02 — Case study
The company had demand. It had projects. It had customers. Revenue still was not the full story. Some work paid. Some work consumed time, coordination and working capital without comparable return. The business did not need more projects. It needed better ones.
A Bengaluru studio working across custom furniture and interior projects, for clients who wanted made-to-measure rather than catalogue. Customisation was the offer. It was also the source of cost, delay and margin leakage if it was not priced and selected with discipline.
The company had grown by saying yes. Opportunities arrived; the team took them. That built a book of work. It did not build a model. Pricing drifted from project to project. Profitability was rarely visible before a job was accepted. Custom requirements produced costs that only showed up in execution. Effort clustered on the wrong work. There was no shared rule for which projects to pursue.
Some jobs looked large on the quote and thin once drawings, site coordination, rework and working capital were counted. Others were smaller, cleaner, and actually left money in the business. Without a project-level view, the team could not tell those apart until it was too late to change the terms.
Top-line growth could look healthy while the mix quietly got worse.
Looking at total revenue hid the economics. The useful view was the project and the offering: value, cost, execution load, degree of customisation, and the margin that remained. Until that was visible, “winning” a project was not a commercial decision. It was a sales reflex.
The shift we needed was from can we win this? to should we take this?
We analysed the book at project and offering level — not only company-level revenue. That showed where the company created genuine economic value, and where it was trading complexity and time for turnover.
From there the work was commercial design: pricing principles, minimum thresholds, a split between high-value and low-value work, and a view of which offerings could be standardised without killing the brand of custom.
We defined which customer segments were strategically attractive and built a simple evaluation frame for new opportunities — so the next yes or no was not a gut call in a WhatsApp thread. That frame covered value, likely cost, degree of customisation, strain on the workshop and site team, and whether the job sat above a commercial floor.
Project-level profitability became something the founders could see before they committed capacity, not after the site was finished. Saying no became a strategy, not a personality trait.
The business gained a clear view of its economics and the work it should prioritise. Founders had a stronger basis for pricing, accepting projects and allocating the team — a path to profitable growth rather than growth at any cost.
Key outcome: A commercial filter for which projects to take — not a fuller pipeline at any margin.