Three Advisors, Three Answers: The Restructuring That Made Me Build PitchFit

By the founder of PitchFit, written from the other side of too many steering committees.

Before PitchFit, I led the transformation program of a major airline going through restructuring. It was the kind of engagement where everyone serious shows up: a global strategy consultancy was already on the ground, a Big Four firm had been brought in to audit the business plan defined, and a third advisor advising on fleet matter.

The leadership asked one foundational question: How much cost did we actually need to take out?

I did what any airline cost analyst would do. The unit cost picture was built from the ground up. CASK, cost per available seat kilometer, standardized against a peer set of comparable carriers.

That word "standardized" is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence, and it is the whole point of this story. To compare one airline's CASK against another's, you have to make several judgment calls. Which costs are operating and which are not. How to treat owned aircraft versus leased. How to handle fuel hedging gains and losses. How to align carriers whose fiscal years end in different months. How to standardize the cost baseline versus the stage-length flown. I made those calls, documented them, and the analysis showed a clear, sizeable cost takeout requirement. The gap to efficient peers was real.

The audit firm came back with their own CASK view, built on their own basis for almost the same peer set, and their conclusion was the opposite: the cost base was actually competitive.

The third advisor's analysis landed in between: yes, there was room to improve.

Three sophisticated institutions. One airline. Three answers shared with the leadership and the Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors.

What the next 2 weeks were actually spent on

Here is what should have happened next: leadership picks a target, the program mobilizes, the airline starts taking out cost.

Here is what actually happened: days of debate and reconciliation sessions. Walk-throughs of classification choices. Arguments about the requirement to standardize against stage-length and which stage-length to use, etc. Senior people, at senior billing rates, arbitrating spreadsheet methodology while the actual restructuring waited.

The Sizeable takeout target was eventually validated, and the leadership activated a cost take-out program proceeded on that basis.

I felt like the whole flow had revealed something broken, because the time we lost was not spent discovering anything new about the airline. It was spent discovering how three teams had each standardized the same data differently.

If that can happen on a flagship restructuring, with everyone's reputation on the line, imagine how often it happens quietly inside companies, where one analyst's version simply becomes the truth because nobody had the time to check.

The industry's answer has been access. The problem is basis.

For thirty years, financial data tools have competed on access: more companies, more history, faster terminals, better screens. Access has genuinely improved. You can pull any listed company's financials in seconds.

But access was never the bottleneck. In our survey of 500+ professionals who work with company financials, 90% still rebuild statements by hand in Excel, re-keying numbers from CapIQ, Bloomberg, FactSet and raw filings just to read them the same way. Nine out of ten people, with some of the most expensive data subscriptions in professional services on their desktops, are retyping numbers into spreadsheets. They are not doing it because they enjoy it. They are doing it because every provider, and every analyst, standardizes differently, and the only basis you fully trust is the one you built yourself.

Which is precisely how a steering committee ends up with three answers.

What "one basis" actually means

PitchFit exists to fix the basis, not just the access. Every filing, every statement, every company, every fiscal year, standardized onto a single, defensible framework. The same line item means the same thing everywhere. Fiscal years are aligned before you ever see a chart. And every figure traces back to its source in the original filing, so when someone in the meeting asks where a number comes from, the answer takes one click, not one workshop.

Judgment calls will not disappear, because they are inherent to accounting. What changes is that the judgment is made once, consistently, transparently, and documented, instead of three times, differently, invisibly, in three separate models.

The test we hold ourselves to is that steering committee. If three teams pull the same comparison from PitchFit, they get the same answer, and the meeting goes back to being about the company, the market, and the decision. Not about whose model to believe.

That is the whole company, really. Every statement, standardized one way. So the C-suite never has to choose which version of the numbers to believe again.

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PitchFit is opening early access. If the meeting above sounded familiar, you can join the waitlist at [pitchfit.ai].