Your best markets are subsidizing your worst.
In most multi-site businesses, a small group of markets, contracts or customers earns most of the profit. Most of the rest roughly breaks even. And a different small group quietly consumes what the first group earns.
Your company P&L combines all three into a single number. That number cannot tell you which market to fix, which contract to renegotiate or which line to close. Those decisions live one level down, and that is where I work.
The total hides the decision
Trips, the volume metric in one such business, finished the year up 1% across five large operating units. As a single number, that is a business that has stopped growing.
The total argues for taking cost out of all five. The units argue for fixing one and leaving the rest to run. Same data, opposite instruction.
Report the company. Manage the units.
What that has produced
Two calls about specific units: a business and a workforce. The fuller record is on the About page.
−$3.6M → +$1.4M
EBITDA at Falck Northern California, turned in fourteen months as its CEO. The organization restructured for accountability, the leadership team rebuilt, and utilization up 10% from reshaping shifts and cutting dead hours.
Wages up, overtime down
Base pay raised so the market could hire and hold people. Headcount followed, overtime fell as a share of wages, and volume grew because there were crews to run it. Total labor cost rose: the extra spend was adding capacity rather than paying overtime.
Tell me what you are working on.
A short description of the situation is enough to start.