Derek Gobel

I find the money your timing is costing you.

Ik vind het geld dat je timing je kost.

Most organisations know their costs. Few understand what happens to their margins when the timing is off — between price changes, procurement, capacity, and cash flow. I build the models that make that visible.

Let’s talk
Derek Gobel
A 4% cost increase doesn’t hurt. A 4% cost increase that takes nine months to reach your customer — that kills your cash flow.
The problem

Your margins aren’t wrong. They’re late.

You can absorb a price increase. You can handle rising costs. What you can’t survive is the gap between when your costs go up and when your prices follow.

That gap is invisible in most reporting. It doesn’t show up in your dashboards. Your BI tools will tell you what happened — not what the timing is doing to your margin right now, or what it will do to your cash flow in six months.

Your diesel costs rise 12% in March. Your contracts reprice in October. For seven months, every trip, every delivery, every project runs at a margin you didn’t plan for.

Multiply that across procurement categories, across seasons, across currency exposures.

That’s not a reporting problem. That’s a steering problem.

The same pattern appears in space and capacity: materials arrive before the construction yard can store them. People are scheduled before equipment is available. Every mismatch in timing costs money — but no one is modelling it.

What I do

I build the models that connect timing to money.

I take your existing data — spreadsheets, exports, ERP fragments — and wire them to economic logic. Not a dashboard. A working instrument that lets you see the P&L impact of timing mismatches, run scenarios, and steer before the damage is done.

Margin timing models

Map the lag between cost movements and revenue adjustments. See what every week of delay costs you — in euros, not percentages.

Scenario simulation

What if diesel goes up 8%? What if you can reprice in 3 months instead of 9? What does that do to Q3 cash flow? These become answerable questions.

Resource & capacity timing

People, space, materials, equipment — modelled against actual availability windows. Where timing mismatches create hidden waste, the model surfaces them.

Decision architecture

A repeatable loop that keeps your management team connected to the economic reality underneath the numbers. Not once — continuously.

Background

20 years of finding margin in the detail.

I’ve spent my career in places where timing is measured in millions per day and where the difference between a good plan and a great plan is a €15,000 pump that someone forgot to order.

Offshore

Turnaround management for oil & gas production platforms. Every day of overrun: €2M in lost production. I cut typical durations in half — not by working harder, but by getting the detail right. Annual performance improvement: €100M.

Shell

Designed value loops at Shell Smartfields — small feedback systems where data becomes information, information becomes models, models become insight, and insight changes the operation. This is the DNA of how I work today.

Forex

Built Monotor — modelling the impact of currency fluctuations on net procurement margins for mid-size companies. This is where I learned: insight only matters when you express it in money.

Now

I take the same principles — detail, timing, economic logic, working models — and apply them to mid-size organisations where the complexity has outgrown the spreadsheet but hasn’t yet justified the enterprise platform.

Why me

I speak every floor of the building.

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Finance

P&L, cash flow, margin, risk — the language your CFO thinks in

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Operations

Resources, timing, capacity, logistics — what actually happens

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Data

Pipelines, models, structures — turning messy reality into clean logic

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Strategy

Boardroom conversations, scenario thinking, decision architecture

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Technology

20+ years building systems — I don’t just advise, I build

How I work

Start small. Prove fast. Compound.

I don’t propose multi-year roadmaps. I take one margin driver, build a working model, and prove the value. Then we decide together what comes next.

Sparkle Test

1–2 weeks

A quick scan of one margin driver to see if timing dynamics are costing you more than you think. You get a clear answer and a quantified indication.

€3,500

Diagnostic

6–8 weeks

One margin driver, fully modelled. Entity mapping, data structuring, a working decision loop. First proof that you can steer what you couldn’t see before.

From €15,000

Programme

8–12 months

3–5 decision loops across multiple margin drivers. The full architecture: causal models, scenario simulation, and a management steering instrument that compounds.

From €80,000
Get in touch

Curious what your timing is hiding?

No pitch. No deck. Just a sharp conversation about where your margins might be leaking — and whether I can help.

[email protected]

Based in the Netherlands. Working across Europe.