The words
we use.

The way we read work inside a company: learn, change, improve. Not three separate services but three moments of the same path: you learn to read the company, you change what does not hold, you improve what works. Then it starts again, because the market does not stand still.

The sequence that links our work: every service page says where you come from and where you go next. It is not a catalogue to pick from, it is a spiral: whoever enters at any point sooner or later passes through the others, and when they come back to the first one the company is no longer the same.

Strategy is the direction: where you want to get and why. Tactics are the how: the concrete moves, in the right order, with the resources you actually have. Strategy without tactics stays an intention; tactics without strategy are agitation. Their relationship is the craft.

The three ways a product reaches its buyer. Traditional distribution goes through independent shops, each with its own choices. Organised distribution groups autonomous outlets under shared brands and buying centres. Large-scale distribution is made of single-brand chains. Everything changes: who sets the price, who holds the stock, how much a single order matters.

The phases a product goes through on the market: introduction, growth, maturity, decline. It serves to understand that the same actions do not always work: the price, the sales push and the investment that make sense at launch make no sense at maturity, and whoever does not notice defends a product the market has already left.

How much of the value a company produces actually reaches the buyer, and how much is lost on the way. A product can be better than another and not appear so: if value is not transferred — from product to channel, from channel to customer — it stays a cost incurred and not recognised.

A price is always two numbers together: how much margin each unit leaves and how many units are sold. On their own they say nothing. A high margin on a product that does not turn is worth less than a modest margin on one that does, and the sum is always a multiplication, never one column read alone.

Margin used as a lever to obtain something, not as a number to defend. You give up a point on one product to enter an account, to move stock, to get a new line tried. It is a commercial choice with a stated objective — the opposite of a discount decided case by case in front of the customer.

The set of what you sell, read as a set and not product by product. Margin is made on the mix: some items pull revenue, others hold the margin, others hold the customer. None lives alone, and removing the one that "does not pay" often brings the others down too.

How the price list becomes commercial action: what you push, in which period, with which lever and towards which channel. It is the step most often missing — a well-built price list stays on paper if nobody decides how to take it to market.

Contribution margin is the difference between the revenue of a sale and the variable costs that sale generates. It is what contributes to covering fixed costs and, beyond those, to producing profit.

Formula: contribution margin = revenue − variable costs.

It is read in three ways. Unit: on a single item — a product sold at 100 with 60 of variable costs has a unit contribution margin of 40. Total: unit margin times quantity sold. Percentage: margin divided by revenue — in the example, 40%.

The practical meaning is that a high markup is not enough to make profit: profit is margin times volume, and a generous margin on a still product is worth less than a modest one on a product that turns.

The break-even point is the sales level at which revenues cover all costs exactly: above it you make profit, below it you make a loss. It is calculated by dividing fixed costs by the unit contribution margin, and it says how many units must be sold before the company starts to earn. It is the first number to know before deciding a price or an investment.

A business plan is the document that translates an entrepreneurial idea into numbers, timing and resources: what you want to do, for which market, with which investments and expected returns. It serves to decide even before it serves to ask: banks and partners are its readers, but the first recipient is whoever must understand whether the plan holds.

A business plan is made of market analysis, revenue model, financial plan and operating plan. The term business planning indicates the continuous activity of planning, not the document: the plan is a photograph, planning is work that never ends.

Templates and outlines are everywhere; what no template gives you are the assumptions, and that is where a plan holds or falls.

Management control is the system by which a company measures what it does while it does it: what each product, order and customer costs, and how much margin it leaves. It is not accounting — that says what happened according to tax rules — but a decision tool, built to fit how that company works.

Whoever uses it stops discovering results when the books close and starts correcting while the year is still open.

Management consulting is the support given to a company's leadership on decisions that concern the whole business: organisation, markets, resources, margins. It differs from specialist consulting — tax, legal, IT — because it does not solve a technical problem: it helps to decide.

It is also written as management advisory or executive consulting: they are the same thing.

Strategic consulting works on the direction of the business: which markets to serve, with what offer, in what position against competitors and with which resources. It looks further than organisational consulting, which works on how the company is built inside, and it is usually where a path begins.

Organisational consulting works on how the company is built inside: who does what, who decides, how information moves and where work gets stuck. It touches roles, responsibilities and processes — not people as such, which is the ground of human resources consulting.

Business reorganisation is the review of a company's structure — roles, responsibilities, processes, sometimes corporate arrangements — to bring it back in line with what the company must do today. Its practical meaning is that it is not about moving boxes on a chart: it changes who decides what, and for this reason it only succeeds if leadership backs it all the way.

Pricing strategy is the criterion by which a company decides what to charge: not a calculation on cost, but a choice that holds together the value recognised by the market, the position against competitors, the channel and the margin needed.

The classic approaches are three: cost-based, you start from what you spend and add a markup; competition-based, you look at what others do; value-based, you start from what it is worth to the buyer. The first is the most common and the one that most often leads to a price that exists in the price list and not in the market.

Positioning is the place a product occupies in the buyer's mind, relative to the alternatives: who it is for, what it serves, why it costs what it costs. The company does not decide it alone — the market does — but the company can build it, through price, channel, language and what it chooses not to be.

A product without positioning is not neutral: it gets positioned by others, usually on price.

Stock turnover is the speed at which a product sells and is replaced: how many times, in a period, the stock of that item empties and is rebuilt. A fast-turning product ties up little capital and frees it quickly; a slow one locks money away even when the margin is good.

It is the concept behind the sentence that recurs in our pages: a generous markup on a product that does not turn is worth less than a modest markup on one that does. Margin is always measured together with turnover, never alone.

Willingness to pay is the maximum price a buyer accepts to bear for a product, before giving up or choosing an alternative. It does not depend on production cost but on the value that person recognises, in their context and with their alternatives in front of them.

It is the starting point of how we build a price list: you start from the end, from the price the consumer accepts to pay, and work back along the chain to the company margin. Cost tells you the floor; willingness to pay tells you the ceiling.

The value chain is the sequence of steps through which a product reaches its user, where at each stage someone adds value and keeps a margin: production, distribution, resale. Looking at it whole shows where value is really created and where it is consumed instead.

It is what we do when we say that every step has its margin and you rebuild backwards to yours: a retail price out of line with the market rarely originates inside the company, it originates along the chain — and without looking at all of it you cannot tell where it was lost.

A cost centre is the unit to which costs are attributed so they can be read: a department, a job, a product line, a customer. It answers the question general accounting does not — not how much did we spend, but where.

It is the tool that is missing when some jobs or customers look like they are losing money but nobody can measure it: without cost centres the sum only adds up at company level, and the product eroding the margin stays invisible inside the average.

Variance is the difference between what was planned and what happened: on revenue, on costs, on margins. It is not an error to justify at year end — it is the signal that allows correction while the year is still open, provided somebody measures it regularly.

It answers the situation we describe as: you invoice more but you do not earn more. Without comparing plan and actual that sentence stays a feeling; with variance it becomes a number, and a number can be attacked.

Delegated authority is the formal attribution of the power to decide: who may sign, spend, hire, grant a discount, and up to which limit. It is the difference between a company where decisions are distributed and one where everything returns to the owner's desk.

When we say a reorganisation changes who decides what, this is what we mean: not boxes moved on a chart, but authority actually given — because a role without authority is a title, and whoever holds it will keep asking permission.

A job description is the document that states what a position does: activities, responsibilities, who it reports to and who it coordinates with. It describes a post, not a person — which is why it survives when the person changes.

It is the written form of the question who does what, the first we ask in a reorganisation. In companies where it does not exist, duties have settled by habit: somebody does something because they already did it, and nobody can say whether they still should.

Barriers to entry are the obstacles that make it hard to enter a market where others are already present: required investment, skills, licences, supply contracts, established buying habits, switching costs for the customer. They are not always economic — often they are relational.

They are the first thing to measure when considering entering a new market: an attractive market with no barriers is attractive to everyone, and a market hard to attack is also hard to defend for those already in it.