Margin structure · The cost to serve model · Element

The direct costs

Costs that vary directly with delivering to this customer.

The part

What it is

These are the straightforward part and the part organisations usually have. Infrastructure, licences, materials, transaction fees.

The trap is treating them as the whole picture, which is what makes low-margin customers look profitable.

The smallest level

The attributes it carries

Each attribute is one of the framework’s shared types. What a date is, and how it is written, is defined once for the whole model — the note here says what it means in this particular place.