At Harms, we protect the privacy of our clients. All case study Calibrations are anonymized to protect our partners' brand. What you’ll read here reflects real interventions, systemic truths, and outcome shifts, without compromising the relationships that made them possible.
Despite over 30 years in business and $2.9 million in annual revenue, a beloved Canadian food-retailer couldn’t consistently make payroll for 50+ staff without shuffling cash week to week. The brand was strong. Customer loyalty was high. But their margins weren’t holding.
Leadership suspected deeper structural issues but couldn’t isolate the problem. Before any restructuring or growth planning could begin, they needed an end-to-end view of what was draining profitability, and a plan to stabilize both cash and confidence.
Despite decades in operation, the partner lacked a unified lens to understand where any why margin was eroding. The data existed, but the patterns, causes, and corrective levers were hiding in plain sight.
Harms delivered a forensic financial diagnostic and SKU rationalization strategy, revealing the structural drivers behind the partner’s margin erosion. Through product-level analysis and operational modeling, we identified the clearest paths to recovery, retiring low-margin SKUs, optimizing pricing, bundling for lift, and anchoring a new margin architecture to guide future decision-making.
This engagement spanned both our Reset and Scale tiers, delivered through the Execution Performance Diagnostic and Capital Efficiency & Burn Optimization Diagnostic. These frameworks were used in tandem to decode margin erosion, isolate cost leakage, and reframe revenue opportunity through a capital efficiency lens.
Signal Diagnoses
Harms conducted a full forensic review across revenue, discounting, and SKU performance, revealing structural drag and hidden inefficiencies across locations. The product portfolio lacked guardrails, leading to margin dilution and operational bloat. We introduced a tiered SKU strategy, and a phased audit plan aligned inclusive of pricing elasticity analysis with executive decision leverage.
This was not a repositioning, it was a reset. The SKU portfolio became the lens through which waste, dilution and brand misalignment could be addressed systematically.
Harms outlined a clear path to reclaim 30-40 percentage points in gross margin by surfacing hidden cost leakage, rationalizing SKUs, and realigning pricing strategy.
The organization now has the tools and clarity to make surgical cost cuts, simplify operations, and re-anchor margin performance. By translating raw financials into strategic insight, Harms enabled leadership to move from reactive troubleshooting to proactive margin management.
Rather than treating product selection as a mechanism solely for merchandising, they now have a lens to view it as a lever of profitability, privileging high-performance items, constraining portfolio sprawl, and steering toward sustainable growth.
This remains an active engagement for a broader operational audit scoped for rollout.
High revenue doesn't always mean high performance. If your margins are eroding despite steady sales, the issue isn’t effort, it’s architecture.
This engagement proves that even long-standing, beloved brands can suffer from silent cost leakage and product complexity that drag down profitability. But with the right diagnostic lens, recovery can begin quickly.
Harms can help you surface margin erosion, decode operational drag, and architect a model that privileges performance without compromising brand integrity.
Time-to-shift: 1 month (Phase 1), 3-6 months for the full operational overhaul (Phase 2)
Author: Jesse Harms, President
Human-led. AI-assisted. Always accountable.
#Tier(s): Reset and Scale
#Engagement Name(s): Execution Performance Diagnostic and Capital Efficiency & Burn Optimization Diagnostic
#Sector: Food & Beverage, Retail/DTC, Mission-Led Ventures
#Competencies: Cost & Margin Optimization, Product Line Rationalization, Strategic Pricing & Bundling, Operational Audit Design, Retail SKU Velocity Analysis, Financial Triage & COGs Analysis, Margin Architecture
#Inflection point: Burn Rate Pressure, Margin Collapse, SKU Creep/Complexity Drag, Brand Dilution, Break-Even Vulnerability, Founder Fatigue
