Insights
Engagement examples, and one brief laid out in full.
A target screen that focuses a pitch. A working-capital and should-cost diagnostic that shows which cash and margin levers to test. A pre-LOI valuation bridge or risk assessment that directs the next round of due diligence.
Anonymized engagements
Research used in real work.
Anonymized examples of delivered work.
140 → 12
~140 organizations ranked into a 12-target priority shortlist.
Pilot → annual
An institutional investor expanded from a pilot to an annual engagement.
Borrower-level
Outside-in borrower diagnostics, unit-cost sensitivity and bankability checks across a direct lender's loan book — built without internal borrower data.
Portfolio-wide
Source-linked financial, operational and risk screening across an institutional investor's portfolio — issuer by issuer.
Site-by-site
Outside-in working-capital, component should-cost and site-by-site financial models for industrial, retail and energy assets — built without internal company data.
Peer-benchmarked
A leading life & health insurer's benchmarking, delivered against a defensible peer set — every comparison source-linked.
Macro → issuer
Repeatable asset cash-flow stress tests, facility cost bridges and physical-risk screening across a portfolio, every rating source-linked.
34 companies assessed
34 companies assessed against defence procurement and industrial-participation opportunities.
Within a day
Screened the list and placed every firm on one chart of opportunity against readiness, with the case for each, within a day.
Should-cost stack
Bottom-up component cost models decomposing raw-material indices, machine cycle times, labour and paid-off tooling amortization — with zero specification changes.
Branch & SKU cash
Footnote-reconciled working-capital and SKU margin diagnostics isolating excess branch inventory, trading-house markups and post-merger SG&A layers against peers.
Pre-LOI bridge
Implied equity valuation bridges and standalone carve-out reconstructions separating volume growth from channel mix and margin expansion before exclusivity.
Research experience
From the work.
Patterns our research has surfaced, anonymized. They describe what we found, not results we claim for clients.
Markets and growth
In one retail valuation, about half the value the share price implied sat in margins and asset efficiency, not new stores.
Research experience · Retail & consumer
Street-level and multi-year discounted cash flow modelling of ultra-luxury showrooms showed that vehicle sales alone never covered high-street rent, whereas seasonal brand beacons in wealth-migration corridors cut occupancy costs by more than nine-tenths while preserving customization and aftersales margin.
Research experience · Retail & consumer
Apparel profit is splitting two ways: toward brand-led premium and direct-to-consumer players, and toward scale-led, high-volume ones.
Research experience · Retail & consumer
A telecom benchmark turned acquisitions into rules: an explicit payback threshold and variance band decided go or no-go.
Research experience · Technology & telecoms
In enterprise software, shifting low-margin implementation and custom integration work to system-integrator partners lifted recurring subscription gross margins and net revenue retention simultaneously.
Research experience · Technology & telecoms
Comparing direct digital channels against physical retail networks showed digital transactions retained far more net contribution per dollar once distributor commissions, print logistics and markdown drag were unbundled.
Research experience · Retail & consumer
Reconstructing standalone subsidiary accounts from parent footnote disclosures surfaced a high-margin specialty manufacturing business hidden inside a distressed conglomerate’s consolidated reporting.
Research experience · Advisory & professional services
In mid-market commercial lending, cross-referencing plant permits and equipment registries surfaces qualified industrial borrowers long before they enter a brokered refinancing.
Research experience · Financial services
In one national market, domestic drug manufacturing met under a tenth of drug spending, with a skilled-worker shortage ahead.
Research experience
Rebuilding standalone headcount, facility utilization and operating margins for a precision engineering subsidiary inside a distressed consumer parent revealed a profitable device manufacturer masked by consolidated parent overhead.
Research experience · Industrials & manufacturing
Standard industrial classification codes missed most dual-use sub-tier manufacturers across sovereign procurement programs; capability-based graphing with geographic realism filters surfaced qualified machine shops, energetics producers and clean-room assemblers that directory screens overlooked.
Research experience · Industrials & manufacturing
Performance and cash
Most trapped cash comes out through three levers: collect faster, pay slower and hold less.
Research experience · Industrials & manufacturing
Decomposing stamped and machined component quotes into raw alloy indices, press cycle times and scrap recovery revealed buyers were still paying tooling amortization on moulds already paid off across prior production runs.
Research experience · Industrials & manufacturing
In specialty apparel, unbundling intermediary trading-house commissions and compressing design-to-rack lead times recovered more gross margin than closing underperforming stores.
Research experience · Retail & consumer
Speed can be the asset: one food processor turned its inventory many times faster than its industry, and a few days less stock was worth millions in cash.
Research experience · Retail & consumer
A metals distributor’s working-capital program closed the gap to its peers on both collection days and inventory days.
Research experience · Industrials & manufacturing
In enterprise software roll-ups, legacy version support and custom patches can absorb over half of engineering capacity before net-new features begin.
Research experience · Technology & telecoms
Mapping management spans and layers across unintegrated post-merger enterprise resource planning systems showed excess supervisory tiers between the finance chief and front-line analysts were driving the overhead gap.
Research experience · Technology & telecoms
Across colocation and digital-infrastructure operators, customer installation prepayments and extended contractor payables created a negative working-capital cycle that helped self-fund capacity expansion.
Research experience · Technology & telecoms
Margins and returns can disagree: a company can post top-quartile margins and bottom-quartile returns on investment.
Research experience
Across high-tech assembly lines and enterprise reporting workflows, active processing accounted for a fraction of a percent of total lead time while components spent nearly their entire factory journey waiting between stations, showing that parallel sub-assembly cells beat buying faster equipment.
Research experience · Industrials & manufacturing
Bottom-up component should-cost modelling against commodity indices and cumulative shipment volumes exposed paid-off mould and die amortization still billed in unit prices, alongside temporary energy and freight surcharges that persisted after spot markets normalized.
Research experience · Industrials & manufacturing
Style-level profitability decomposition at a specialty apparel chain showed that more than a fifth of core category garments carried negative contribution margins after markdowns and reverse logistics, compounded by a design-to-rack cycle twice as long as fast-turning peers.
Research experience · Retail & consumer
Outside-in organizational and systems reconstruction across post-merger enterprises surfaced deep management hierarchies between executives and front-line analysts alongside multiple unintegrated enterprise resource planning instances inflating general and administrative overhead.
Research experience · Industrials & manufacturing
Decomposing seasonal route profitability and wet-lease reliance at a leisure carrier showed that operating mixed aircraft and engine families eroded summer peak margins, whereas standardizing on a single long-range narrowbody type cut maintenance overhead by more than a fifth.
Research experience · Industrials & manufacturing
Risk and resilience
Supply-chain emissions usually dwarf a company’s own: in one agri-food case they ran about fifty times its on-site emissions.
Research experience
Tracking resin, steel and freight indices against contracted vendor prices each quarter exposed where temporary supply surcharges had remained in component invoices long after spot markets normalized.
Research experience · Industrials & manufacturing
In sustainable finance, traceability data, not membership claims, decides who qualifies.
Research experience · Financial services
At one utility, the electric business earned just over half the revenue but produced almost all of the direct emissions.
Research experience · Energy & utilities
Across industrial and energy facilities, heat-recovery and electrification projects often pay back years before capture retrofits reach positive returns.
Research experience · Energy & utilities
Borrower-level circular-economy audits across industrial, aviation, agricultural and solar operators showed that operating assets often missed credit-readiness floors not from lack of circular activity, but because metered performance, traceability and waste baselines stayed trapped inside project companies.
Research experience · Financial services
Quarterly tracking of receivables ageing, inventory turns, segment disclosures and supplier concentration across reporting cycles surfaced working-capital and margin drift well before headline earnings missed consensus.
Research experience · Financial services
Public sector
A municipal asset plan holds up only when its levels of service rest on recent, verifiable data.
Research experience · Public sector
Across comparable municipalities, capital-reserve adequacy and user-fee recovery often diverge sharply even when headline property-tax increases look similar.
Research experience · Public sector
Benchmarking operating expenses per weighted patient case across community and academic hospital networks isolated wide unit-cost dispersion in clinical supplies and operating-room scheduling that shared procurement and block-time pooling could close.
Research experience · Public sector
Institution-by-institution revenue modelling across post-secondary campuses showed that caps on international student visas created structural budget deficits of up to a quarter of operating revenue, making back-office shared services unavoidable.
Research experience · Public sector
Long-horizon pharmaceutical manufacturing analysis showed domestic production met less than a tenth of national medicine spend after decades of vaccine facility exits, pinpointing sterile fill-finish contract manufacturing and technical workforce pipelines as the binding bottlenecks.
Research experience · Public sector
How we work
We map a process before we price it: the trigger, the inputs, the steps and handoffs, where they break, and who uses the output.
Research experience · Advisory & professional services
About half of requests are for a working spreadsheet, model or slide deck rather than a written report, so we deliver in the format the team already uses.
Research experience · Advisory & professional services
Parsing multi-hundred-page public tenders into requirement-by-requirement compliance matrices and matching them against historical statements of work cut proposal scoping from weeks to days while flagging mandatory credential gates before bid budgets were committed.
Research experience · Advisory & professional services
Illustrative output
Follow the question through to the brief.
From a question to a reconciled value bridge.
A performance, working-capital and should-cost diagnostic pairs an executive brief with a live, formula-driven spreadsheet model, separating empirically sourced filing facts from model-inferred estimates.
- Provenance discipline
- Every line item is tagged empirically sourced (audited footnotes, import records, mill indices) or model-inferred (parametric cycle-time and cohort benchmarks).
- Peer cohort calibration
- Calibrated against three tiers: direct competitors, adjacent industrial distributors and top-quartile operators.
Illustrative brief. Fictional example; the format is real.
Where is cash trapped in operations, and why do unit costs and overhead trail comparable peers?
- Research question
- Reconcile working-capital days, component supplier quotes and post-merger overhead against direct, adjacent and top-quartile peers, accounting for differences in business mix and inventory methods.
- Finding · Branch working capital & payables
- Inventory days sit well above the reconciled peer median, concentrated in slow-moving regional branch stock and unbilled work-in-progress rather than lead-time buffers, while vendor payment runs settle ahead of contracted terms.
- Finding · Parametric component should-costing
- Decomposing stamped and machined assembly quotes into raw alloy mill indices (net of metallic swarf credit), press cycle times, regional labour and tooling amortization shows suppliers still billing raw-material surcharges from prior peaks and amortization on moulds already paid off across earlier shipment volumes.
- Finding · Post-merger spans, layers & ERP drag
- Back-office finance and procurement teams operate across unintegrated enterprise resource planning systems following prior acquisitions, creating excess supervisory layers between the finance chief and front-line analysts.
- Evidence & accounting reconciliation
- Built from audited filing footnotes, customs bills of lading, alloy and resin mill schedules, and peer disclosures. Where a peer reports inventory on a LIFO rather than FIFO basis, or capitalizes tooling and software differently, the accounting difference is reconciled and flagged explicitly.
- Confidence & value-creation bridge
- High confidence on branch inventory cash release and paid-off tooling clawbacks (empirically sourced from footnotes and volume schedules); medium confidence on multi-ERP SG&A delayering (model-inferred from peer span benchmarks pending internal org chart review).
- Open questions & negotiation script for management
- Which regional branches hold slow-moving stock above annual demand? Which component part numbers have exceeded their contracted tooling amortization volume? Which acquired entities remain on legacy enterprise resource planning instances?
The blog
Ideas from the research team.
Explore our published perspectives on business research, investment analysis and the decisions behind the work.
Start with one question
Bring us the question behind your next decision.
Tell us what you’re investigating and when you need an answer. We’ll discuss the scope, inputs and research that would help.