Case Study 2: Industrial distribution · 2 years
A multi-division industrial distribution platform — four operating groups, roughly $700 million in revenue at the start of the period. This is a business Bill ran. The results below are his operating record, not an advisory engagement.
Four divisions, four cultures, four ways of pricing. Margin performance ranged from the high twenties to the low sixties depending on which business you looked at, and nobody could say how much of that spread was structural and how much was simply unmanaged.
Case Study 2: Industrial distribution · 2 years
The same system, run across all four divisions at once so the comparisons meant something. Segmentation identified the profitable core in each division, on the same basis, for the first time.
Discipline was applied wherever margin had drifted — which turned out to be most places. Two-thirds of the total gross margin gain came from simply catching up on pricing that had been left alone for years.
Quad-based rules stopped the non-core tail from consuming resources the core needed, and the overhead that freed up was reallocated to growth rather than removed. The remaining third of the gross margin gain came from this work.
The number that matters is not the total. It is that all four divisions moved within 50 basis points of each other. A single division improving is a good leader. Four improving together is an operating system.
EBITDA
Revenue
Gross margin overall
Total margin improvement
Division 1 (bps)
Division 2 (bps)
Division 3 (bps)
Division 4 (bps)
Revenue scale
Timeframe
Margin movement
EBITDA movement
Dominant lever
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