Revenue growth doesn't automatically mean profit growth. Performance optimization is about understanding what's actually driving — or dragging down — your margins, and making deliberate decisions instead of relying on a blended number that hides the real story.
What this includes
Gross profit analysis — margin visibility broken down by product, customer, or channel
Customer profitability analytics — knowing which relationships are actually worth the resources they consume
Pricing strategy — pricing decisions grounded in real cost and margin data, not guesswork
Inventory optimization — the working capital tied up in inventory, managed deliberately rather than by default
Working capital — cash tied up in the operating cycle, freed up where it can be
How this works
Performance optimization starts with breaking apart blended numbers — by product, by customer, by channel — until the real drivers of margin become visible. From there, it's about turning that visibility into pricing, inventory, and working capital decisions the business can actually act on.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between this and FP&A's Business Analysis work?
There's real overlap by design — Business Analysis under FP&A tends to focus on ad hoc, forward-looking questions, while Performance Optimization is the deeper, ongoing work of restructuring how margin and profitability get measured and managed day to day.
How quickly can this surface a real problem?
Often faster than expected — once revenue and cost get broken apart by customer, product, or channel instead of blended together, problems that were invisible in the consolidated numbers tend to surface immediately.
Does this require new software or systems?
Not usually. Most of this work is about how existing data gets structured and analyzed, not about buying a new tool — though for some businesses, better tagging or categorization in the current system is part of the fix.