“Around Ninety Something Percent” Just Cost Him the Deal

A manufacturing owner called me the week before meeting a buyer, wanting a final polish on his pitch deck. More bullet points about “operational excellence.”

I asked one question instead: what is your on-time delivery rate.

He said it was excellent. Asked for the number, he said around ninety something percent, though it depended on the month, and some of the late ones weren’t really his fault.

That is not a number. That is a vibe wearing a number’s clothes.

The buyer asked the same question two weeks later, in front of his own operations manager, and got the same answer wrapped in the same excuses. The deal didn’t collapse that day. It just got smaller, quietly, over the next three meetings, as every unmeasured claim turned into a discount.

A buyer cannot price what you cannot measure, so they price the uncertainty instead, and uncertainty is always priced against you. Every “I think” and “roughly” in a data room becomes a risk premium subtracted from your number, whether or not the underlying reality was actually fine.

I have sat with owners who could describe their culture in loving detail and could not tell me their gross margin by product line. The two forms of knowledge feel similar from the inside. Only one survives a stranger asking hard questions with money on the line.

If you do not track on-time delivery, you cannot improve it. You have no baseline. You cannot price it into contracts with confidence. And you cannot defend it under scrutiny, because a claim without a number is just an opinion, and buyers have learned to discount opinions on sight.

This isn’t a call for fifty dashboards nobody reads. Most businesses need five to eight numbers tracked properly: on-time delivery, gross margin by line, customer retention, revenue concentration. Measure those consistently before adding anything else.

The manufacturing owner went back and started tracking on-time delivery properly, weekly, by supplier. Three months in, the number was eighty four percent, worse than his guess, which is the whole point. You cannot fix a number you were too optimistic to check.

He’s back in front of buyers now, with a chart instead of a guess. The number is climbing. So is the offer.

PS: When I was working for a fashion chain, at store level we only had three metrics: sales, shrinkage, staff costs. When it is that simple and that clear, focus follows.