The problem wasn’t the costs. It was which customers we were serving.
Twenty-two months as a budget planning assistant at a confidential small music company. A routine look at the books turned into a question about revenue mix, and the answer changed what the company chose to sell.
This case is presented anonymously to protect commercially sensitive information. Identifying details and source extracts are not reproduced; only the evidence necessary to explain my analysis is included.
A small company that looked like a cost problem.
The company ran public concerts and smaller education programmes. Profitability was thin, and the working assumption was that costs had crept out of control.
I planned and tracked the event budgets, so I was the one holding the numbers. When I sorted them by event type instead of by expense line, the assumption stopped holding. Costs were roughly proportionate to activity. What varied was the margin on each engagement.
The real issue was revenue fit. Most of the company’s time was going into the work that contributed least per hour.
How I got from receipts to a decision the company acted on.
Four steps, and one assumption that turned out to be wrong.
Make the numbers comparable first.
The company first needed a consistent way to record and report. I designed a recording and reporting structure so revenue and cost could be traced to individual events instead of being pooled into monthly totals.
Check whether costs were actually the problem.
I compared budgeted against actual cost across the period and looked for overruns. The disparities were real but modest, and they did not account for the margin pressure. That result mattered mainly because it ruled something out: cost discipline was not where the recovery was going to come from.
Find where the margin actually lived.
Sorting the same data by engagement type showed a wide spread. Private engagements carried materially higher margins and more predictable costs. Public events carried lower margins, more variance and heavier fixed commitments, but they were also what gave the company its public presence and its pipeline.
Rebalance, don’t abandon.
The tempting recommendation was to drop public events entirely. I argued against it. Public work was doing something the margin analysis could not see: it built visibility and reputation, and it brought in the private bookings. I recommended shifting capacity toward higher-margin private engagements while deliberately retaining roughly 30% of activity as public events.
What happened after they adopted it.
Share of activity deliberately retained as public events, against the higher-margin option of dropping them.
Long enough to see a recommendation adopted, and to see what happened in the quarter that followed.
The company acted on the recommendation. The decision was theirs; the analysis and the argument were mine.
One company, one cycle. The result is real, but I cannot yet call it repeatable.
- The timing supports the claim, but there is no counterfactual, so no proof of cause.
- One company, one cycle. Not yet a repeatable result.
- Next test: the same reasoning where I don’t control the bookkeeping.
Title. Revenue-mix and margin analysis — Confidential Small Music Company, Ho Chi Minh City.
Author. An Quach — sole author of the analysis. The decision to adopt was the company’s.
Date. March 2023 – December 2024.
Why. It is the only work here where my analysis led to a decision someone actually made.
Career relevance. Shows commercial analysis influencing a real operating decision.