Pocket Margin Diagnostic

This checks whether you actually control your unit economics, or whether rising sales are hiding the fact that you don't.

In a product business, a record top line can sit on top of a margin that's quietly leaking. Volatile freight, shifting labor costs, unmonitored waste, unallocated overhead — volume climbs while the money you keep per unit shrinks. This finds where that leak is before it turns into a cash crunch.

What You'll Need — three parts of margin control:

• Fully Loaded COGS & Landed Cost Precision: every penny it takes to build, land, and deliver a product, counted at the unit level rather than buried in broad operating expenses (OpEx).

• Customer & SKU-Level Contribution Analysis: which customers and products actually make money once you load in their true cost. The high-volume distributor or the popular variant can look like a win and earn nothing after discounts and handling. Knowing the real number per account tells you where to set a discount floor before you agree to the next bulk order.

• Pricing Agility & Yield Protection: whether you can defend margin in real time when a supplier raises prices or when yields drop to defects, scrap, or returns.

Your Results — three tiers of margin control:

• Tier 1: Margin Mastery. Margins are managed with real data. Fully loaded COGS is computed monthly, landed cost maps to individual SKUs, and volume tiers protect the bottom line even when the market moves.

• Tier 2: Margin Erosion. Strong product-market fit and real sales momentum, but the pricing underneath hasn't been reviewed in a while. Static annual Bills of Materials (BOMs), fixed and variable overhead blended together, inbound freight trapped in OpEx, guessed discount thresholds — you're scaling blind, and the leaks compound.

• Tier 3: Profit Blind Spots. Pricing by gut. Direct labor and waste allowances ignored, discounts handed out to close deals, volume chased on the assumption that scale fixes profit. You may be losing money on your largest accounts right now, which means more sales only speed up the crisis.