Audit your margin. Find the leak.

Because where you bleed determines what you fix. Gross margin reveals delivery cost. Contribution margin reveals variable-spend efficiency. Operating margin reveals overhead bloat. Net margin reveals the final scorecard. A business with strong gross and weak operating margin has an overhead problem. A business with strong contribution and weak gross has a vendor problem. Looking at net alone is like checking your bank balance without reading the statement. You see the result. You miss the cause.

COGS is the direct cost of producing what you sold this month. Hosting for SaaS. Materials and shipping for ecommerce. Frontline labor for service businesses. Variable sales and marketing is anything that scales with new customer acquisition. Ad spend, affiliate payouts, commission structures, channel partner fees. Fixed operating is rent, salaried headcount, software subscriptions, insurance. If you laid off your sales team tomorrow, variable goes to zero. If you laid off your sales team tomorrow, your office rent still hits.

Because interest and tax are not operating decisions. They are downstream consequences of your capital structure and your jurisdiction. We split them out so operating margin stays comparable to industry benchmarks (which usually exclude tax). The net margin number then tells you what actually flows to the owner, after the bank and the government take their cut. Both are real. But you cannot manage them with the same playbook.

Defaults are blended from public benchmark reports (NYU Stern margins by industry, IBISWorld SMB profiles, Bessemer State of the Cloud for SaaS), restaurant and dental association data, and Nirvani's own deployment data across 200+ SMB clients. They're medians, not means. Regional cost-of-living, niche, and channel mix will move your numbers 15-25 points in either direction. The benchmarks are a starting point to flag outliers, not a target.

Industry-dependent, but here's the rough scale. Restaurants and grocery: 3-6% is healthy, 8% is best-in-class. Service businesses (HVAC, salons, auto repair): 8-15% is healthy. Ecommerce DTC: 5-10% is healthy once you scale past the unit-economics death zone. SaaS at maturity: 15-25%. Law and real estate brokerage: highly variable, often 20-40% because of low fixed cost per transaction. Anything sustained above 25% net usually has a moat (brand, IP, switching cost). Anything sustained below 5% is one bad month from break-even.

Almost always raise prices first. A McKinsey study across 2,400 companies found a 1% price increase delivers an average 11% boost to operating profit, more than triple the impact of a 1% volume increase or a 1% cost cut. The reason is leverage. Price flows almost entirely to the bottom line. Costs hit the bottom line dollar for dollar, but cutting costs hurts morale, capability, and customer experience in ways the model doesn't capture. Raise prices on new customers first, grandfather existing customers if the relationship matters, and only touch costs once pricing is at market.

Five pages. (1) Your P&L waterfall and margin stack, your numbers vs industry benchmarks side by side. (2) The leak diagnostic, which margin layer has the widest gap vs your industry and why. (3) The specific levers most likely to move your weakest margin, ranked by impact. (4) A pricing-and-packaging audit checklist. (5) Implementation roadmap, week 1 through day 90. No fluff. You'll receive it within 2 minutes of submitting the form.