Let’s Talk About the Sh*t in the Middle

Most businesses are obsessed with the top line.

Sales. Growth. New stockists. More orders. More SKUs. More channels.
That stuff’s exciting — and it looks great on a pitch deck.

But what actually makes or breaks your business?

The sh*t in the middle.

What’s “the middle,” exactly?

It’s all the stuff between the revenue and the profit.

• Production
• Purchasing
• Inventory
• Margins
• Stock transfers
• Packaging delays
• Ingredient shortages
• Price updates that didn’t sync
• Staff who can’t find the last batch sheet

It’s messy, manual, and (usually) spread across five systems and twelve spreadsheets.

And when that middle is a mess?
You’re scaling chaos.

Why founders ignore it (until it’s too late)

Because it’s not fun. It’s not shiny. It’s not “growth.”

But every business that scales without sorting the middle hits the same wall:

• Orders go out late
• Staff burn out
• Margins shrink
• Customers get annoyed
• You start making decisions based on guesses, not data

And worst of all? You don't even know where the money's going anymore.

What fixing the middle actually looks like

It doesn’t mean hiring more people or buying a mega-enterprise system.

It means:

• Managing production in one place
• Seeing real-time margins
• Syncing your pricing across every channel
• Knowing what’s in stock (and what’s about to run out)
• Ordering from suppliers without digging through old emails
• Giving your team tools they’ll actually use — without a PhD
• Optimising every step of your processes — while removing error points.

That’s what Supply’d is built for.

Bottom line

Everyone wants growth.
But if your operations are duct-taped together, growth just makes the cracks bigger.

Sort the middle.
Make your ops boringly efficient.
And scale with your margins (and sanity) intact.

Fix the middle →

Bonus Content

I have a great chat with Chelsea Ford ahead of the Foodpreneurs Festival about why brands owners find themselves paying too much, and often focus on the wrong things.

Check it out on LinkedIn...

Many brand owners find themselves paying too much in expenses - like wages… | Chelsea Ford

Many brand owners find themselves paying too much in expenses - like wages - that quietly creep up as the business grows. It happens slowly, until suddenly it’s a real problem. The cycle can be deadly and hard to break unless you’re aware of what Jason Stockton from Supply'd calls “the shit in the middle”... the often-ignored middle of the P&L where costs quietly stack up. I sat down with Jason to unpack this issue and what to do about it. In our conversation, you’ll hear his take on: → practical, low-cost ways to tighten operations; → why obsessing over tiny expense line items can be a red flag; and → how volume really plays into margin management. Jason’s also running a workshop at Foodpreneurs Festival to dive deeper into these strategies. If you’re scaling and need to get your numbers working, especially on the operations side, you’ll want to be in that room. This is exactly why we run the Festival: to connect founders with experts who’ll help them save time, money, and hard lessons. If you want to improve your food or retail business by streamlining your operations, automating key tasks, and removing the hassle of disconnected systems - chat to Jason.

LinkedInJason Stockton