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Even today, Dayton Kellenberger marvels at his good fortune in having landed inside the corporate finance department of The Coleman Company, Inc..

Of course, like a lot of career success stories, this tale had timing as a large contributor, especially inasmuch as and a little more than 10 years ago, Coleman was experiencing declining gross margins across its business.

To Kellenberger, a recently hired business analyst, Coleman\u2019s shrinking gross margins seemed to present not only a problem-solving challenge but also an opportunity to help to rewire a renowned brand\u2019s customer best practices.   

\u201cWhen you\u2019re part of a consumer packaged goods (CPG) company, you basically have one shot at the beginning of the year to do an annual line review with a customer,\u2019\u201d explains Kellenberger, who adds that at the time, the process might have involved having a \u201cseller\u201d from, for example, Cabela\u2019s freely thumbing through different Coleman catalogs while casually signaling to a Coleman representative, \u201cOkay, we\u2019d like to sell this product.\u201d  

\u201cThe process change that we made was to get finance involved from the very beginning and have us run the line reviews so that we would create one catalog of feature products,\u201d recalls Kellenberger, who notes that the new catalog proved particularly invaluable for what it displayed internally.  

Comments Kellenberger: \u201cBecause we could see what a product\u2019s margin was from the previous year and compare it to the current one, we could flag low-margin products, consider replacement products with higher margins, and sometimes even sunset certain SKUs.\u201d

Kellenberger believes that the resulting price volume analysis exposed the previous risks of making business decisions based on analysis that had historically seldom penetrated beyond the customer or product category level.

\u201cWhat we learned at Coleman was that a single SKU at a single customer could be responsible for dragging an entire product category down,\u201d remarks Kellenberger, who reports that the analysis also exposed the alarming fact that Coleman had at times unintentionally been replacing high-margin products with lower-margin newer ones.

Looking back, Kellenberger observes that Coleman\u2019s margin decline turnaround might have had a different outcome had the manufacturer not rejected certain popular theories.

At the time, Kellenberger remembers, one management team member attributed the decline to \u201crising prices in China,\u201d while another suggested that the downturn was due to \u201cmanufacturing snags in the U.S.\u201d

Says Kellenberger: \u201cThis all began with a debate that was rooted not in fact but in emotion.\u201d \u2013Jack Sweeney