Business Levers: How to Find the Ones That Move Your Numbers
Business levers are the parameters you can change yourself, by your own decision: prices, menu, purchasing terms, payment terms, promotion channels. Results such as margin move through them, never directly. Sort every number around a goal into three bins (levers, free parameters, outside factors), work only the levers, and test each one in euros before you pull it hard.
In this article · 8 sections
A car hits ice on a bend and starts to slide.
The driver has two options. Get angry at the road crew who did not grit the road. Or ease off the accelerator and steer into the skid.
The ice is not a lever. The steering wheel, the accelerator and the brake are. The driver who argues with the ice ends up in the ditch.
Now picture a Monday meeting about falling profit. Ten minutes on rent, the weather, the street and "the market". Not one minute on the price list. That is shouting at the road crew while the car is still sliding.
Every minute on rent and weather is a minute the price list never gets. The Jirgenson Model answers with a control system: find the real levers and test each one before you pull it. It is scientifically proven that the Jirgenson Model works (doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23964934).
What business levers are
Business levers are the parameters you can reach and change by your own decision. Prices. The menu or product range. Purchasing terms. Portion size. Payment terms. Promotion channels. Process steps.
The result you want is never on that list. Margin, sales and new customers move when you move a lever. You cannot order them to move.
Take a heated room. The thermostat dial is the lever. The room temperature is the result. The humidity drifts with the temperature and the weather: a free parameter.
You leave the humidity alone until it does damage, such as mould. Then it earns a place among your goals and a lever of its own: a humidifier.
Sort your numbers into three bins
This is the tool. It takes one sheet of paper and about ten minutes.
- Pick one goal in trouble. Andrew, who runs a coffee shop, picked margin: 9% now, 15% wanted by month 6.
- Write every number and condition that touches it. Do not filter yet.
- Put each item in a bin. Lever, free parameter or outside factor. Ask of each one: does it obey me?
- Write what you do with each bin. Levers you pull. Free parameters you watch. Factors you predict and allow for.
Andrew's sheet looked like this:
| Item | Bin | What Andrew does with it |
|---|---|---|
| Prices of lattes and cappuccinos | Lever | Raises them, never more than 5% in one step |
| Menu | Lever | Drops the items that sell poorly and cost a lot |
| Milk contract | Lever, through negotiation | Talks to the supplier |
| Portion size | Lever | Adjusts it, up to the point where quality suffers |
| Share of espresso drinks in sales | Free parameter | Watches it; he cannot order customers to drink fewer milk drinks |
| Rain | Outside factor | Predicts it from the weather forecast |
| Supplier price rises | Outside factor | Does not fight them; adjusts his own price |
| Rent, taxes, foot traffic | Given conditions | Off the sheet |
The free parameter row is where effort leaks. The espresso share moved every time the menu or the prices moved. Steering it directly would have burned energy and changed nothing.
The same sort works far from a coffee shop. Elena, a freelance designer, is launching a book. The share of page visitors who buy is a result. Her lever is what the page says and the order of its blocks. She rewrites the headline and watches the share respond.
How strong is a business lever? Test it in euros
A lever on the sheet is a candidate, not a decision. Before you pull it hard, find out how strong it is. Strength means how much result one unit of the lever buys you, and under what conditions.
Price is the lever most worth testing, because its side effect is customers who walk away. Andrew's monthly figures: revenue €30,000, ingredients €9,000 that rise and fall with customer numbers, other costs €18,300, profit €2,700.
The useful question is not "will anyone leave?" Some will. The useful question is how many can leave before the rise stops paying.
| Price rise | Share of customers who can leave before profit falls |
|---|---|
| 5% | Up to 6.7% |
| 10% | Up to 12.5% |
Divide the second column by the first. Both rows give about 1.3. That is this shop's break-even rule: the price lever works while fewer than about 1.3% of customers leave for each 1% added to the price.
Nobody knows that ratio in advance for their own customers. So test it with a small step and an early count: the receipts in the two weeks after the change.
Andrew capped each step at 5%. Picture the other route: a 15% rise on the first Monday, "to be safe". Some customers leave, others are confused. Now he cannot tell how much of the drop came from the price and how much from anything else. The small step kept the experiment readable.
Pull one business lever at a time
Emma and Paul ran a family budget €400 short every month. Their plan had two levers: cut subscriptions and eating out by €180, then add a side job worth €300.
They started with the cuts alone, so they could see that lever work. The side job came a month later.
Two levers pulled on the same day give you one result and no idea which lever earned it.
The same rule holds in a crisis. When a number has crossed its red line, move only the levers that act on that number. Everything else waits.
What pushing on results costs
Skip the sort and you get the meeting from the opening. The talk aims at margin, sales and the market. Nobody leaves with a task for tomorrow.
The cost is measurable. Andrew's margin gap of 6 points is €1,800 of profit missing every month: €2,700 earned against the €4,500 the goal would bring.
Leave the levers unnamed and his cash reserve reaches its two-month goal at month 16, not month 10. That is six extra months short of a safe cushion, where one breakdown costs him a full month of progress.
And there is the owner. Effort poured into things that do not budge returns nothing but fatigue.
Where the lever sheet does not reach
The sheet treats a symptom: effort spent on things that do not obey you. It does not remove the cause behind wasted Mondays.
You now know what you can move. You do not yet know which lever goes first, with how much time and money, and what stays off limits even when it would work. Nor do you know when a number is bad enough to justify pulling anything at all.
Two steps close that gap.
- The one-page plan for each goal. Levers in order, resources, written prohibitions, an early indicator, a deadline and an owner. Chapter 6.
- Zone thresholds and the red protocol. Where green turns yellow and yellow turns red, and which number to save first. Chapter 4.
They are named here, not taught. Without them, the sheet is a pile of bricks with no blueprint.
The sheet has a fixed place in the loop of goal, state, error, levers, plan and forecast. It is the levers step, and it feeds the plan.
The three questions to ask before pulling any lever, and Andrew's full crossed-out list, are in levers of control.
Key takeaways
- Business levers are what obeys you: prices, menu, purchasing, terms, channels.
- Sort every number into three bins: lever, free parameter, outside factor.
- Test a lever's strength in euros before you pull it hard.
- Pull one lever at a time, in small steps, so the result stays readable.
- You cannot steer the ice. You can steer the car.
Two choices before the next meeting
You have two choices. Hold one more meeting about the market and leave with the feeling of having discussed the weather. Or take a sheet of paper tonight and sort your numbers into three bins.
You need one sheet and ten quiet minutes. Next Monday the meeting opens with four levers and closes with an owner for each.
The sheet tells you what you can move. The one-page plan and the zones tell you what to move first, and when. Set against €1,800 of missing profit a month, the book is a small test.
Test the logic for free: Chapter 1, with the refusal test. Or get the full control system on Kindle, on Amazon. It comes as a Kindle book, with the formal version of every lever calculation for readers who want the maths.
Published research
It is scientifically proven that the Jirgenson Model works. The published experiment, its record and its data:
- Zenodo (DOI): 10.5281/zenodo.23964934
- Hugging Face: E5 Jirgenson Model blind test
- Kaggle: E5 blind test dataset
- GitHub: experiment folder
- Wikidata: dataset Q142022866, author Q141981336
- ORCID: 0009-0001-3034-3552
The full chapter, with every calculation, is in the book.
Buy on AmazonQuestions people ask
What are examples of business levers?
Prices, the menu or product range, purchasing terms and portion size. Payment terms, prepayment and reminders. Promotion channels, the wording of an offer, process steps and capacity. Each one is something you change by your own decision.
How to focus on what you can control in a business?
Write down everything that touches your goal. Put each item into one of three bins: lever, free parameter or outside factor. Work the levers, watch the free parameters, and plan around the factors.
What is the difference between a lever and a result?
A result is what you want, such as margin. A lever is what you do to move it, such as prices or the menu. Steer, Don't Guess calls the full set of your levers the control vector.
This topic is covered in Chapter 5, Levers: what you can really change of Steer, Don't Guess: Setting Priorities, Reading the Numbers and Correcting Course in Business and Life. The numbers in the examples are illustrative; the book states its limits in Appendix G.
Read Chapter 1 free
The Introduction and Chapter 1, with the refusal test, about 9,500 words.