When two moves pull against each other
Most moves have a side effect on another number. The plan names each one, prices it, and sets a guardrail to keep it small.
Most moves have a side effect
Raise prices and a few more customers may leave. Send more calls to the cheaper carrier and you depend more on one carrier. Buy growth through partners and you pay more in commissions. A plan that ignores these side effects overstates itself.
The engine finds them the same way every time: a measure that sits on two paths to the value, helping on one and hurting on the other, is a tension. The plan names each one and prices it.
The sample’s three tensions
| Move → side effect | Before → with the plan |
|---|---|
| Pricing → customer churn each point of price firmness adds about 0.15 points of competitive churn | 4.7% → 4.38% a year |
| Gross margin → carrier dependence each point of margin won by routing moves about 2.5 points of traffic to the cheaper carrier | 50% → 60% of traffic |
| Growth → partner commissions each point of growth bought through partners adds about 0.4 points of commission load | 5% → 5.56% of revenue |
The small print under each row is the rule applied. The coupling strengths are judgments, graded C, and printed so they can be argued with.
- SPlan, side effects only described$2.00M
- 1Side effects run together−$212k
- EPlan, side effects modeled$1.79M
How to read it. The left bar is the plan if every move landed with no side effects. The red step is the engine run with every target and every side effect at once. The right bar is what is left.
Each tension comes with a guardrail
Naming a tension is only useful if the plan says how to keep it small. In the sample:
Raising prices without losing customers
Hold increases to the installed base under 4% a year, exempt accounts that are inside a term, and watch the save-request rate monthly. If competitive churn rises above 2% of customers a year, pause.
Cutting overhead without starving growth
Cutting sales commissions or marketing would lower the overhead ratio and raise the cost of growth. So the plan takes the cost out of software, professional fees, bad debt and commission structure, and leaves marketing spend alone.
Cheaper routing without one-carrier risk
Routing more traffic to the cheaper carrier raises carrier concentration, which the discount rate prices: half a point once one carrier carries 50% of traffic, a full point at 90%. Keep the second carrier above 25% of traffic.
Longer contracts without disputes
Longer terms and auto-renewal cut churn in three branches of the tree but raise early-termination disputes. Number-porting rules bar delaying a valid port-out, so saves must happen before the port request, not after.
Growth that isn’t bought with discounts
Every discounted win feeds the pricing leak, and partner-sold seats carry commission for life. Growth that costs more than a point of margin or a point of price is not worth taking.
- Detection. Computed from the whole connected structure, never assembled by hand: a measure with the same sign on several paths to the value is a shared lever; one with both signs is a tension
- Joint run. Each objective declares the inputs it pushes the wrong way and by how much per unit of its own move; the engine runs every target and every side effect at once
- Reporting. The cost of the tensions is the in-sequence plan value less the joint run: −$212k in the sample
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