80% of savings aren’t where we usually look
How a CFO thinks when profits fallImagine you’re the CFO of a multinational and you see this news: net profit declining, pressure on results, internal transformation underway.
Your first thought isn’t “Should I renegotiate the largest service contract?” Your first thought is much more basic—and much more painful:
- “Are we really reviewing spending at its root?”
- “Which contracts and operational structures are eating into margins by inertia?”
- “Which past decisions are draining our EBITDA today?”
- “Where are the sustainable savings hiding?”
- That CFO’s mind isn’t looking for quick fixes.
- They’re looking for lasting solutions.
- The Myth of the Big DecisionThe corporate narrative tends to reward bold measures. Restructurings, unit closures, massive layoffs… they’re all visible, substantial, dramatic.
But in practice, the margin is eroded by less visible factors:
- indirect services that haven’t been reviewed in years,
- specifications that have expanded without critical analysis,
- automatic renewals signed out of habit,
- demand structures inherited from an earlier stage of the business,
- lack of real external market benchmarks.
- Each one individually seems minor. Together, they become structural.And in a scenario where even giants like Nestlé are accelerating cost cuts to regain competitiveness, a CFO’s pain point is not just “cutting costs,” but rethinking how that spending is designed from the ground up.
- Optimizing isn’t about pressuring the supplierOptimizing isn’t about haggling over price.
It’s about redesigning.
In many categories, savings do not come from “squeezing,” but rather from:
- adjusting the actual scope of the service,
- redefining technical standards,
- aligning frequencies and consumption levels,
- comparing terms with independent market data.
- When the design of spending improves, the nature of negotiation changes.
- It is no longer a fight over every discount point. It becomes a technical conversation about value, alignment, and efficiency.
- The cumulative effect: from 3% to 20%
A 3%, 5%, or 7% improvement in different categories may seem marginal when analyzed in isolation.
But when these improvements are structural and recurring, the impact on EBITDA is sustained. It is not a one-time adjustment.
It is a more efficient cost architecture.
For companies that have systematized this review—not only in technology, but also in services, indirect procurement, fleet, or maintenance—the aggregate savings have been comparable to the restructuring targets announced by giants that are cutting staff to protect profits. That is no coincidence.
- Implications for the Finance FunctionStructural optimization requires:
- methodology,
- external market benchmarking,
- cross-functional coordination,
- regular monitoring.
- It is not a project. It is a discipline.
- And in environments like today’s, where even companies with economies of scale are seeing their profits fall and accelerating efficiency initiatives, discipline is often more profitable than reaction.
