Engagements delivered for private equity ownership and inside a PE-backed, multi-unit industrial manufacturing and distribution group, from commercial strategy through to acquisition support. Client confidentiality is absolute; the method and the impact speak for themselves.
Fragmented demand across a vast SKU range, high part churn, and multiple business units on separate systems. Margin visibly on the table, but invisible at line level.
Built a normalized data layer across all trading units, layered segmentation analytics on top (customer tiers, repeat-versus-occasional buying patterns), and put pricing tools in the seller's hands at the point of quote.
A step change in quoted margins within months, compounding into exceptional annualized margin gains across the group, with pricing established as the single steepest lever on enterprise value.
A substantial inventory position accumulated by habit, with no line-level answer to "why do we hold this part, and this much of it?"
An accuracy-first rebuild: classified every SKU by demand frequency and revenue class, quarantined unreliable data rather than guessing, and sized min/max levels per SKU with service coverage as the single deliberate lever.
A major share of inventory capital identified as releasable at the chosen service standard, with the cash and service trade-off quantified at every coverage level, so the decision belongs to management, not the model.
A meaningful share of sales earned margins far below quoting policy. Was it operations failing, or commercial choices? Nobody could say.
Fingerprinted the ERP cost mix of every weak-margin line: excess subcontract on made parts, machine time on parts that should be pure resale. Filtered out lines with a normal cost mix, since those are pricing decisions, not quality failures.
A material annualized cost of poor quality, the bulk of it carrying a genuine operational fingerprint, now a KPI operations owns and improves, with the commercial remainder routed to pricing.
A high-volume quote pipeline, a newly implemented CRM, and no evidence-based view of where the business actually wins.
Cleaned and deduplicated the pipeline, then analyzed win rate by quote size, workstream, and customer tier, identifying champions, value leaks, and the deal sizes where win rates collapse.
A focused commercial strategy grounded in the data, and a repeatable win/loss review the sales team now runs from its own CRM.
Industrial quote volumes priced by hand: slow, inconsistent, and consuming the commercial team's most skilled hours.
Deployed AI-assisted quotation and auto-costing tooling wired to the pricing policy, so speed and discipline arrive together.
Substantial skilled time returned to the commercial team every year, with every quote priced on policy, not memory.
Ownership targeting exit within the hold period, with real operational wins that weren't yet legible as a repeatable, buyable system.
Built the board data section and value-creation narrative: near-term benefits landing now and long-term benefits a buyer can apply across a wider platform, with every figure verified to source.
A board-adopted narrative and reporting cadence, from weekly chairman scorecards through to board packs, that keeps the value story current all the way into the process.
An attractive add-on target with a confident CIM, and a deal team that needed the commercial story tested before the price was set.
Rebuilt the target's revenue and margin picture from its own data: growth quality, customer concentration, product mix, and operational trajectory. Mapped customer overlap with the existing platform, sized cross-sell and footprint synergies honestly, and ran structured customer referencing.
A clear-eyed view of what the platform was actually buying, a synergy case built to survive the first year of ownership, and a post-close commercial growth plan ready on day one.
Softening intake in a core end market, heavy customer concentration, and a strategy conversation running on anecdote rather than evidence.
Diagnosed the intake decline from the order book itself, separated market movement from share loss, and built the response: diversification across business models and end markets, business development performance tracking, and a pricing and margin discipline to protect the core.
A chairman-adopted commercial strategy with named actions and owners, reviewed on a standing cadence, with new-account generation and pipeline performance now measured instead of asserted.
Weeks to a quantified opportunity, from data you already have.
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