Across-the-board cuts are fair, fast and almost always wrong. They take as much from the capabilities customers value as from the overhead nobody would miss.
Sort spend by what customers feel
We classify every major cost line into three groups: spend that customers directly experience, spend that enables it, and spend that neither customers nor colleagues would notice if it stopped tomorrow.
The goal is not a smaller organisation. It is a sharper one.
Where the money usually hides
Duplicated reporting built for leaders who have since moved on.
Service levels set years ago and never tested against what customers value.
Contracts that renew automatically because nobody owns the renewal.
In our experience, twelve to eighteen per cent of addressable cost sits in the third group. Removing it rarely shows up anywhere except the P&L.
