Fit For Growth

Fit For Growth is a guide to expanding your company’s influence and profits by looking for ways to cut costs in the right places, restructuring your business model, and eliminating unnecessary departments to pave the way for exponential success.

There are many reasons why growth is hard to come by. The economy could be bad, or maybe competition is getting worse. Whatever it is, cutting costs will help. It’s so important that the authors recommend putting as much effort into reducing expenses as you do into increasing your revenue.

But you have to be smart about it. You can’t just go slashing budgets left and right. You might wonder where you should start, but the better question to ask as you begin is where should you not cut costs?

To answer this question, you need to find out what your differentiating capabilities are. These are any knowledge, tools, or systems that your business has that makes you better than everyone else. They differentiate you in the market.

In other words, what does your company do best? Once you know what these areas are you can begin cutting costs everywhere else.

Some companies mistakenly believe they need to be the best at everything and allocate resources equally to all departments without ever asking if it’s the right decision.

Unfortunately, this only makes them mediocre at everything. It’s far more productive to be the best at one thing and reduce expenses everywhere else. This is the big secret to both slimming down and maintaining growth at the same time.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a wake-up call for many businesses. Some have restructured, and others have had to close their doors permanently. They may have been able to prevent this, however, if they had begun cutting costs before they needed to. We often hear the old adage that we should dig our well before we’re thirsty. Preparing your company for a crisis is the same way. You must start now to be prepared. Not only is it vital that you’re ready, but it can prevent you from making terrible mistakes when difficult times do come. Most companies that are unprepared for a rainy day make hasty decisions to slim down in the areas where they’re spending the most money. But this only ends up hacking away at their differentiating capabilities and leads to disaster in the long run. It’s also a good idea to perform regular checkups on your organizational model. This means reviewing the chain of command and relationships between departments to make sure they’re all running efficiently. If something’s not working or could use fewer resources, that would be the perfect area to cut costs. You might reduce the number…