Profit rarely disappears by accident. It leaks through the handoffs: a supplier that quietly rewrites terms, a channel that taxes access, a service policy that turns into a subsidy, a platform that owns your data, a discount that becomes the new list price. The Value Chain Advantage is a practical guide to seeing your business as a system of control points and profit pools, so you can decide what to own, what to outsource, and what to govern tightly.
Hugo Mardane walks you through value chain strategy with a clear aim: protect the activities that create margin and redesign the ones that drain it. You will learn to identify margin leakage, diagnose dependency, and make sharper make or buy decisions without treating outsourcing or integration as dogma. The book shows how supplier power forms (and how to reduce it), why distribution economics can matter more than product features, and how customer relationship control shapes pricing, renewals, and resilience. It also covers after sales profit and the often-overlooked mechanics of returns, repairs, and service capacity, where many businesses win or lose lifecycle margin.
This book is for executives, functional leaders, founders, and operators who need a shared framework for cross-functional decisions: pricing and discounting, sourcing, production, channels, data, and service. You will finish with a repeatable playbook for mapping where profit is created, where it is taxed, and what your company should control directly to defend the economics of the whole chain.