5 Ways Finance Can Help Improve Company Profitability

Businesses in various industrial sectors are undergoing a fundamental transformation as a result of the effects of globalization, advancement in new technologies and increasing digitalization.  Apart from presenting a wealth of opportunities to help the organization soar to greater heights, these changes are also presenting a variety of challenges on the business model.

They are altering customer behaviours, placing increased pressure on existing markets and impacting financial performance.  In these trying times, the finance function is being called upon to help steer the organization in the right direction and improve profitability.

Popularly known as bean counters, accountants are now required to support business growth initiatives and help grow the beans within their organizations. The modern finance function has evolved from being a “just numbers” back-office function to a “strategic partnering” front-office role providing deeper insights and a clear direction for translating the numbers into effective actions for those operating on the front lines of the business.

Whereas in the past the finance professional spent his day behind the scenes, glued to his computer, producing and reporting the numbers, today’s finance professional is involved in the business interacting with the other organizational functions and helping drive business performance. There is a joke about an accountant without a spreadsheet being described as “lost”. In the past, this could have been true, but not today. The bean grower of today is a strategist, a motivator, a leader, a team player, a change agent, completely understands the drivers of business performance and drives improvements in respect of new revenue and value-producing opportunities.

It is no secret that the finance function is the custodian of the business profit and loss. In times of economic downturn when cost control is critical, the finance professional is called upon to help identify areas where the organization can scale back in order to improve overall profitability. In good times, finance helps senior management identify new opportunities (new markets, new products, potential acquisition targets, new services etc.) that need exploiting. Disrupt or be disrupted is the mantra in today’s ever-changing business environment. The business has to evolve with times.

The challenge on the finance function is to deliver more with less. This has led to many organizations to embark on ad-hoc cost-cutting programs hoping to improve the bottom-line. Unfortunately, cost control alone is not sufficient or effective enough to enable the organization realize the targeted gains. You can only cut costs up to a certain level. This is because each cost initiative reaches a point of diminishing return, after which, the company has to explore new ways of improving profitability. In order to grow its influence on company profitability, the finance function must:

  1. Understand the Drivers of Business Performance.  To be effective bean growers, accountants need to move beyond numbers and get an understanding of the company’s product s and services and how they affect the profitability of the business. This means finance teams lifting their heads up from their financial reports and obtaining a better view of the business itself. Instead of focusing only on where the business has previously failed, finance should provide strategic insights, competitive intelligence and analysis that enable effective decision-making by the senior management team. For example, finance should be able to provide data, metrics and analysis that helps transfer the function’s own understanding of the drivers of profitability to others throughout the organization, in order to ensure that profitability develops into a basis for action.
  2. Help Identify New Pathways Toward Profitability. When it comes to profitability improvement initiatives, many at times the focus is on the bottom-line. As mentioned earlier on, eliminating fat from the bottom line works up to a certain extent. Cost reduction is a short-term fix but not sustainable in the long-term, especially if the company is looking to grow. Management become misguided and believe that by laying-off people to contain salary costs or postponing capital investments they are placing the organization in a better competitive position. The opposite is true.  In fact, cost cutting by itself is counterproductive as it can lead to inefficiencies, missed opportunities and higher operational costs. There is nothing wrong in getting the business lean, but getting lean has to be linked to the business strategy, done the right way, at the right time and for the right reasons. Attention should also be focused on the revenue side of the business, for example, diversifying the business, internally growing existing business units, making additional productivity improvement, improving existing product or service offerings and making major business purchases.
  3. Invest in Modern Technologies. As the amount of data generated continues to grow, an enormous demand is being placed on finance to make meaning of this data, identify trends and develop the most effective responses that will help protect and improve company margins. Finance must know what information will have the greatest impact on profitability since having the right information is at the core of improving company profitability. Equally important is placing this information in the right hands. Relying on spreadsheets alone will not cut it. Finance must invest and make use of modern Business Intelligence and Analytics technologies in order to be able to identify accurate, reliable and relevant information and place it in the hands of the right people at the right times. These modern technologies help transform finance into a more flexible, responsive and forward-looking function. The modern finance function must have the ability to use technology to gain a more detailed understanding of the metrics underlying the company’s profitability.
  4. Develop Effective Pricing Capabilities. The sales organization is normally rewarded on revenue made and this sometimes results in the sales team being interested only in closing the deal at the expense of profitability. Not all customers are equally profitable to the organization; therefore sales should be tailored to optimize profitability. Getting the pricing wrong has negative consequences on the overall profitability of the company. Finance need to have an advanced understanding of the company’s different customer and product portfolios. By performing customer profitability analysis and product profitability analysis, finance will be able to understand the customer costs-to-serve and use these costs to segment customers, fine-tune pricing and manage profitability by helping direct efforts towards growing profitable product and customer combinations. Sales personnel can then use this cost-to-serve in negotiations as well as forward-looking analyses to drive effective decision-making.
  5. Collaborate With the Rest of the Organization. Although finance plays a central role, maintaining and improving company profitability is a team effort – it should be everyone’s concern. It is imperative that finance professionals work directly with their colleagues outside of finance (Sales, Marketing, Operations and R&D.) and develop a list of actionable items which impact profitability. For example, working more closely with the sales organization will ensure that sales personnel have all the information and tools they require to make decisions that support profitability goals, otherwise they will be ill-equipped to make the best decisions. Getting the buy-in and commitment of the C-Suite is also critical since the C-Suite is involved in setting the direction of the company. The C-Suite’s involvement will in turn lead to the establishment of a common goal and set of metrics shared with the front lines of the business through synergies with their finance teams. Remember Individuals don’t win, teams do.

If the organization is to succeed in maintaining and improving its margins, finance’s involvement is important. Finance helps make meaningful and measurable profitability improvements.  Look at the bigger picture and beyond quick fixes such as rapid cost reductions. Develop a more detailed understanding of the full set of your business’s profitability drivers and take full advantage of new technologies capabilities to uncover the organization’s key profitability levers and challenges.

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The Art of Risk Management

This is the title of the article by BCG published a few years ago. The article discusses the principles that should govern the approach to risk management by companies of all shapes and sizes.

The authors make several points with which I agree. Here are some excerpts:

  • Risk management is essential in today’s volatile economy. In a continuously changing economic environment, companies cannot assume a stable risk landscape.
  • Stop thinking of risk management as primarily a regulatory issue. Embed risk management in the mindset of the broader organization.
  • Risk management is a value-creating activity that is an essential part of the strategic conversation inside the company. The goal of that discussion should not be to eliminate or minimize risk but to use it to create a competitive advantage.
  • Risk management starts at the top. The organization needs to demonstrate that it has made risk management a high priority and an integral part of the decision-making process by appointing a dedicated risk leader who reports back frequently to the CEO and the board to discuss the latest trends and any changes in the company’s risk scenarios.
  • Risk cannot be managed from an ivory tower. Risk Management should not exist in isolation from the rest of the organization, with an insufficiently granular understanding of the actual business-specific risks the company faces. To avoid this outcome, integrate risk management into the company’s entire routine management processes, including planning, capital allocation, controlling, and reporting.
    • Understand the scope of the risks the company faces.
    • Plan for how the company will manage those risks.
    • Act to mitigate the risks or take advantage of strategic opportunities.
  • Avoid relying on black boxes. Although sometimes appropriate, over-reliance on complex metrics or models can muddy the risk management process, turning it from a transparent management activity into a frustrating black box. The appropriate level of complexity is company-specific and depends on the industry, business model, availability of data, level of experience, and mandatory legal requirements.
  • Align risk management with a company’s overall business strategy. Companies need to identify all relevant risks – not just those that can be easily quantified. Some of the relevant risks for a company may be those that are qualitative and especially difficult to quantify.
  • Risk management is more than a policy; it is a culture. The objective of a company’s risk-management system should be not only to enforce new policies but also to create a risk-aware culture that addresses risks proactively, not reactively, and manages them to create new sources of competitive advantage.
  • Effective risk management depends on the free flow of information throughout the organization. Unless employees at all levels of the organization are actively involved in the risk management process, it will be difficult to maintain the unrestricted flow of information. This can result in the most important data getting buried in one part of the organization unavailable to other parts of the business.
  • Risk management deals with uncertain futures. As a result, the goal should not be to develop precise metrics or future outcomes but to strive for a general understanding of the probabilities and potential impact of various trends or scenarios on business performance and enable decision-makers to confront the uncertain nature of risk and act accordingly.
  • Risk management is never about finding “the answer.” Rather, it is about continually refining the organization’s assumptions about the future and its understanding of the implications of those assumptions for the company’s business. Assumptions about risk often change quickly, so the relevant parameters, probabilities, impacts, and correlations should be revisited frequently.
  • It is possible to prepare for unknown risks by building an organization that so excels at crisis management that it is resilient even in situations in which it is blindsided by unprecedented challenges. For example, through developing the ability to detect, capture, and exploit information patterns as well as to think outside existing frameworks and risk landscapes.
  • Avoid the downside, but don’t forget the upside. Companies should use risk management also to identify new opportunities and to exploit them systematically. For example, scenario planning should be used to define not only worst-case scenarios but also best-case scenarios. Think in advance about how a company can make the best use of the latest market developments and trends and ultimately make the right decisions.

I enjoyed reading the article and highly recommend it.

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Leading in Uncertain Times

One of the biggest challenges facing business leaders today is making the right decisions that will ensure their organizations succeed, survive, and remain competitive in an increasingly uncertain and complex environment.

A recent post, The best way to lead in uncertain times may be to throw out the playbook, by Strategy+Business has several good points.

The article is about the COVID-19 pandemic, how global companies navigated through the crisis, and how best to prepare for future disruptions. Here are some key points and my comments.

  • Rather than follow a rigid blueprint, executives must help organizations focus on sensing and responding to unpredictable market conditions.
    • Comment: Senior leaders play a vital role in providing clarity about the organization’s strategic direction, creating alignment on key priorities to ensure the achievement of enterprise objectives, and ensuring the business model is continuously evolving to create and capture value in the face of uncertainty. They must not rest on their laurels and stick to the beliefs and paradigms that got them to where they are today and hope they will carry them through tomorrow. Regulatory changes, new products, competition, markets, technologies, and shifts in customer behavior are upending many outdated assumptions about business success. Thus, the businesses you have today are different from the ones you will need in the future hence the importance of continuously sensing changes in the global economy. Employees and teams often feed off the energy of their leaders and tend to focus their attention where the leader focuses attention. If the leader is comfortable with current business practices and rarely embraces the future or challenges the status quo, then the team is highly likely to follow suit.
  • When it became clear that supply chains and other operations would fracture, organizations began scenario planning to shift production sources, relocate employees, and secure key supplies.
    • Comment: Instead of using scenario planning to anticipate the future and prepare for different outcomes, it seems most of the surveyed organizations used scenario planning as a reactionary tool. Don’t wait for a crisis or a shift in the market to start thinking about the future. The world is always changing. As I wrote in The Resilient Organization, acknowledge that the future is a range of possible outcomes, learn and develop capabilities to map out multiple future scenarios, develop an optimal strategy for each of those scenarios, then continually test the effectiveness of these strategies. This does not necessarily mean that every change in the market will impact your business. Identify early warnings of what might be important and pay closer attention to those signals. In other words, learn to separate the signals from the noise.
  • The pandemic forced the organization’s senior management team to re-examine how all decisions were made.
    • Comment: Bureaucracy has for a very long time stood in the way of innovation and agility. To remain innovative and adapt quickly in a fast-changing world, the organization must have nimble leadership and an empowered workforce where employees at all levels can dream up new ideas and bring them to life. Identifying and acting on emerging threats and potential opportunities is not the job of the leader alone but every team member. To quote Rita McGrath, in her book Seeing Around Corners, she writes, “Being able to detect weak signals that things are changing requires more eyes and ears throughout the organization. The critical information that informs decision-making is often locked in individual brains.” In addition to the internal environment, the leader must also connect with the external environment (customers, competitors, regulators, and other stakeholders), looking for what is changing and how.
  • It’s worthwhile for leaders of any team to absorb the lessons of sense-respond-adapt, even if there is no emergency at hand.
  • Sensing: Treat the far-flung parts of your enterprise as listening stations. The question leaders must ask is, “What are we learning from our interactions beyond the usual information about costs and sales?” Train your people to listen for potentially significant anomalies and ensure that important information is not trapped in organizational silos.
    • Comment: Cost and sales data are lagging indicators that reveal the consequences or outcomes of past activities and decisions. Although this information can help leaders spot trends by looking at patterns over time, it doesn’t help understand the future and inform what needs to be done for the numbers to tell a different story. In addition to lagging indicators, pay attention to current and leading indicators and understand the relationship between these indicators and outcomes.
  • Responding: Improve communication across intra- and inter-organizational boundaries. Leaders should view business continuity as an essential function that acts as connective tissue for the enterprise.
    • Comment: In addition to creating mechanisms that allow the free flow of information both inside and outside the organization, decision-makers should also be comfortable receiving information that challenges their personal view of the world, even if it’s not what they want to hear. Create a culture of psychological safety where people are not afraid to share bad news for fear of getting punished, but rather are acknowledged and rewarded for speaking up. Leveraging the diversity of thought enables leaders to anticipate the future as an organization, decide what to do about it collectively, and then mobilize the organization to do what’s necessary.
  • Adapting: Challenge assumptions, and question orthodoxies. There’s always the temptation to mitigate threats simply by applying existing practices harder and faster. One way to get at those deeper issues and encourage double-loop learning is to ask, “What needs to be true for this to be the right approach?”
    • Comment: In an increasingly uncertain environment, it’s difficult to survive and thrive with an old business model or outdated technologies. Many businesses fail because they continue doing the same thing for too long, and they don’t respond quickly enough and effectively when conditions change. As a leader, stay curious and connected to the external environment, look for market shifts, understand what needs to be regularly refreshed and reimagined, adopt new technologies and capabilities, and adapt in ordinary times but also during times of transition. Unfortunately for many leaders, it’s just more convenient for them to continually downplay the fact that conditions are changing than take the appropriate course of action that drives business success.

How are you preparing your organization for potential future disruptions?

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The Collaborative Organization

These days the term collaboration has become synonymous with organizational culture, creativity, innovation, increased productivity, and success.

Let’s look at the COVID-19 pandemic as an example. At the peak of the crisis, several companies instructed their workers to adopt remote working as a health and safety precautionary measure.

Two years into the pandemic, they are now asking their employees back to the office full time or are planning to adopt a hybrid model.

The need to preserve our collaborative culture and accelerate innovation are two of the top benefits being cited by organizational and team leaders for bringing workers back.

Collaboration is indeed essential for the achievement of team goals, functional objectives, and the overall success of the organization.

Today’s breakthrough innovations are emerging from many interacting teams and collaborative relationships.

When teams, functions, and organizations collaborate, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; group genius emerges, and creativity unfolds.

But, what makes a successful collaboration? What are the key enabling conditions?

  • It extends beyond the boundaries of the organization. Business success is a function of internal and external relationships. Instead of viewing your business in vacuo, understand that you are part of an ecosystem. External to your organization, who do you need to partner with to enhance your value creation processes, achieve/exceed your objectives, or successfully execute your strategy?
  • Ensure the objectives are clear and there is shared understanding by everyone. Unclear objectives are one of the topmost barriers to team and organizational performance.
  • Foster a culture that encourages opinions and ideas that challenge the consensus. People should feel free to share their ideas and not hold back for fear of others penalizing them or thinking less of them. Collaboration is hindered when one or two people dominate the discussion, are arrogant, or don’t think they can learn anything from others.
  • Groups perform more effective under certain circumstances, and less effective under others. There is a tendency to fixate on certain topics of discussion amongst groups which often leaves members distracted from their ideas. To reduce the negative effects of topic fixation, members of the group should be given periods to work alone and switch constantly between individual activity and group interaction.
  • Effective collaboration can happen if the people involved come from diverse backgrounds and possess complementary skills to prevent conformity. The best collective decisions or creative ideas are often a product of different bodies of knowledge, multiple opinions, disagreement, and divergent thought processes, not consensus or compromise.
  • New technologies are making collaboration easier than ever, enabling us to increase our reach and broaden our network. Although new technology helps, it will not make your organization collaborative without the right culture and values in place. First, define what you want to achieve through collaboration then use these tools to promote creative collaboration.

How else are you championing collaboration within your organization to create value and succeed?

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