagnostic was blunt. They told us our pricing was wrong on 40 per cent of our service contracts and that fixing it would be uncomfortable because some long-standing clients would push back. They were right on both counts. We raised prices, lost two small accounts, and ended the year £95,000 better off.
Karen Mellor
Owner, Mellor Facilities Management, Bolton
Our debtor days were running at 68. Their team renegotiated terms with our top ten customers and set up a rolling cash forecast that my finance manager now updates every Monday morning. Debtor days came down to 47 within three months. That freed up enough working capital to fund a warehouse extension without borrowing.
James Whitworth
Finance director, Pennine Building Supplies, Oldham
This family-owned business makes chilled ready meals for regional supermarket chains. Revenue was £14 million but net profit had been flat at 3 per cent for three years despite growing sales. The owner suspected that two of their supermarket contracts were unprofitable but could not prove it from the management accounts.
We rebuilt the costing model from the production floor up, tracking labour, ingredients and packaging at the batch level rather than averaging across the whole factory. The analysis showed that one contract was running at negative 4 per cent margin because of a penalty clause triggered by short-dated returns. A second contract was marginally profitable but consumed 35 per cent of production capacity.
Working with the owner, we renegotiated the penalty clause on the first contract and reduced the product range on the second from twelve SKUs to seven. The factory ran fewer changeovers per week, waste dropped, and the combined effect was £310,000 in recovered annual margin. Net profit moved from 3 per cent to 5.2 per cent in the first full year after implementation.
A 45-person structural engineering practice had grown quickly after winning several large residential developer contracts. Cash flow, however, was terrible. Debtor days sat at 72, and the practice was drawing on a £200,000 overdraft facility every month to cover payroll.
The root cause was not late payment by clients. It was late invoicing by the practice itself. Project managers were submitting fee applications an average of eleven days after the contractual milestone date because the internal approval process required three sign-offs. We simplified the approval chain to one sign-off for invoices under £25,000 and introduced a shared tracker that flagged overdue milestones daily.
Within four months debtor days dropped to 51. The overdraft balance fell to zero in month five and has stayed there since. The practice director told us that the engagement paid for itself within seven weeks of the first change going live.
These figures cover all completed engagements since 2016. We update them at the end of each financial year.
Every client receives a short questionnaire eight weeks after the engagement ends. We ask five questions: Did we deliver what we promised? Was the fee fair for the value received? Would you use us again? Would you recommend us? And, most usefully, what should we have done differently?
The testimonials on this page are drawn from those questionnaires, with the client's written permission. We have not edited the wording beyond minor corrections for clarity. Where a client preferred not to be named, we have respected that and excluded their quote from the site.
The case studies were written by our team and reviewed by the client before publication. Financial figures are based on the client's own management accounts. We do not verify them independently, but we have no reason to doubt their accuracy given that we built the models together during the engagement.
If you would like to speak directly with a past client before committing to a diagnostic, let us know. Several clients have agreed to take reference calls, and we can arrange an introduction within a few days.