CEO’s believe that costs cannot be “Influenced”?

While checking out the latest “CEO Future Trends Survey 2015” that was recently released by Marketingheads I was struck by two of the items that were reported.

The first was in the section “Success factors affecting Business” where “Costs” was rated very highly, as you would expect.

Ref: “Marketingheads CEO Future Trends Survey 2015”

Nothing very new here, but as I have quite a vested interest in helping business reduce costs, the next section that jumped out was when the CEO’s were asked to rate “Success Factors CEOs Believe they can Influence”.

Ref: “Marketingheads CEO Future Trends Survey 2015”

While it is surprising how few CEOs believe that Costs are able to be influenced, the real surprise was that it had fallen so far in 2015.
I have noticed that there is the temptation by some in Australian business to treat costs as a sort of “Tax”, that is, an inevitable line item that must be borne – limited to natural increases, but not something that can be easily avoided or reduced.
Today’s savvy CEOs should realise that it takes some effort to identify, implement and sustain cost reduction strategies. Companies are running leaner in terms of available staff resources than ever before, indicating that managing costs are important. However, for some reason this strategy isn’t transferring into other areas of the organisation. Where many organisations have the potential to improve is in their understanding that controlling costs is every bit as important to profitability as is revenue growth.
It becomes incumbent on cost management companies such as us, to help time-poor CEOs and of course, their CFOs, identify cost minimisation projects to achieve profitable results on the bottom line.
The good news of course, is that the rapid growth in outsourced services means that companies can now entrust procurement management and cost management to businesses such as Resources for Profit and be sure that guaranteed results can be achieved without the diverting internal resources away from their own critical tasks.

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