The group had grown by saying yes. Three generations of contracts, adjacent services, and loyal customers had produced a business that did many things adequately and nothing distinctively. Margins had eroded for six consecutive years, and every internal explanation pointed somewhere else.

Seeing the real business

We spent the first month building a picture the management accounts could not show: profitability by customer, by route, and by promise made. Roughly a fifth of the business was funding the rest. The work was not finding this — it was helping a family agree on what it meant.

A narrower firm, held more firmly

The board chose to concentrate on temperature-controlled distribution, exited two commodity segments, and repriced the long tail of legacy accounts. Eighteen months later, EBITDA was up 22% on lower revenue — a smaller company, and a considerably stronger one.