Finding Your 1%

How Fractions of a Percent Win in the Global Supply Chain 

The companies winning big in your category aren’t winning by big margins. They’re winning by fractions.  

Boeing and Airbus. A duopoly that has run for thirty years. What separates them in any given year isn’t a five percent advantage—it’s fractions of a percent on fuel burn, list price, and residual value, compounded across hundreds of aircraft, millions of parts, and decades of production and servicing.   

Next, compare Amazon with every other e-commerce player. The difference between leading and lagging at this level is 1%. That’s the game we’re all in now—and it’s coming for the mid-market next.  

At Enable, we call it The 1% Factor. And if you want to see it in its purest form, look at Formula 1 racing.  

Four-Tenths of One Percent: From First to Last 

At the 2025 Dutch Grand Prix, 20 of the most engineered machines on the planet lined up on the same circuit, in the same conditions, for the same number of laps. Seventeen cars finished. First place: Oscar Piastri, McLaren at 98 minutes. Last place: Pierre Gasly, 23 seconds behind. 

The gap from first to last was four-tenths of 1%. 

But the real story is how McLaren got there. A few years ago, they were stuck at the back—not for lack of effort, but because their development lacked intelligence. Upgrades were based on imperfect data and disconnected functions, so performance gains were inconsistent. They turned it around by rebuilding how they worked: real engineering intelligence built into the system, every function aligned—design, simulation, trackside, and drivers—all coordinated around the same feedback loop. A major upgrade in 2023 proved the model. From that point on, every change was deliberate and delivered. They didn’t just build a faster car. They built an intelligent, coordinated system that consistently produces speed. 

And that is exactly what’s happening in business right now. The difference between the leaders and the laggards isn’t 20 points of margin. It’s fractions. 

What 1% Means to a Manufacturer or Distributor 

If you’re a business with 10% operating profit, a 1% improvement in price is worth 10% to your bottom line. At 2% margins—like many distributors—that same 1% delivers a 50% lift in profit. That’s the difference between charging a dollar and a dollar and one cent. Cost of goods sold doesn’t change. Overheads don’t change. That penny drops straight to the bottom line. 

And it’s not just price. What happens if you reduce rebate leakage by 1%? Or cut inventory carrying costs by 1%? Recapture unclaimed backend rebates and SPAs falling through the cracks? Each is incremental on its own. Together, they’re transformational. 

A £1.4 Billion Eureka Moment 

I saw this firsthand Buildbase, which was part of the multi-billion Grafton Group until 2022. In 2019, it accounted for £1.4 billion of total group revenue, with an operating profit below industry norms. 

Following a period of challenging trading conditions, the Buildbase leadership team prioritized insight—what was driving results beyond just pricing, procurement, and operations. In the summer of 2019, they connected the dots: rebates, discounts, and cost to serve. It was a eureka moment. The business had not been focused on the right commercial areas. The mix of business was going in the wrong direction. They were working with numbers that did not include all rebates. 

In 60 seconds, in that boardroom, the entire commercial strategy of a £1.4 billion business changed. They became commercially intelligent. 

That intelligence led to four things. They captured more rebates owed to them. They aligned their sales team and client incentives to strategy. They worked smarter on managing demand relating to the mix. They became intelligent. And they found their 1%—which made the business roughly $70 million more valuable. Buildbase and its fellow UK operations were sold in 2022 for a significantly higher price because they had their rebates game in order. 

Disconnected Operations Are Killing Your 1% 

Think of your business as a Rubik’s Cube. Each side is a department. Let one side optimize in isolation, and it makes every other side look like a mess. The only way to solve it is to do so holistically. 

You can have the best pricing strategy in the world, but if your sales team gives it away in discounts—or marketing runs promotions without coordination—you’ve undone the work. Your pricing team builds a perfect waterfall; your rebate team doesn’t know it exists. The margin you engineered on paper evaporates before the invoice clears. 

I’ve seen this challenge repeatedly among buying groups and wholesale organizations. Rebates are often treated as an accounting process when they are actually a critical profit driver. Africa Trade Masters understood this from day one. They are a fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) buying group operating on narrow margins, but they knew their business depended on accurately collecting supplier rebates and efficiently passing those benefits back to customers. Manual processes simply weren’t an option. They needed a system they could trust implicitly; one that could automate rebate management, improve transparency, and scale alongside the business. That’s why built a strategic rebate program through Enable. 

Now flip the scenario. Assume a company has a disciplined rebate program—every supplier agreement tracked, every threshold monitored, every claim filed on time. But their pricing is locked in six-week cycles, keyed into an ERP by an offshore team working 36-hour shifts to enter changes manually. They win a contract at a special bid price, but their system can’t isolate it. Every customer in that segment gets the discounted rate. They win the bid and lose margin on all their regular sales at the same time. Rebates are buttoned up; the pricing leak wipes out the gain. 

Or consider the distributor whose pricing file takes nearly a week to generate and arrives at their largest retail partner with only 90% accuracy. Prices too high don’t sell. Prices too low bleed margin for an entire month before the next update. In a razor-thin-margin, high-volume business, that drift compounds across thousands of SKUs and millions of transactions. 

The Market Has Changed Underneath You 

Ten years ago, pricing complexity was manageable. Manufacturers sold to distributors. Distributors sold to contractors or retailers. Channels were few, and a spreadsheet could handle the math. That world is gone. 

Today, a single manufacturer sells through distributors, direct to retailers, through B2B websites, and on Amazon—each channel with its own waterfall, its own rebate structures, and its own margin profile. A customer standing in a store checks Amazon on their phone before they buy.  

Your commercial partners want intraday pricing responsiveness, not monthly updates. Distributors like Enable customer Wesco, often face pricing system fragmentation after years of growth and acquisitions. We helped Wesco retire the practice of managing prices across 27 ERPs and spreadsheets, and gave them real-time pricing capability across the buy and sell side. The platform delivers accurate, up-to-date pricing across all channels in real time. Teams can instantly access and adjust prices, improving responsiveness to market changes and reducing the risk of revenue leakage. 

Pricing and Rebates Are Having Their Moment 

This is why pricing and rebate management is having its moment. After 30 years as a back-office function that finance owned and nobody else wanted to touch, CFOs of the world’s largest distributors, manufacturers, and retailers have figured out where the 1%  actually lives. You can’t squeeze it from procurement or operations because you’ve already done that. Pricing and rebates are the last unindexed margin pools in the modern enterprise. 

We estimate that more than 3,000 companies globally have already taken the plunge with rebate and pricing technology, creating considerable value. Site One Landscaping once had legacy systems running 1.5 billion pricing combinations across 50 pricing models and 30,000 customers. When they replaced old systems with Flintfox by Enable, they replaced problems with modern solutions, achieving a 2X increase in profitability and boosting their pricing accuracy to 98%. They’ve centralized pricing so a single change propagates across every channel in real time. They’ve connected rebate claims to transaction data so nothing falls through the cracks, and turned week-long pricing cycles into intraday capability. The direct price you charge up front and the indirect price you settle after the fact—rebates, SPAs, backend allowances—are both part of your real margin. Managing one without the other means you’re flying blind on half your economics. Get them both right, and that’s commercial alignment.  

The Next Phase: Commercial Intelligence 

Once your connected operations foundation is in place, the next phase is Commercial Intelligence: what becomes possible when pricing, rebates, and agreements operate as one. For most enterprises right now, those live in three different systems, three different teams, three different cadences. That’s makes their 1% invisible.  

When it’s all connected, you can act on insights to find your competitive advantage, which can be expressed in four words that your CEO will care about. Clarity: where the margin is, in real time. Control: the ability to act on it before the quarter closes. Confidence: to make commercial commitments without the spreadsheet anxiety. Competitive Advantage: because while your competitors are still reviewing last quarter’s variance, you’re already executing next quarter’s gain. 

Over many years, F1 teams stopped acting on instinct and started to act on insight, and they became intelligent. They don’t just build faster cars; they build coordinated systems that consistently produce speed and seek that extra 1%. Your business is no different. The good news is, access to that technology is changing and you can now become commercially intelligent. 

Where’s Your Penny? 

Every business has its 1% waiting to be found. In rebate programs that cost more than they return. In pricing that hasn’t moved from monthly to intraday. In backend claims that never get filed because nobody connected the proof of sale to the agreement. 

The companies that find their 1% will compound those gains and pull ahead. The ones that don’t will grind out to a loss doing the same things they’ve always done—while competitors collect the pennies they left behind. 

So, where’s your 1%? Not your next billion—your next penny. Your next 23 seconds. Your next $70 million. Contact Enable to help you find it.