Written by M. Alvarez, Operations
When the company was three years old, we sold every gaylord we touched at a per-pound price. It made sense on the inside: our pickup trucks weighed every load, our balers spit out tonnage, and the OCC market — which is also priced per ton — was the easiest benchmark we had. The problem was that nobody outside our walls thought in tons. Procurement teams think in units. Operations managers think in pallets. CFOs think in line items. The first time a brewery's purchasing manager asked us to confirm whether a 'metric ton of doublewall' was 60 or 80 boxes, we realized we had built our pricing around the wrong customer.
The day the spreadsheet broke.
It came down to one specific transaction in the spring of 2022. A regional cannabis cultivator wanted 400 grade-A 40×48×40 doublewall gaylords delivered to a Pueblo facility. We sent the quote in tons — 7.4 metric tons, $2,840 — and the buyer simply asked, 'How much per box?' We did the math on a napkin, came back with $7.10, and the buyer thanked us, said yes, and that was that. The whole exchange revealed a simple truth: every customer wanted to know one number, we were giving them a different number, and the conversion friction was costing us deals we should have been winning.
What we changed.
Within two weeks we rebuilt the entire quote engine. Every quote that goes out today carries three numbers: the per-unit price, the number of units, and the delivered total. Tonnage still appears, but down at the bottom, in the diversion documentation footnote — where it belongs. The change took us about four hours of spreadsheet work and zero dollars in capital expense, and our close rate improved by an embarrassing margin in the following quarter.
The lesson, in one sentence.
If you sell a thing, quote in the same units the buyer counts it in. Nobody buys a hamburger by the kilogram.
“If you sell a thing, quote in the same units the buyer counts it in.”