The call you do not want to get Last month I was on a call with someone running a small food distribution business in East London. Their main packaging supplier had just increased prices by 22%. No warning. No negotiation. Just an email that landed on a Tuesday morning. Their first instinct was to find a cheaper supplier immediately. Their second instinct was to absorb the cost and hope things settled. Both instincts were wrong. With jet fuel prices doubling since tensions escalated with Iran, and UK borrowing costs hitting levels not seen since 1998, this kind of shock is becoming more common. Supply chains are twitchy. Costs are volatile. And if you are running your own thing, you do not have a procurement department to handle it. You have yourself, maybe a small team, and about 48 hours before the stress starts affecting every other decision you make. Why your first reaction is usually wrong When costs spike, the brain wants to fix it fast. That is survival instinct. But speed without structure leads to decisions you regret. I have seen people switch suppliers to save £1,200 a month, only to discover the new supplier's lead times added £3,000 in storage costs. I have seen others absorb a 15% increase for six months because they "did not have time to deal with it", then realise they had quietly eroded their entire margin. The problem is not that you lack options. The problem is you are evaluating them with adrenaline instead of criteria. What a decision matrix actually does A decision matrix is not complicated. It is a table where you list your options down one side and your criteria across the top. You score each option against each criterion, weight the criteria by importance, and see what comes out on top. That is the mechanics. What it actually does is force you to name what matters before you start comparing. When a supplier spikes their prices, you might think the only criterion is cost. But when you sit down and write it out, you realise you also care about delivery reliability, payment terms, minimum order quantities, quality consistency, and how much hassle it will be to switch. Suddenly you are not just chasing the cheapest quote. You are making a decision that accounts for the full picture. Building the matrix for a cost spike Here is how I would approach it. Say your packaging supplier has increased prices by 20%. You have three options: stay with them and negotiate, switch to a competitor, or redesign your packaging to use cheaper materials. First, list your criteria. For this decision, I would use: Unit cost (weighted heavily, say 30%) Switching cost and time (20%) Quality risk (20%) Supplier reliability (15%) Payment terms (15%) Then score each option from 1 to 5 on each criterion. Be honest. If you do not know something, find out before you score it. A guess is worse than a gap. When I worked through this with the East London distributor, the "switch immediately" option scored highest on unit cost but lowest on switching cost and reliability. The "negotiate with current supplier" option scored moderately across the board. The "redesign packaging" option scored surprisingly well once we factored in that their current boxes were oversized anyway. The final weighted scores were close. But the matrix made it clear that switching was not the obvious win it had seemed at first. They ended up negotiating a smaller increase with their current supplier while starting a packaging redesign project on the side. Six months later, the redesign saved them 31% on packaging costs. The crisis became an advantage. When to use it and when not to A decision matrix is useful when you have multiple options and multiple criteria. It is not useful when the decision is obvious or when you genuinely have no alternatives. If your only supplier in the UK just increased prices and there is no one else who can deliver what you need, the matrix will not help. You are negotiating or absorbing. That is it. But most situations are not that constrained. Most situations have three to five realistic options, and the right choice depends on factors you have not consciously weighed against each other. The matrix makes the weighting explicit. That is its value. Where to start If you want to try this, the Decision Matrix tool at alira.london walks you through the structure. You input your options and criteria, assign weights, and it calculates the scores for you. But you can also do it in a spreadsheet or on paper. The tool is not the point. The thinking is the point. What matters is that you stop, name your options, name what you care about, and score them before you act. That pause is worth more than any framework. What to do this week Identify your top three suppliers by spend. For each one, write down what would happen if they increased prices by 20% tomorrow. Do you have alternatives? Do you know what switching would cost? If you cannot answer in five minutes, that is a gap worth closing. Build a decision matrix for one real decision you are facing. It does not have to be a supplier issue. Any decision with multiple options and competing priorities will work. Use the alira.london Decision Matrix tool or a blank spreadsheet. The goal is to practise the thinking, not to get a perfect answer. Check your supplier contracts for price change clauses. Many contracts require 30 or 60 days notice before price increases. If yours do not, that is a negotiation point for your next renewal. Know what you have agreed to before the next spike lands in your inbox.