“Why are our costs 34% higher than industry average?”
The conference room went quiet. All eyes turned to Marcus. The CFO had just asked a simple question: “Why are our inventory carrying costs 34% higher than the industry average?”
Marcus opened his mouth. Then closed it. He pulled up a spreadsheet. Scrolled through tabs. Clicked to another report. The silence stretched from uncomfortable to excruciating.
“I’ll need to get back to you on that,” he finally said.
But he already knew the truth. He didn’t have an answer. He had assumptions. He had the way things had always been done. He had tribal knowledge passed down from the guy before him, who got it from the guy before that. What he didn’t have was data.
That night, Marcus couldn’t sleep. Not because he was embarrassed, though he was. But because in those ten seconds of silence, a realization had crystallized: he’d been managing millions of dollars in inventory based on intuition and tradition. And intuition, it turned out, was expensive.
The next morning, Marcus stopped defending the system and started questioning it. Every assumption became a hypothesis to test. Every “that’s how we’ve always done it” became “but should we?” He dug into the numbers not to justify the status quo, but to dismantle it.
Six months later, the CFO asked him another question: “How did you free up $1.4 million in capital?”
This time, Marcus had an answer. A detailed one. With data.
The Numbers Tell the Story
Inventory Turns
- Before: 3.2 turns per year
- After: 7.9 turns per year
- Impact: Capital working instead of sitting
Hidden Capital
- Before: $1.8M tied up in excess inventory
- After: $1.4M freed up for growth
- Impact: Money that could finally move
Time to Transformation
- 6 months from uncomfortable silence to confident answers
That 10-second silence changed everything. Because in that silence, Marcus stopped pretending to know and started learning to measure.
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