No room for top-line growth? Focus on bottom-line

Since this year started 776 tech companies have laid off over 119,155 staff - These events are clear indications of where we are headed.

No company is immune from not being impacted by these tectonic changes and external forces.

Achieving top-line growth is out of scope at this time, so what can organizations do to achieve bottom-line growth?

I’ve identified the following initiatives organizations can take to stay afloat:

Define a standard frame of reference

Leadership can help to prepare a frame of reference using every decision or change that can be evaluated. These are the some of questions that can help to bring clarity:

• Can businesses survive without this product/service?
• Is this effort going to save time or increase productivity?
• Is it helping to grow revenues?
• Is it helping to reduce the operating cost?
• How does this rank in the priority to run the business?

Optimize or Eliminate SaaS products

Many SaaS products offer niche features. However, some of them have overlapping features and functionality. Identify every SaaS solution used by your organization and find out if a potential application(s) can be eliminated or usage can be reduced.

• How many SaaS applications are being used in the organization and their usage in the last 3 months?
• How does each application rank in terms of Impact on function?
• Are there any two applications that offer a similar feature that can be eliminated?
• Can we reduce the license count for low-usage application(s)?
• Can we implement auto-claiming & releasing licenses?

Reduce Cloud Expenditure

The public cloud offers many benefits, but If unchecked or not monitored regularly, the cost of using it increases significantly. Major cloud providers Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure offer native tools to manage and optimize costs:

• Identify public cloud usage, and consumption and initiate efforts for optimization
• Identify redundant, unoptimized resources, and implement auto-stopping or removing policy
• Get each application evaluated against optimizations, usage, and the lowest possible cost to run
• Set capacity limits for cloud resources & event-driven actions
• Set a budget, consider off-hours shutdown, and clean-up up ideal resources

Optimize and Standardized Business Operations

Identify an opportunity to optimize and standardize business functions, by providing training, guidance, and upskilling staff:

• Identify an opportunity for automation for common user requests
• Empower users by providing training, knowledge base, and redefining SLAs
• Understand the consumption chain of various products and services - eliminate, replace or merge links
• Initiate targeted efforts for each user persona and segment to optimize your services
• Identify ways to be more responsive, less of a hassle, more user-friendly, and more convenient

Periodic Checkpoint

Set up a schedule for the periodic check to meet with your stakeholders. Find out how the recent changes have impacted them. Based on the feedback tailor your strategy and next steps:

• Implement a schedule for periodic check-point
• Measure the progress against the metrics
• Gather enough information to decide the next steps
• Review go/no-go criteria for the next steps and phase

What are the changes your organization has implemented to sail through this wave?

Cheers,

Satish