In this solo instructional video, Lara Guevara expands on her previous tutorial about recalculating landed cost after the July 24 reset and presents three concrete operational actions to mitigate the ripple effects of a cost increase on a brand’s Q4 performance. She argues that a cost rise is only a supply‑chain issue for about 45 minutes; after that it becomes a cash‑flow, promotional, merchandising, and customer‑service problem that most brands fail to address holistically. The three moves are: (1) recalculate landed cost on a regular schedule and maintain a simple variance log that records the date and new cost each time; (2) negotiate better payment terms with suppliers before taking on inventory debt, leveraging existing relationships to obtain net‑30/60 terms instead of costly external financing; (3) obtain written confirmation of production timelines from suppliers each month, rather than relying on outdated lead‑time quotes. Lara then traces how a single landed‑cost change cascades through finance (cash‑buffer assumptions), marketing (promo depth and potential loss‑making sales), merchandising (budget allocation to resilient SKUs), customer experience (price‑change communication), and fulfillment (order sizing and receiving slots). She highlights the common failure where each function works off a different version of the number, leading to misaligned decisions. The solution is a single SKU‑level sheet that defines repricing thresholds, assigns clear ownership, sets recurrence, and is shared across finance, marketing, merchandising, and operations. She provides an implementation checklist (naming the rule, assigning an owner, scheduling reviews, documenting location) and ties the process to Michael Gerber’s three‑step loop of finding a better way, measuring it, and embedding it into the system. The video ends with a call to build the sheet, assign responsibility, and schedule the review, promising a follow‑up on why ops and marketing often hold different numbers and a 15‑minute meeting that resolves it.
Chapters
Last week I showed you how to recalculate your landed cost after the July 24th reset. A lot of you actually did it, which thank you. And then a lot of you sent me some version of the same sentence. Okay, it went up, now what? So here's the thing I got wrong for most of my career. I thought that was a supply chain question. So it's not. A cost increase is a supply chain event for about 45 minutes. After that, it's a cash flow problem, a promo problem, a merchandising problem, and a customer service problem. And most brands only ever staff the first 45 minutes of it. I'm Lara, this is Move Supply Chain, and today, 3 operation moves that are actually operations. And then I'm following that one number out into the rest of your business because that's where the money generally gets lost. So this 3 moves, not 7. Move 1, recalculate on a schedule and keep a variance log. I said the schedule part last week. The log is the part I skipped, and it's better than the schedule. Every time you check, write down the date and the number. That's the whole log. 11 seconds. What it buys you is the difference between, I think our costs are creeping up, and here's exactly when it started. One of those sentences you can act on. The other one is a feeling. Move 2, have the supplier terms conversation before you take on any inventory debt. When cash gets tight from a cost increase, the instinct is to go find financing. A credit line, a cash advance, something. But the cheapest capital you have access to is usually sitting inside a supplier relationship you already have. In the form of payment terms you never asked for. Net 30 instead of deposit plus balance. Net 60 if you've been reliable for a couple of years. That conversation cost you one email. The loan cost you interest for the next 3 years. Move number 3, confirm production timelines in writing this month. Not the lead time you were quoted in 2024. Not the one from January. Sourcing hubs are dealing with their own version of this disruption, and a supplier under pressure doesn't volunteer that their timeline slipped. They quietly deliver late and hope you don't notice until it matters. Now, that's the supply chain part. Genuinely, that's it. Everything else people put on this list— the cash buffer, the repricing rule, the promo coordination— those are not supply chain moves. They're business decisions that supply chain number triggers. Which is where I want to spend the rest of this. So say your landed cost on your top SKU went up by, for example, 10%. Watch what one number now has to do. It hits finance first. Your Q4 cash buffer was built on an assumption, and if you built it against the gentlest of the 4 resets we've had since February, you built it wrong. Rebuild it against the worst realistic swing you've actually seen this year, not the average. If the new number is uncomfortable, that discomfort is your information. Then it hits the marketing, and this is where I see the most expensive mistakes by a wide margin. Marketing is a planning queue for promo depth of cost numbers somebody pulled in. If your real landed cost moved and the promo calendar still says 30% off on that SKU, you've just planned a quarter of selling at a loss, and it will look like a good quarter the whole time it's happening because revenue looks fine, and that's the trap. It hits merchandising next, and in most brands your size, that's the same person wearing a different hat, which is exactly why it gets skipped. Not every SKU moved the same way. Some of your catalog barely flinched, and some of it got hammered. If ad spend is still spread evenly across everything like nothing happened, you're funding acquisition on your worst budgets. Rank the SKUs by margin resilience. Point the spend at the top of the list. Now, if it hits customer experience, because if you're changing a price, somebody has to explain it, and the worst possible day to write that explanation is the day you need to send it. Write it now while nothing's on fire. Then it's in the folder instead of being drafted in a panic by whoever happens to be closest to the inbox. And if it hits a fulfillment because a repriced or resized order changes what you told your PPL to expect, and receiving slots in Q4 are not something you want to be renegotiating in week 2 of November. Now, one number, 5 decisions. Now, here's the actual problem, and it isn't that any of these 5 is hard. It's that in most brands, those 5 decisions get made in 5 separate rooms on 5 different days using the 5 different versions of the number. Ops know the real cost on Tuesday, marketing founds out in October, finance finds out when the P&L closes in January. A previous client told me last month, and I'm quoting her, we had our best revenue quarter ever and I still almost missed a payment. Best quarter ever. That's not a bad operator. That's 5 functions each doing their job well against a different number. So here's the fix, and it's one sheet. For every SKU, decide in advance, if landed cost goes up by less than this percentage, we hold price and absorb it. If it goes up by more than that, we reprice. Write the threshold down per SKU before you're on a call with a supplier under pressure Making the call live for the first time. Now that's the difference between a strategy and a reaction, but honestly, that's not the part I care most about. The part I care about is that this sheet is the only document in your business that finance, marketing, merchandising, and ops can all read and get the same answers from. Marketing doesn't have to ask ops whether a promo is safe, They read the sheet. Finance doesn't have to guess at the buffer. They read the sheet. It isn't a supply chain document. It's a shared language that happens to be written in supply chain. If you build one thing from this video, build that. Now, the owner's test. Same 4 questions as last week applied to the sheet you just built. What it's called? Who runs it when you're not in the room? When does it recur and on whose calendar? Where is it written down? Let me be specific about the second one because within this particular sheet, it's the one that decides everything. The person who owns their pricing rule should probably not be you, and it probably shouldn't be whoever runs ops either. It should be whoever is closest to the margin because they're the one who feels it first when the rule is wrong. In a lot of brands your size, that's the finance person or the founder wearing the finance hat, which is fine as a starting point as long as you're honest, and that is the starting point. And the recurrence matters more than the thresholds do. A repricing rule received once and never again becomes wrong quietly over about a quarter, and nobody notices because it's still being followed. A rule that's followed and wrong is worse than no rule because it has authority. Michael Gerber's version of this is a 3-step loop: find a better way, measure whether it's actually better, then build it into the system so nobody had to decide again. Most of us are pretty good at step 1, and we almost never do step 3. Step 3 is what turns your good judgment into something a team can run without you. So this week, name the rule, assign it to a person, and say the name out loud to them. Don't just think it. Put the review on their calendar. Write it in one page. Now, if you want to pressure test your specific thresholds, ask AI Lara. Links in the description. Next week, why ops and marketing almost end up holding 2 different numbers and the 15-minute meeting that fixes it. See you Thursday.
