Losses On Brandt

Since it’s now long in the past I’ll share this little gem.

This is a print of a spreadsheet that I did at the end of 2004, just over five months of Brandt work, to illustrate to D&G (at the time) just how much it was actually costing to service Brandt products. Whilst Brandt is, from what I can gather, pretty much unchanged and probably still a loss-making brand to cover the same equations will apply to other work where things don’t go quite to plan.

The figures are on a PDF HERE

The £26.92 was the cost for an engineer to ring the doorbell based on my costs and overheads, what is demonstrated is the losses incurred due to a low first completion rate. In this case through product diversity and poor support leading to that low completion rate.

The point of it is that if your gut tells you that something’s not working then it very likely isn’t, but you have to sit down and analyse the costs to prove and argue your case. Here the losses were so bad as to actually tempt me to drop D&G altogether, which I didn’t want to do, just over one brand as it turned the whole contract with D&G into a loss making exercise. I would not have been aware of that had I not done this and it proves that, whilst D&G is generally a good contract the old tired argument of “swings and roundabouts” in this instance was certainly not working in my favour at all.

K.