Ursa Major Stratégie-Conseil
Ursa Major’s approach draws on management experience and knowledge acquired over the past fifteen years. It connects issues across the business, makes assumptions explicit and establishes follow-up. The leader retains responsibility for the choice and its implementation.
Ursa Major starts with what is happening in the business: the available numbers, signals from the field, constraints and decisions already made. Facts, interpretations and assumptions are separated to clarify the question and identify missing information.
Money, people, operations, the market and technology affect one another. Ursa Major examines those connections so that a decision in one area does not create a problem elsewhere. Planning for growth or developing the leadership team means considering these dimensions together.
The analysis should include the options that truly exist: act, wait, test or maintain the status quo. The criteria are explicit, calculations are reproducible and the level of uncertainty is named.
Analytical tools, including artificial intelligence when its use is appropriate and protected, may support the work. They do not replace the advisor’s judgment or the owner’s.
A look at the reasoning
Fictional case. The company, its services, its volumes, and the ratios, gaps and ranges are all fictional; they illustrate the method.
A business-services company with fewer than 50 employees bills each file per unit delivered; its costs are almost entirely the hours of salaried professionals. Its services sell at good prices, clients are loyal, measured quality is improving and complaints affect fewer than one file in a thousand. Yet net income for the year is negative. The leader wonders where to cut.
Using the available data sources, recalculate margins from existing files: direct margin per file, gross margin and net margin. Check the share of files with negative margin. Break down paid hours that are not tied to any billable file, comparing several periods. Cross-check accounting, the operations system and the quality management system: the gap between these measures helps guide the search for lost margin.
The 18-point gap between direct margin (53%) and accounting gross margin (35%) points the investigation toward hours not tied to billable files, without definitively ruling out pricing or the portfolio mix. Before cutting costs or revising prices, the recommendation is to test adjustments to quality control according to the demonstrated reliability of each service and each person, with a sampling safety net, and to proceed through a limited pilot project rather than a general directive, since an earlier attempt failed for lack of structured roll-out. The potential gain is bounded between C$37,000 and C$71,000 a year: the low end corresponds to the control ratio returning to its historical low, the high end to a broader adjustment scenario. It is an estimate, not a realized gain.
Track monthly the control-to-production ratio, volume-weighted quality and the share of volume below threshold, to detect any deterioration in quality and adjust or stop the pilot project. Also track two signals the leader was not looking for: client concentration, with five clients accounting for roughly three fifths of revenue, and the delay between opening a file and starting production, which went from three to six days.
Ursa Major does not practise public accounting and does not provide legal or tax advice. Deliverables are intended for internal management use. They are not an audit, review or compilation engagement, attestation, or opinion on financial statements. They do not guarantee an outcome. These boundaries protect the quality of the relationship and make responsibilities clear.
What I do not do
Before we speak
No. I work directly with the business leader without taking part in managing the team. The team retains all its responsibilities.
Yes. Their work is often a starting point. I work alongside them without encroaching on their role or providing public accounting services, legal advice or tax advice.
The next step
Bring the decision as it stands, with what you know and what you are missing. An hour is enough to see whether an outside perspective could help.
Request an initial conversation60 minutes, at no cost and with no obligation.
