Profitability analysis consulting for businesses in Chicago, Gurnee, Libertyville, and across northern Illinois.
SixFiftyThree Consulting LLC is a data and profitability consulting firm serving small and mid-sized businesses across northern Illinois. Profitability analysis is the structured work of identifying which products, customers, or channels actually generate margin versus which ones quietly absorb it. Most business owners track revenue and total cost; few have visibility into segment-level profit.
Revenue looks reasonable, but the money never quite adds up. One product line appears to be carrying the others. Nobody knows which. A major client takes significant service hours every month, but the margin on that account has never been measured. These aren't unusual situations. They're what happens when a business grows past the point where a single P&L tells the full story. The cost of not knowing is concrete: pricing decisions made without knowing the true cost to serve, investment decisions based on volume rather than margin, and cash flow that stays inconsistent despite a growing top line. The problem isn't the business itself. The problem is the visibility gap between what the numbers show and what is actually driving them.
Every engagement begins with the business as it actually is, not a generic framework imposed from outside. We work from your data, your structure, and the specific question you need answered.
We identify what financial and operational data the business already holds, where it lives, and whether it's clean enough to analyze at the segment level. You gain a clear picture of what is measurable right now and what needs to be addressed before analysis can run cleanly.
We translate the core business question, "Where are we actually making money?", into a structured analytical frame, defining the product lines, customer groups, or channels that will be measured and compared. You gain a defined scope so the analysis stays focused rather than sprawling.
We quantify how much of any revenue or margin change comes from pricing decisions, volume shifts, or changes in the sales mix. This is the core diagnostic tool that separates genuine margin improvement from accounting flattery. You gain a factual explanation of what is actually driving your numbers.
We build segment-level models that assign revenue, cost, and margin to specific products, customers, or channels. You gain a ranked view of which parts of the business are contributing margin and which are consuming it, at a level of specificity a blended P&L can't provide.
We deliver findings as a practical report you can act on, not a dense deck. You gain specific next moves: where to reprice, which segments to grow, and which relationships or product lines to reconsider based on their true margin contribution.
Business owners want to know what this costs before they get on a call. That's a fair question, and the honest answer is that it depends on a few things that vary meaningfully from one business to another. There is no published price here not because we are being evasive, but because quoting a number before understanding the engagement would not be honest scoping. It would just be a number.
The factors that drive scope are practical. The current state of the business's financial data matters most: clean, centralized records reduce scope considerably, while siloed or inconsistent data across systems adds diagnostic work before analysis can begin. The number of product lines, customer segments, or channels being measured shapes the effort significantly. A business with three products and one customer type is a fundamentally different engagement than one with fifteen SKUs selling through several channels. Whether the work is a one-time diagnostic or an ongoing advisory relationship changes the structure. And how clearly the business can articulate what decision the analysis needs to support makes a real difference: the tighter the question, the faster the answer.
You have likely already tried the obvious things before landing here: reviewed your P&L, asked your bookkeeper, and pulled a sales report. None of those tell you where margin lives at the product or customer level, because they aren't built to. A P&L shows you the total; it doesn't tell you which 30% of your customer base is generating 80% of your net margin and which relationships are silently costing more to serve than they return. That gap between the summary and the underlying reality is what this work fills.
SixFiftyThree doesn't produce a generic financial summary. The engagement builds a margin model specific to the client's business structure. Price volume mix analysis separates pricing decisions from volume changes from mix shifts, so a business owner knows whether revenue improved because they raised prices, sold more, or shifted toward higher-margin products. Segment-level attribution assigns real margin to each product line, customer group, or channel, not a blended average that masks who is actually profitable. The businesses we work with across Libertyville, Gurnee, and the broader Lake County region are typically mid-sized operations where these distinctions have never been surfaced in a usable form.
A P&L shows total revenue minus total cost. Profitability analysis goes further. It breaks margin down by product, customer, or channel so you can see exactly which parts of the business are earning versus which are absorbing resources. A P&L tells you what happened; profitability analysis tells you why and where.
It depends on the complexity of the engagement. The timeline depends on how clean and accessible the financial data is and how many segments need to be analyzed. A short diagnostic call at the start gives us a clearer picture of what is realistic for a specific business.
Not necessarily. SixFiftyThree has worked from exported spreadsheets, QuickBooks files, and combinations of both. The starting point is understanding what data exists and in what form. From there, we determine whether it's workable as-is or whether a short data cleanup phase is needed before the analysis can run.
That's often one of the outputs, yes. Margin-level attribution frequently reveals that a small number of products or customers are generating most of the profit, while others contribute little or nothing after true cost to serve is applied. The findings inform pricing and mix decisions. What you do with them is always the owner's call.
Every inquiry gets a reply, usually within one business day. Start with a short conversation, no commitment required.
Schedule a profitability conversation