Free Tool
The Question Engine
fifteen questions · rules, not models · verdicts in 30 seconds
Executives do not want dashboards; they want answers to the questions they already have. The engine takes the fifteen questions that govern a specialty food brand’s operating margin and answers each one with a verdict, one chart, and the three numbers behind it.
The questions that keep a specialty food CEO up at night are not mysterious. Should I fire my biggest customer? Can I afford this retailer launch? Which SKUs should die? Where is my trade spend going? What would a recall cost me? They are finite, recurrent, and answerable — and they go unanswered because each answer gets treated as a custom analytical project instead of a standing capability. The build never happens, so the Monday meeting runs on numbers somebody remembered rather than calculated.
The engine is deliberately not an LLM. Every verdict is produced by explicit, readable rules with documented thresholds. A CEO reads the answer in thirty seconds; a CFO who wants to audit the logic can read the rule that produced it, line by line. Transparency is the product.
The worked example is Cinderhaven Provisions — a fictional $25M specialty food brand with 50 SKUs across 6 contracted retailers. The data is synthetic, so every verdict can be shown in full. The question set, the rules, and the thresholds are exactly what the engine runs on real numbers.
What a verdict looks like
“Should I fire my biggest customer?” returns: “No, but renegotiate.” Over the trailing twelve months the account produces $412K in contribution after a $187K deduction tail, which ranks third in the portfolio. The deduction rate runs 2.1x the portfolio average, and 62% of it traces to shortage claims disputable with better ASN data.
One chart shows contribution by account with the deduction overlay. Three numbers anchor the verdict: $412K contribution, $187K deductions, 62% traceable to data errors. A link leads to the full worked analysis behind the rule. No dashboard to interpret, no SQL to write, no analyst to brief.
Thirteen of the fifteen questions run live today; two link out to their source tools while their native verdicts are in development. Each question is a doorway into the deep-dive piece behind it — the same analyses documented across this portfolio.
When the questions are known, rules beat exploration
“Should I fire my biggest customer?” resolves to arithmetic: pull the account’s gross revenue, subtract trade commitment, subtract trailing-twelve-month deductions by category, subtract compliance chargebacks, apply the cash conversion timing cost, and compare the resulting contribution to what the same capital earns in the next-best account. That is not a discovery exercise. It is the same math worked through in Channel Profitability & Capital Allocation →, encoded once and run on current data.
The operational questions underneath work the same way. “Is my product data going to break at Walmart?” runs the field-level checks behind the Chargeback Prediction & Prevention engagement; “Which SKUs should die?” applies the SKU Portfolio Audit scoring. The engine compresses each full deliverable into a thirty-second read, with the deep dive one click away.
What you get
Fifteen questions, each phrased the way a CEO would ask it, each answered with a one-sentence verdict, one chart, and three numbers. Every threshold documented, every rule readable, every verdict reconciled to the worked analysis it came from. Pick the question your Monday meeting cannot answer and read the verdict in the time it takes the meeting to argue about whose number is right.
Verdicts, not dashboards
A brand’s operating decisions are finite, and finite decisions can be encoded. The full argument — why fifteen questions cover the operating margin and why rules beat BI projects at this scale — is in CPG analytics is fifteen questions →
Start in writing.
A few minutes by form — no call. Tell me which question your Monday meeting cannot answer, and I’ll write back with the rule that answers it: the inputs it needs, the thresholds it applies, and what it would take to run it on your data instead of Cinderhaven’s. No deck, no obligation.