Recorded, billed, banked
Money leaks twice on its way to the bank: once as a write-down before the invoice, once as lock-up after it. The write-down is bigger, and nobody signs it off.
UK median lock-up is 134 days, not the 93 the search results give you. And no UK survey publishes realisation at all.
📐 Architecture servicesBusy isn't profitable
Utilisation says how busy the studio is, not whether the fee covered the cost. Effective multiplier, fee burn by RIBA stage and lock-up say the rest.
Utilisation stayed flat at 72% while the effective multiplier moved from 2.44× to 2.61×. Only one of those is margin.
🍽️ Restaurants & barsThe two-point gap
Theoretical versus actual food cost, prime cost against the 60% ceiling, and what £100 of delivery revenue is really worth after commission.
A two-point gap between theoretical and actual food cost is worth £188k a year on £9.4m of sales.
How to read these
Every worked example is a composite built from public UK benchmark data, not a named client. The benchmarks are cited and linked at the foot of each piece; the arithmetic is shown so you can run it against your own figures.
They're written for two readers at once: the partner or owner who wants to know what the number is worth, and whoever runs the systems it has to come out of. If you want to talk through what your own systems could produce, book a discovery call.