You raised prices in the spring. Your P&L is still waiting.

You worked hard for every point of margin you have. Operations decides how much of it you keep.

Think about the price increase you signed off on this spring. On paper, it's done. The new price list went out, the forecast moved up, and everyone went back to work.

Your new pricing actually went on a bit of a quest.

Contract customers stay on their old pricing until their escalator date, and some of those dates live in a PDF nobody opens. A distributor loads the new price weeks late. A promotional allowance that was supposed to end in June is still coming off invoices in September. Deductions pile up in receivables, and nobody has the time to dispute them.

None of these is a bad decision. Each one is small enough to look like a rounding error. Together, they decide how much of the increase you approved actually reaches your P&L.

Most monthly reporting shows the margin you ended up with. Very few businesses put the margin they planned beside it, customer by customer, with someone's name attached to the difference. So the shortfall shows up as a softer quarter. It gets blamed on food costs or volume, because those are the numbers everyone already watches.

The good news is that this is money you've already earned. The pricing work is behind you. What's left is making sure the benefit is realized in your business.

This week, pull your ten largest customers. For each one, compare what you're invoicing today with what you decided they'd pay. It's usually an afternoon of work, and you'll know right away whether the increase made it all the way through.

Reply and tell me what you find. I read every one.

Thanks for reading,

Sarah