Physics has a clean definition of work: force times distance. Move a pallet across a warehouse, that's work. Lift a die into a press, work. Drive a service truck 200 kilometres to fix a compressor: force, distance, work. A shop floor is one of the few places left where the physics-textbook meaning and the everyday meaning are the same thing.

But your books don't measure work in joules. They measure it in dollars, and dollars obey a different physics. After a hundred-plus conversations with people who run asset-heavy businesses, I think profit has laws too. Two of them, and a demon.

The first law: revenue is conserved, profit is not. Every dollar of revenue becomes either profit or heat. Heat is the stale price book quoting January's steel in August. Heat is scope creep nobody re-priced. Heat is the same order keyed into three systems that disagree with each other. Nobody decides to lose margin; it dissipates, the way a warm engine loses energy to the room. At our first design partner, a Quebec pallet manufacturer, we surfaced 300K dollars a year of it. Not one bad decision. Heat.

The second law: left alone, every price book drifts toward disorder. Costs move weekly. Prices move annually, if the estimator remembers. So the gap between what you charge and what things cost decays like everything else in the universe decays: quietly, one quote at a time, and never in your favor. Margin does not spontaneously improve. No shop has ever been surprised by margin going up.

Which brings in the demon. In 1867, James Clerk Maxwell imagined a tiny demon guarding a door between two chambers of gas, letting fast molecules through one way and slow ones the other, creating order out of chaos, apparently for free. It took physicists a century to find the catch: the demon has to pay for information. Sorting requires knowing, and knowing costs.

We built the demon, for quotes. It stands at the door where quotes leave the building. Each one gets checked against what the work truly costs at today's prices, and anything below the floor doesn't pass; it gets repriced, or approved by a human with their name on it. And exactly as the physicists predicted, the demon pays its fee in information: it has to read your ERP, your spreadsheets, and your field system continuously, resolving the number that's actually true. That reading never stops. That's why we call it a pulse.

The sum is your P&L. The constraint is your future. Everything interesting lives in that inequality, and in the little (t): cost now, at the moment you commit, not cost whenever someone last updated the sheet. A business that enforces the inequality at commitment time cannot quietly leak. It's not that the leak gets found faster. It's that the leak becomes physically impossible.

But a floor is only half a physics. A boundary condition tells you what a price may never be; it doesn't tell you what a price should be. For that you need an objective, and the honest objective isn't this quarter's margin. It's the value of the business you're trying to own. Every price you set nudges that value: the work you win, the customers you keep, the capacity you burn, the multiple a buyer or a bank would put on the whole thing. So the offense inverts the question. Instead of costs up to a price, it works backwards from the enterprise value you want to the price that gets you there, and re-derives it as costs, demand, and capacity move.

Defense is an inequality. Offense is a target. The floor keeps any single quote from hurting you; the goal makes every quote add up to something. Pricing toward V* is what the name allometric pricing means: the price of the unit derived from the value of the whole organism.

One more law, the one we named the company after. In biology, allometry is the study of how things scale: metabolism grows as roughly the ¾ power of mass, which means an elephant is far more efficient per gram than a mouse, because evolution scaled the transport network along with the body. Companies get the opposite by default. Revenue doubles and margin doesn't, because complexity grows faster than control. Unless the control system scales with the organism.

Here's what makes this the right decade to build the demon: agents just got good at holding physical systems to setpoints. A research lab recently used an AI agent to hold a quantum laser locked to a frequency, catching drift and recovering in seconds. A margin floor is a setpoint. Holding a price to a floor while costs drift is the same control loop, run on your books instead of a laser.

And one thing further out, because it changes what "work" means. Software already buys compute, payments, and intelligence the same way: an API call with a scope, a price, and a receipt. Your customers' software is next in line to buy physical work that way — a request with a spec, a deadline, and a budget, expecting an answer in seconds. When that arrives, W = F × d gets a second definition: a unit of work is a call — requested, priced, committed, done, proven. The operators whose businesses can answer a call like that — price checked against true cost, capacity checked against the real calendar — get found and get paid first. The floor, the pulse, and the goal are how a business becomes able to answer.

Know what to sell, at what price, and whether you can deliver it profitably. The rest is thermodynamics.

Want to see your own heat? The margin scan is free.

— Taylor GendronFounder, Allometry · Montréal | New York · taylor@allometry.com