What should we charge? Which work should we stop chasing? Should this service become a retainer? Where is senior time being wasted?
MANDRIXADiscuss a decisionCheltenham & Gloucestershire · Working across the UK
Something is eating your growth.
It may not be sales.
Commercial strategy for founders and leadership teams of expertise-led businesses. We find the decisions underneath stalled growth: what you sell, what you charge, which work you pursue and what actually makes money.
Margin erosionBuyer uncertaintyPartner leakageCapacity misallocation
Alex RickmanFounder / Commercial decision architect
Recognise the symptoms
It may not be a sales problem.
More activity is not always the answer. For consultancies, agencies, technical specialists and other expertise-led businesses, the constraint can sit in pricing, scope, customer selection or the work consuming senior time.
01The work is winning. The margin is disappearing.
Pricing · scope · change · cash+
Mandrixa response
Margin Genome™ VIEW
- Reconstruct quoted versus realised contribution
- Separate strategic investment from preventable leakage
- Install price, scope and change-control decision rules
What changes
A deal-level erosion map and the commercial rules that stop the next project repeating it.
02The pipeline is full. Decisions keep slipping.
Buyer truth · procurement · proof+
Mandrixa response
Buyer Reality Exchange™ VIEW
- Neutral interviews with buyers, lost deals and procurement
- Internal belief versus external decision-weight analysis
- Proof, packaging and willingness-to-pay corridors
What changes
Independent evidence of what changes the decision — and what merely earns polite interest.
03Partnerships multiply. Incremental revenue does not.
Referrals · co-delivery · client control+
Mandrixa response
Ecosystem Yield & Control™ VIEW
- Partner-attributed gross-profit reconstruction
- Influence, incrementality and servicing-cost tests
- Customer, data, pricing and relationship-control map
What changes
A defensible decision to invest, renegotiate, repair or exit each material relationship.
04The pipeline is full. The wrong work gets the capacity.
Activation · technical fit · cash velocity+
Mandrixa response
Capacity-to-Cash Conversion™ VIEW
- Separate award probability from delivery readiness
- Compare contribution per scarce unit of capacity
- Set reservation, expiry and displacement rules
What changes
Capacity allocated to the work most likely to become contribution and cash — not the largest headline deal.
05The symptoms are visible. The commercial constraint is not.
Position · offer · pipeline · economics+
Mandrixa response
Commercial Decision Sprint
- Test one material commercial bottleneck
- Review a focused sample of commercial information
- Convert the evidence into one owned executive decision
What changes
Two weeks. One service line. A decision brief, one working commercial tool and a 90-day action plan.
06The decision is made. It still does not survive execution.
Ownership · governance · cross-functional friction+
Mandrixa response
Commercial Decision Mandate
- Executive decision rights and operating cadence
- Complex-deal and commercial-exception governance
- Board-ready evidence, ownership and movement
What changes
A senior commercial decision layer that remains accountable until the decision changes behaviour.
Start with one decision
Commercial Decision Sprint.
£2,500 / fixed scope
Two weeks. One service line. One consequential commercial decision. A focused starting point, not an open-ended consulting commitment.
Check whether a Sprint fits →We review a small, agreed sample of your commercial information, speak with the people who own the decision and test the available options.
A concise decision brief, one usable commercial tool and a 90-day action plan with clear owners. The tool might be a pricing model, qualification scorecard or service-line economics calculator.
One decision within one service line. Scope and information requirements are agreed before starting. Implementation and wider research are scoped separately.
How Mandrixa thinks
Commercial decisions. Not more activity.
Margin. Buyers. Capacity. Partners. Four ways to test where effort stops becoming profit. Explore our specialist life-sciences applications below.
- Mandrixa’s commercial erosion diagnostic identifies where margin is lost between opportunity, scope, delivery, change control and collection.
- Deal-level erosion ledger
- Service-line margin corridors
- Scope and change trigger library
- Procurement give / get rules
- Independent buyer and procurement evidence shows why scientific interest does not become a commercial decision.
- Buyer decision-system map
- Truth Gap heatmap
- No-decision and procurement friction
- Minimum-proof and packaging decision
- A partner-economics system separates genuinely incremental revenue from servicing cost, influence and loss of customer control.
- Partner yield / control matrix
- Incrementality and attribution ledger
- Incentive and fee waterfall
- Invest / renegotiate / repair / exit rules
- A CRO/CDMO capacity-allocation system ranks work by activation probability, contribution and cash realisation.
- Contribution per scarce unit
- Award versus activation risk
- Capacity displacement decisions
- Reservation and expiry governance
The Mandrixa method
No 80-page strategy deck. A decision you can use.
Name the executive decision, its owner and the evidence that would change it.
Rebuild what actually happened across commercial, finance, delivery, quality and the market.
Make the trade-off explicit, confidence-graded and owned at executive level.
Change a price, a scope, a customer choice, a partner arrangement or a resource decision. Set an owner and review date.
The operating standard
Selected founder evidence across prior roles
The practice is new. The commercial experience is not.
These are career-wide outcomes led by Mandrixa's founder across regulated life sciences.
From ad-hoc fees to governed commercial choices.
Built tiered audit propositions, value-based pricing, procurement give/get rules and fixed-outcome programme structures designed to defend margin.
From projects to continuous governance.
Designed QaaS and assurance ladders that convert episodic work into paid pilots, ongoing oversight and recurring commercial relationships.
Commercial structures that follow operational reality.
Developed six-figure, multi-site and inspection-critical programme options around funding horizons, delivery milestones and executive risk.
Partnerships with attribution and control built in.
Structured referral, co-delivery and technology-partner models with explicit economics, ownership, customer control and renewal logic.
Founder-led commercial decision practice
Independent enough to challenge. Experienced enough to decide.
Mandrixa is led by Alex Rickman, a biochemist and industrial biotechnologist with more than a decade of commercial experience across pharma, biotech, MedTech, CROs and specialist life-science services.
Her work spans enterprise revenue, pricing architecture, international market entry, complex commercial agreements, recurring-revenue models, partnership economics and board-level forecasting. Based in Cheltenham, Mandrixa works with expertise-led businesses in Gloucestershire and across the UK. That experience now informs commercial decisions in professional services, technical businesses and specialist consultancies, as well as life sciences. This is commercial advisory, not outsourced lead generation.
View Alex on LinkedIn →Commercial strategy answers
Questions founders ask before changing the commercial model.
Direct answers to the commercial problems that are too often treated as sales problems.
What does a commercial strategy consultant do?
An independent commercial strategy consultant identifies why specialist expertise and sales activity are not translating into sufficient revenue, margin or market share. The work typically covers positioning, pricing, pipeline quality, buyer behaviour, service architecture and commercial decision-making.
What is commercial leakage?
Commercial leakage is revenue or margin a company could reasonably capture but loses through weak pricing, positioning, qualification, contracting, scope control, delivery handoffs, partnerships or account management.
Do we need more sales activity or better commercial strategy?
More business development helps only when the proposition, target market, pricing and conversion system are already sound. If qualified opportunities stall or low-quality pipeline absorbs capacity, adding sellers can amplify the wrong commercial model.
How can a service business improve project margins?
Start by tracing quoted margin through scope, resourcing, delivery, rework and collection. Then set explicit rules for discounts, scope changes and work that consumes scarce senior time.
What does the first Mandrixa engagement look like?
The £2,500 Commercial Decision Sprint takes two weeks and focuses on one decision within one service line. You receive a decision brief, one working commercial tool and a 90-day action plan. Scope and information requirements are agreed before starting.
Bring the decision, not a consultancy brief