Revenue Went From $2M to $5.5M. His Income Didn't Move.
Operatus nearly tripled revenue in a single year. Chris Fezza took home no more than the year before. The reason was sitting in the difference between his best project margin and his worst.
September 29, 2026
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1 min read
Operatus is a revenue operations firm, about 50 people, working with B2B companies from 50 to 5,000 employees.
For the first five years Fezza tracked one number, top-line revenue, and said yes to most things. When the work piled up he hired senior people, on the assumption that experienced people need less oversight and produce better work. Then revenue went from $2 million to $5.5 million in twelve months and none of it reached him. It went into cost of delivery.
What he found when he finally looked project by project was that no two engagements were making the same money. One large project, roughly $800,000, he could only staff about 40% of internally. The rest went to subcontractors, it came back needing rework, the timeline stretched, and the finished job cleared about 15% gross margin. Two people on the same kind of work could be running at 10% and 60%.
The fix wasn't effort. He hired a delivery leader and standardized what the firm sells into packages with defined hours, so scoping stopped being invented each time.
Why it matters to you.
Most founders track an average gross margin, and the average is exactly where the problem hides. A firm averaging 45% could be at 45% on everything, or running 60% on half the work and 30% on the other half. Those are two different companies. The first has a pricing model. The second has a scoping problem it's paying for out of its good projects. Growth tells you which one you are, expensively. Sell more work at a consistent 45% and your income climbs with revenue. Sell more work when the spread is 30 points wide and you mostly sell more of the cheap end, because the cheap end was the work that was easiest to say yes to. That's the version where revenue nearly triples and nothing reaches the owner. What closes a spread isn't discipline, it's packaging. A defined package has a defined shape, a defined team and a defined price, so the margin is decided before the work starts instead of discovered after it ends. Custom-scoping everything guarantees the spread. One caution. Tight isn't automatically good. A band of 20 to 25 across the board isn't a firm with control, it's a firm that priced everything wrong consistently. You want the band narrow and the level where you want it, in that order.
“There was a lot of variability. Some of those projects were 55-60% margin, some of them were 35, and now we're much more in the 40 to 50 range across the board. - Chris Fezza, CEO, Operatus”
Your one thing.
Pull the gross margin on your last ten delivered projects and sort them highest to lowest. Look only at the gap between the top and the bottom. If it's wider than 20 points, your average isn't telling you anything, and the projects at the bottom are the ones growth will sell.
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