How we walked our own number back — $8.3M to $1.81M

You shouldn't — until they've shown you they'll correct it down. Here's the time we did.

Our first reconciliation for a 16-unit chef-led group put the recovery surface at $8.3M a year. The number was on the screen, the math was internally consistent, and the design partner had already seen it. Then one signal broke the story: a rollup view reported chain net at $72M for a four-month period — in a group that has never done $72M in a year. The rollup was double-counting, and the model was confidently extrapolating from a doubled number.

We pulled the model down, re-pulled net sales from the leaf-channel view, and de-duplicated. The honest network number came out at $15.72M reconciled across 545,677 orders. The honest recovery surface came out at $1.81M — about 22% of what we'd originally reported. We walked it back in writing, to the partner who'd already seen the original figure.

That's the rule the company runs on: every figure is source-tagged Verified, Estimated, or Unverified, and when the model is wrong, we publish the correction. The discipline of correcting your own number down is the product. It's why the design partner stayed — and why the next number we shipped landed without anyone needing to verify it twice.

The full write-up, with the timeline, is at never86.ai/case/walked-the-number-back.