$400K+
Gross profit opportunity identified and structured: levers, owners, metrics, and dates
1st
Single measurement location in the business’s history, built where none existed
+35%
The average order value lift the goal demanded: $30.89 to $41.76
Weekly
Clear, actionable, data-driven steps for the overwhelmed, max-capacity owner, on a feasible weekly cadence
Before
A business running entirely on gut feel
The business was not profitable, and the owner framed the coming year as make or break. His diagnosis was capacity: he was maxed out and needed outside direction, and a recent tax change had reopened a wholesale channel that had been minimized for years, so the growth was there if he could handle it.
The Sage Advisory assessment reframed the problem. This was not a capacity problem alone: adding more sales was not going to repair the damage the bottom line was incurring. Within the capacity umbrella, no data measuring infrastructure existed, and not one metric was being measured anywhere in the business, so every decision ran on the owner’s gut feeling: customer purchase trends, pricing, staffing, ordering, and the season itself. A cidery, a bistro, an orchard, and a boutique grocer: four revenue lines under one roof, and no way to say which of them actually paid the bills.
The Project
Build the first measurement location
The scope ran on two tracks: the Profitability Project, a diagnostic and an implementation, and a full rebrand with renovation running alongside. The profitability work was a full financial review across all four revenue lines, benchmarked against four sectors at once: hospitality, retail, agriculture, and wholesale alcohol. The centerpiece was the first single measurement location the business had ever had: a consolidated Levers sheet and an owner-facing dashboard, fed by a weekly Monday routine that pulls net sales, transactions, and items sold from the point of sale, and labour cost and cost of goods from the accounting system, with the labour schedule added to the same weekly pull. Baselines were established where none existed.
Structure followed the measurement. A target model set the year’s revenue goal from the prior year’s actuals, with average order value and labour optimization thresholds set to match it. Every goal the model demanded was then structured into his day-to-day business: a Monday routine for the inputs, a weekly owner update for the decisions. That structure is what eased the load on his capacity and took the uncertainty out of the week.
The Outcome
The data spoke while there was still time to act
Once the dashboard went live, with the seasonal reopen underway, the numbers started to tell the story, in real time. The average order lift was not fully landing, and the data showed it before the season paid for the miss: repriced items, discounting habits, and product mix were suddenly measurable instead of assumed. Labour cost was running high during the ramp, and the spike sat in black and white rather than surfacing at year end. Ahead of the busiest stretch of the year, capacity itself was flagged as make or break, with the specific profit levers identified.
By engagement close, the picture the business had never been able to see was on one page: a profit gap of more than $400,000, identified and structured, with levers, owners, metrics, and dates attached to closing it. Identified and structured. The number exists, the plan to collect it is defined, and the collection is now an easy trigger to pull within the owner’s capacity.
That is what a measurement location buys: not a dust-collecting report for the shelf but a living tool to align each week’s business activities with the owner’s own goals. Every week, you’re making measurable gains towards what you want from your business.
One number is a finding. The other is a result.
Here, the work was finding the number: a profit gap of more than $400,000, identified and structured, with levers, owners, metrics, and dates. By the end of the project, in the closing update meeting, the owner himself was promoting a 15% year-over-year sales increase. For KFS Plumbing, the same method produced motion: average job value up 46% in one summer, deposits on every job, and clients booking weeks out. Read the KFS story.
In 4 weeks, you have the definitive answer, not a suggestion: the constraint found, the gap priced in annualized gross profit, and one to three levers, each with an owner, a metric, and a date.
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