Gross margin: the quickest test of pricing power
Why gross margin is often the first number to check when judging a business, what high and low margins usually signal, and how founders can design for healthy margins.
10 min read
Insights
Practical reading for business owners.
Articles on operations, manufacturing, engineering, decision making, finance and business. Organised by subject, so you can find what matters to you.
All articles
Housing booms: what drives them and how to read them
Housing is most households' largest asset and a major driver of the economy. What pushes house prices up, how to judge whether a housing boom has become stretched, and what it means for businesses.
10 min read
How people decide: emotion, reason and what neuroscience really says
Sales training often says buyers decide with a primitive brain. The real science is more interesting. What we know about emotion and reason in decisions, and how to sell honestly.
10 min read
Institution or people? Where the profits of a service business end up
In some service businesses customers trust the organisation; in others they trust individuals. That difference decides who captures the profit, and it shapes how service businesses should be built.
10 min read
Involving the people who will deliver your strategy
Build a planning process that includes decision-makers and implementers, surfaces practical constraints and turns shared discussion into clear, supported commitments.
13 min read
Learning from experts: imitation learning and its limits
Systems can learn by copying expert demonstrations. How behavioural cloning, cascading errors, expert correction and inverse reinforcement learning work, and what they teach about know-how.
10 min read
Learning from small numbers: estimating rates with Bayesian thinking
How to estimate conversion rates, defect rates and success rates when you only have a little data, using priors, pseudo-counts and honest uncertainty instead of misleading percentages.
10 min read
Borrowing against a boom: leverage, equity withdrawal and risk
Rising asset prices make it easy to borrow against homes and investments. How leverage magnifies gains and losses, why boom-time borrowing is so risky, and how to keep it safe.
10 min read
Listening: the most under-trained skill in business
Most of us believe we listen well, few of us were ever taught how, and our minds wander faster than people speak. What that means, and four practical ways to listen better in customer conversations.
10 min read
Looking ahead: tree search, rollouts and planning by simulation
When problems are too large to solve completely, decision makers plan from the current situation by looking a few steps ahead. How lookahead, rollouts, Monte Carlo tree search and re-planning work.
10 min read
Managing opportunities: identify, qualify, satisfy, solidify
A practical four-stage way to manage sales opportunities, from finding the right people to keeping customers long after the first sale, and what each stage asks of you.
11 min read
Notes on prototyping early
Why rough prototypes are often more useful than polished ones, how to decide what each prototype should learn, and how to keep early tests cheap, quick and honest.
11 min read
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