Cost Optimisation for Sustainable Growth

This week, I sat down with @Alistair Roman, Founder and Managing Partner of @Cost Optimisation Consultancy, to explore cost optimisation for small businesses and discuss how you can reduce costs in your business sustainably.

We discuss the model that Alistair has developed - the cost transformation maturity map - why most businesses fail to retain cost savings, and explore how SMEs can build cost efficiency into their company culture.

🌟 Some of my favourite parts from our conversation:

✅ How Alistair helped John Lewis drive major cost efficiencies - and what smaller businesses can learn from it.

✅ Understanding the difference between cost optimisation and cost savings and why one is more sustainable.
 ✅Why Finance Teams must be front and centre leading cost optimisation efforts, regardless of their size. 
 ✅ How cost optimisation fuels growth rather than just being a defensive strategy.
 ✅ How SMEs can leverage technology to streamline finance and operations.
 
 ACCA Scale Up Success Article: https://www.accaglobal.com/content/dam/ACCA_Global/professional-insights/Scale-up/pi-scale-up-success-SMEs.pdf

Alistair Roman Contact Details:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alistairroman/
• Website:  https://www.costoptimisationconsultancy.com

Transcript

Adam (00:02.109)

Okay, so today I'm joined by Alistair Roman, the founder and managing partner of Cost Optimisation Consultancy, Cost Optimisation Consultant, with over 20 years experience helping small and larger businesses to reduce costs sustainably. So Alistair, welcome to the Fractional CFO show. How are doing today?

Alistair Roman (00:23.685)

Good fine, thank you very much Adam and thanks once more for the invitation. I'm looking forward to the conversation and sharing some of my thoughts and learnings with your audience today.

Adam (00:32.824)

Well, thank you very much for being here. And to get started, perhaps you could give us a brief overview of your career so far. How did you end up in the UK, starting out in South Africa, I think I saw, and to some quite large companies and helping them to optimize their costs. So could you give us a brief overview?

Alistair Roman (00:47.441)

Yes.

Alistair Roman (00:54.897)

Sure, by all means. You're right, I started out in South Africa and I've moved across to the UK, been here for the last 16 years. I'm a finance director, CFO. I've been doing that for the last 20 plus years, worked in South Africa, the US, as well as the UK. And the thing about where I am today is that in most of my finance leadership roles, there's always been transformation as part of the remit and the transformation is either could be focused on ERP.

you know, business strategy or kind of driving cost Optimisation. So cost Optimisation, the consultancy came around because of that. I thought there was a gap in the market in terms of driving effective cost Optimisation outcomes for businesses. And hence, I've launched the consultancy. Quite excited about it and the work we've done so far. I look forward to many successful client engagements and years to come.

Adam (01:52.074)

Okay, okay, great. Good summary. I guess to start with, a lot of the audience may not know the difference between cost Optimisation and cost reduction. And obviously you're very focused on cost Optimisation. Can you explain the difference between what is cost cutting, simple cost cutting, and what is in your mind, cost Optimisation?

Alistair Roman (02:12.123)

Yep. Yep.

Alistair Roman (02:16.795)

Bowel mains, yeah, think that's a very problematic area I found over the years driving these initiatives with various companies and leadership teams. So I've actually developed what I call the cost transformation maturity map. And that map really articulates very simply what is the definition of cost reduction? What does that time to value look like? What is cost Optimisation? And equally, what is the value Optimisation? And then I have that going along the axis of business impact being tactical versus strategic. And then the other axis is kind of

sustainability impact low versus high. So, you know, in its simplest form, cost reduction is something that is almost immediate. It's something that really drives in-year P &R benefit. It's non-programmatic and it's generally centered around discretionary costs in terms of the type of spend. So for instance, let's cut back on our travel expense for the next few quarters because Q1 hasn't been that great. So let's try and pull that back. The key thing about that is that

There's not a lot of thinking behind that if I could put it to you like that. So non-programmatic, in-year performance, very short term, and it's something that you have to reset again. And then we move up the next scale, which is what I call cost Optimisation. Cost Optimisation is something where it's more programmatic. It's something that is more sustainable. It's something that from a business impact sits between tactical and strategic. So kind of midpoint and similarly from a sustainability of income perspective.

It's at midpoint between low and high. And so cost Optimisation, a good example of that once more would be, for instance, vendor Optimisation. So looking at your vendor estate, looking at your performance across that, across your vendors, where you're getting the good savings, where could you renegotiate, where could you consolidate, where could you reduce your vendor footprint, for instance, and your sourcing plan and things like that. So.

So it's something that is halfway. It's something that is repeatable. Why is it repeatable? Because as you know, all commercial agreements with your vendors are not permanent. They are for a period of time. So that's why I talk of it as a kind of repeatable type of cost Optimisation opportunity. Then we move to the next one, which is kind of what I call the Nirvana state of how you try and drive Optimisation, cost Optimisation strategies for your business, which is around the value Optimisation. And that is programmatic.

Alistair Roman (04:40.325)

that is going to require investment, that is going to be company slash business wide, that is where you try and drive what I call repeatable permanent sustainable income into the P &R in terms of your reduced expenses. So an example of that would be a full blown ERP implementation or something. It really looks at

covering all areas, people, process, technology, and leveraging that as much as you can to drive operational efficiencies, become a lot more effective, help you scale the business and leverage a lot, a lot more of the technology aspects that we have an offer as well. So hence in terms of, you when I look at cost, I always look at it through those lenses because that immediately just kind of allows you to reset in terms of your priorities as to

where your focus areas really need to be. So you can do cost reduction, which you know it's short term. It's going to be purely impacting for that year only, but come next year, you're to have to reset that versus all the way through to your what I call value Optimisation, which is where you want to be in terms of driving and creating better value, more sustainable scalability, leveraging technology that we have. You everybody's on the Gen-AI journey at the moment. So it's all about that. And specifically to the SME,

you know, businesses out there. It's all about how does that then equip your business to scale in time to come, you know. So taking a five-man employee SME all the way through to, you know, 200, 150, whatever that may be. And the importance of having that end state, that vision is so, important. And that allows you to start kind of thinking along those lines so that when you start looking at making cost Optimisation decisions, you start thinking about

well, is this going to be short term or is this going to be something that's going to create more value for me as a SME because I'm on an ambitious growth target. So you know what, I want to do value Optimisation because that's going to allow A, B and C for me as well. So there's a lot of factors into that conversation, so to speak. I'll gladly share with you. I do have a slide on that and I'll gladly share with you as well if you want just to articulate what I've just said now because graphically it's quite nice and it kind of captures everything on one slide, so to speak.

Adam (06:41.154)

Mm-hmm.

Adam (06:44.566)

Okay.

Adam (06:57.026)

Yeah, no, I saw that and yeah, it does make it easy to understand. So yeah, we can absolutely put that together with the show notes when we go live.

One thing you were talking about there with the smaller medium sized businesses, which obviously a lot of the audience for this podcast are, they might not understand the differences intuitively of those three models that you just outlined or three types that you just outlined. And obviously starting out small and then moving through the journey of short term to medium term to long term.

done this before as a small business owner and you start out with your accountant, with your operations team, finance team, you might fail right? There's quite a lot of companies that start on this journey and don't always make it or don't sustain the cost savings or value Optimisation that they hope for at the outset. In your experience, what is it that causes most smaller to medium-sized entities to fail?

this kind of program, is there any sort of common themes that you found in your experience?

Alistair Roman (08:10.125)

Yeah, I think a few things first off. There's no end state in terms of what they're looking to achieve So therefore if you don't have that kind of end state vision slash that outlook you kind of lost in terms of direction of travel So you have to have that in target operating model in mind back to my comment about if it's a five-man Small to medium enterprise business and you want to take it to a 50 or even a hundred and fifty You need to have a plan and then as that then becomes your kind of North Star

you start aligning your cost Optimisation strategies along those lines, because that's going to be quite critical. The other key thing I found as well is that you have to look at getting external help where you do need. There's an element where to make cost Optimisation successful, to embed it, the first bit is that standing up the capacity and capability to actually deliver that ambition that you do have. Once you've delivered that first bit,

where most businesses fail is that they then fail to sustain those savings. And they do that because they haven't really done anything to change elements of the BAU, so to speak. So Gartner has done some research in this space, for instance, and they found that 43 % of companies are only successful in year one when it comes to cost reduction activities. And of that 43%, only 11 % then ends up being successful for a period of 36 months where they're able to hold on to that saving.

When you do the math on that, we're talking about 4.73 % success rate from day one through to day 36, well, month 36 in terms of success. So it's about the initial understanding the scope, understanding that end target operating model, future operating model, then working a plan that's gonna get you there through the lens of the cost Optimisation categories I've mentioned, and then also having the right capability and capacity to actually then get after that.

And you cut your cloth accordingly. And then also making sure you do leverage external expertise that can come in, give you that external view, that external perspective, and give you some key pointers in terms of frameworks, what you should be doing, what your approach should be looking like. Because I think that's where there's so much to this. I know we're going to chat a lot about it on the call, but there's quite a lot of nuances to this to be successful. But I think at a higher level, those are the key things, which is that target operating model,

Alistair Roman (10:34.275)

Make sure you understand your full journey from a cost perspective, what that's going to give you to support your target updating model. And then also, as I said, kind of making sure that you have the right resources to actually deliver that because the resources are going to be quite key in terms of making sure that you are going to be successful and then handing that off into your BAU environment. That's the other critical thing because what you want to do is whatever savings you've landed,

You want to protect that and to do that protection, means you need to change your internal structures, the internal culture, become a lot more cost conscious, have things like costeco sessions where people can contribute to further ideas and that type of thing. That's going to be quite important. It's be treated, when you go down the route of doing a successful cost Optimisation program, it's not a one-off event. It becomes part of the DNA of the company. It has to, to embed your savings, to hold onto your savings.

You have to have a session of this needs to be part of my DNA of my company. needs to be part of my culture of my company as well. And again, back to my future state view, the kind of vision, the mission that be the leaders of the business will have to ensure that that gets embedded.

Adam (11:48.494)

Lots there, lots to unpack there. That's really interesting and fascinating that the Gartner Research, less than 5%, are able to retain those savings by year three. That's fascinating. And I guess that's, you know, a lot of business owners will be prioritizing cost Optimisation now, given the environment that we're trading in at the moment with the pressures that businesses are under. You mentioned about

Alistair Roman (11:52.027)

Yes.

Alistair Roman (11:56.933)

Yep. Yep.

Adam (12:17.13)

informing the culture and changing the culture and that's a...

infamously hard to do in terms of like, as you say, bringing in the external help to help with the initial implementation, but then ensuring that that thing changes the culture of the organisation as a whole. I would imagine that's quite a challenge to do as the 5 % metric shows. How have you found the most successful companies are doing that with your experience of taking smaller medium sized businesses

Alistair Roman (12:24.429)

you

Yes.

Alistair Roman (12:37.797)

Yes.

Alistair Roman (12:43.43)

Yes.

Adam (12:52.24)

and able to be one of the 5 % rather than the 95%.

Alistair Roman (12:57.873)

So a couple of things that they do. Number one is to adopt a management and governance structure that decentralizes control. So in other words, there's better flow of work and understanding of costs between various functions and team members. Key thing about that is that instead of looking at things from a vertical perspective, you look at things horizontally, so end to end. So that allows for that decentralization. So nothing then just sits with the owners, so to speak, or maybe the CFO only. It needs to be owned by everybody. And I think that kind of

then helps change that culture drive that's needed around driving cost Optimisation strategies successfully. There's also a shift needed with regards to the cultural aspects, as I've mentioned. So I think that's again, something that the leaders of the business can really push across the entity with, you know, whether it's five staff members or 50, you have to start somewhere. So embedding that driving the culture change is quite key.

to being successful. The other thing that I've also seen is a lot more visibility, for instance, cost control frameworks, making sure that there is a platform for that. So in other words, how do we have much better visibility to our costs, understanding our drivers of our costs, making sure budget owners have that visibility and linking that all the way through to your suppliers and vendors as well. So what I'm talking about here is, you know, as finance, you know, we do a lot of analysis and things like that.

And so we have this very PNR lens of the world being critical of us being counted, so to speak. I think we need to wrap that around and say, what does that look like horizontally? So functionally, for instance, what does that look like? But from start to finish, know, so if I take, for instance, a functional supply chain cost, there's a functional cost of the actual supply chain as a function.

but then there's all the other stuff that sits around it as well. The technology that they use, the processes, the signature processes and things like that. So it's about how do you have that visibility so all your budget holders have that visibility and then can influence how they drive cost Optimisation strategies. It's something that needs to be owned across the business and not only just in finance. And that's why I said taking a more decentralized approach to this also does help because then people feel

Alistair Roman (15:16.411)

there's more ownership on them as well as opposed to it just sitting with the CFO or the CEO only and maybe the exec sitting around the table. So the more you could do that, I think those are some of the building blocks for actually being successful. The other key thing I've also found across businesses is that communication and engagement piece. So ongoing communication and engagement about progress, about the challenges, about where we are and regular drum beats. So whether it's a quarterly tunnel,

whether it's a monthly tunnel, whether it's just weekly updates on this is how we tracking with our cost Optimisation program, or this is what we've discovered thus far for the year and celebrating those achievements as well. And I think the more visible, the more you communicate, the more we can engage, the better it is with getting that broader stakeholder involvement across all levels. Because what I've found is that companies are really successful when they kind of

bring that vision all the way down to all layers. And so in the context of a SME environment, look, there's employees there. So it's a lot easier to be vocal, to be able to communicate, to give updates and that type of thing. And that's how you bring everybody along this journey. It's something that everybody needs to own, from the CEO all the way down, from the most senior to the most junior. And everybody needs to feel valued in terms of that journey.

Adam (16:40.398)

Yeah, lots of good tips there. think the communication and engagement and those town hall meetings, small businesses often feel because of the size, they don't necessarily need to do that, but you're exactly right. Making that over communication as part of your strategy will allow the focus to stay on this. One question I had as you were talking, I was thinking about some of the businesses that I help are in a fortunate position, which is they're in a growth stage, a startup or scale up businesses.

Alistair Roman (16:51.929)

Yes.

Alistair Roman (16:59.921)

Exactly.

Adam (17:10.478)

And often when you're talking about cost Optimisation, know, or value Optimisation, the mindset isn't there. So they're thinking from a growth perspective, they're thinking aggressive growth.

and they don't always have that defensive or value Optimisation mindset as a natural foundation within the company. How have you found changing that mindset so that it's not about, this isn't about cost cutting and necessarily a defensive strategy, this is part of your offensive, aggressive growth strategy?

Alistair Roman (17:45.467)

Yeah, key thing is that in terms of the growth ambition with any smaller to medium entity, even the larger companies, clarity about what you need to do to scale the business, clarity about how do you provide more efficiencies across the business? How do you operate? does that future operating slash target model, what does that need to look like? I think in order to do the growth, you need to find the capacity somewhere.

So the cost Optimisation provides you with that capacity. In other words, that it creates the headroom. It creates the cash that you need to fund your growth, to fund your growth into new markets, to fund your growth into new product development, to fund your growth into new customer acquisition strategies. So it is literally such a key enabler for that. And I think it's how you then invest those free funds, if I could put it to it like that. And that then for me is how you shift the growth aspect and growth conversation to include

how cost Optimisation could be an enabler for that. So think of an investor safe concept where, you know what, there's a business case and at this business case is gonna cost X amount in terms of investment. There's a run rate post go live. There's a benefit associated with that as well. But ultimately you're gonna embark on this initiative because it has positive ROI, the payback is good, all of those things. And that's how you look at the cost Optimisation through those lens as well. should be a business case of.

How do I invest this, but then what am going to save? And when you start seeing those savings come through in the P &R, that then unlocks the cash that you can actually fund your growth. So there's a symbiotic relationship between the two because you can't grow the business, scale the business without then bringing the rest of the business worth in terms of how do we drive this efficiently? How do we become a lot more effective? How do we leverage more technology? How do we kind of standardize that process? How do we keep this view of simple and standardized across our entity as we scale?

Otherwise, what you're going to find is that you're growing the business great, but your costs and everything is going to be growing at such an exponential rate because you haven't really kept an eye on your cost. You haven't really looked at how do I drive more technology into my business model? How do I drive more efficiencies into my business model? At that point, it's quite late then to take a step back because you're going to be sitting with quite a lot of costs in your cost base that's going to erode whatever growth you would hope to have achieved.

Alistair Roman (20:07.793)

because you haven't scaled your business. Your future operating model hasn't accommodated for driving more efficiencies, for leveraging more technology. And through that, obviously, you can then have much higher margins, which will result in much better cash flows and things like that. And just something for clarity, when I talk, you know, costs, I'm talking purely, purely cash. I'm not talking about things like depreciation and amortization and all of those things.

I have a three-strike rule, so it goes like this. So find the cash savings, deliver the cash savings, protect the cash savings. I cannot spell it out more simply than that. And it's just the word around cash savings. Because I think that is so, so important because it's that cash savings that will fund that future growth ambitions that the business has.

Adam (21:00.334)

I think we've got our quote there for the episode. That's good. There's three strike rule. I like it. I like it. One thing that you're talking about there earlier about automation and programmatic you mentioned in terms of cost savings and you mentioned AI and it would be remiss of me in 2025 not to ask you about AI and how that's affecting what you do. Like how are you able to leverage AI for your clients?

to sort of improve their decision making and ultimately their value optimisation.

Alistair Roman (21:37.679)

What it's definitely doing, because of the introduction of technology. So my lens is always people process data and technology. So on the technology side, it allows and frees up, especially in the finance function. Let's just take a finance lens through this. It allows us to then automate and take and remove the manual kind of work that finance used to do. So kind of invoicing and things like that, invoice processing and things like that.

and allows them to actually become more future forward predictive looking and more insightful in terms of a function. So there the functional save there is on the cost, but also frees up capacity as a function being financed to be more forward looking. As a function, we've always been looking in the rear view mirror, we're great on looking back, but it's the forward looking where the shift is needed as a function. So through AI,

other tools like RPA, robotic process automation as well. Those are all the kind of tools and techniques and technologies that are being leveraged at the moment to drive efficiencies across the finance function. And one could take a similar lens of that across the entirety of the business as well. So supply chain, for instance. One of the clients I worked with, there was a lot of RPA that we implemented as well.

to kind of streamline what was very manual labor intensive processes and activities. And so that's another example of where you use technology like AI and RPA. It's all about how do you leverage that to drive automation. And with that automation comes the scalability. So as I mentioned, as you grow your business, you want to be able to have your business in a position where it can scale and scale not to the extent where...

your revenue is going up by one pound and your cost is basically going up a pound as well because then it's pointless scaling. If that's going to be your rationale, should be revenue is going up by one pound and my costs are going up by one pence. Fine, that's okay. But it can't be one to one, it doesn't make any sense. And that's why it's so important to have this joined up view in terms of your growth ambition, what that needs to be. But at the same time, what that future target operating model needs to look like from a business perspective.

Alistair Roman (23:53.199)

Otherwise, it's going to be really challenging when you start looking at profitability along those growth lines.

Adam (23:58.67)

Okay, no, great. And I think you've touched there on the finance department. And again, where we're talking about smaller businesses, there's not always a finance department per se. There might be a few people who look after finance, but they might not be full-time finance people. They might not have the full-time finance professional's knowledge around this. again, with your experience,

working with the smaller end of the market, what role should finance play in these kind of projects where you don't necessarily have the expertise in house? You might have a fractional CFOs, I'm one such as myself, there might be a smaller team, but again, these might be people who aren't qualified finance professionals. So what role should finance play in those environments within these kind of programs?

Alistair Roman (24:54.895)

Yeah, I think the first thing from a finance perspective and back to my future target operating model is to see how much of finance can you automate? How much of finance can you actually drive and implement more technological solutions like RPA and things like that to scale the business and take away from what is the mundane transactional type activities that most finances are doing these days. They're still doing that to be honest with you.

And so the first thing is in freeing up that capacity, it allows finance team to provide more expert financial analysis. So the expert financial analysis is the bit that will start uncovering where those opportunities and operational inefficiencies may lie across the business. So I get your point that obviously the finance function in SMEs are a lot smaller than your larger corporates. So it's really about how do you use them in an efficient manner? How do you leverage the technology so their day job

does not become embroiled in what I call non-value add transactional type activities that you can automate bank risks and all of those things. Try and add that as being a much smaller part of the day job versus it being the main aspect of the day job. And until you can kind of extract them out of that transactional weed environment and allow them to actually start looking at the more value add, which is like driving the kind of operational efficiencies and opportunities. That's where you want to be, but if your business is different.

So finance can play a role in terms of sense checking its functional performance. How can we become more value-added as a function? What are the things we need to do to become more value-added? And that will then unlock the opportunity to discover where those opportunities, savings opportunities, operational efficiencies may lie because ultimately everything kind of centers around the data that finance has as kind of the central function of the business from a financial performance perspective, reporting perspective.

and then also where the opportunities may lie. So there's that engagement that will be needed with the leadership between finance and the leadership and that transparency that I spoke of because it will allow for a richer conversation when you're able to go to your head of marketing, for instance, and say, look, this is what you're currently spending with the various vendors. This is what we think we could be doing. The ROI on the latest.

Alistair Roman (27:11.601)

advertising campaign we've did, not that great compared to what our competitors are doing or compared to what the market is doing, compared to what other vendors are offering and things like that. To get to that level of insight, you need to have done your analysis so you go well prepared to the head of marketing to have that conversation, similarly in operations as well. So I think there's a massive role for finance to play in regards to driving this agenda across the business.

And it's making sure that they have the right tools and the right data to actually get to that level of detail so they can have the right conversation. The key thing is as finance business partners, I mean, we have that, you know, in our back pocket in the sense of the function itself, in the sense of the access to data. We can actually do, you know, drill downs and things like that. So I think it's a case of how do you drive that level of appetite across not only finance, across the rest of the business.

Finance will be the catalyst for this, but they need the right tools, they need the right technology to help them drive this agenda.

Adam (28:17.718)

Yeah, no, absolutely. that's great. And I think, you know, even in the smallest businesses, there are those heads of operations, there are those marketing heads, they all spend money. So it's just about looking through the lens of the business that you're in and then identifying the areas where you can make the largest difference. And as finance, we can do that. Exactly right. Great.

Alistair Roman (28:25.999)

Yeah. Yes, exactly.

Alistair Roman (28:36.079)

Yeah, exactly.

Adam (28:40.29)

I think there's just one more area that I'd love to touch on, which kind of taking right to the other end of the spectrum, looking through your CV and experience, I see that you did a lot of work with John Lewis and I know you made some big savings there. So I'd love to hear just a little bit of an anecdote or two from your time there and how you were able to make such material savings. Because I think there's lessons for smaller businesses looking at how that worked on a larger scale.

Alistair Roman (28:57.069)

You

Alistair Roman (29:08.091)

Yeah, a couple of things. One is that first it was an amazing opportunity working with a partnership in driving what they call the Lean Simple and Fast slash cost saving agenda program. So getting in there, as I mentioned, as some of the knowledge I've shared was that we stood up what I call a more programmatic approach to doing cost Optimisation. The key thing is in order for cost Optimisation to really be successful, it's not something you can do at the side of your desk. It's not going to be successful. You need to have

the right resources, the right capacity and capability to actually stand up a team to do this. So there needs to be that dedicated investment, if I can put it to you like that. And it could vary on a company by company basis, you know, but there needs to be an acknowledgement that we're going to formalize and stand up a functional team, a programmatic team to actually deliver this. Then it's about understanding which are the key areas you want to look at attacking.

So for instance, in retail like John Lewis, one of the areas I looked at was the vendor estate and looked at how do we optimize that vendor estate. You can well imagine there's quite a lot of vendors that do have in their books given the scale and size of the organization as well. So looking at the vendors and driving an Optimisation strategy around that was one example of the work streams that I implemented. And I think it's about every business will kind of...

look at its operations, look at its cost base, understand where the drivers are coming from, and then we have a conversation on, what does that future operating model need to look like, and what do you want to do in terms of, you know, how do you see the cost shaping up and driving what needs to happen to drive more scalability, efficiencies, and reduce your costs to ultimately improve your margins. So there's an element of, I think,

robust conversations that's needed as well. And by that, I mean a real challenging conversation on, know, do we really need five or six beans, can of beans on the count on the the shelves? Or can we get away with four, for instance? And then you start looking at the cost of saying, well, actually, to operate the supply chain, the vendor, everyone else in that stream will reduce by this much. So you start looking at things not vertically, but horizontally. So end to end. And that's you start thinking as well.

Alistair Roman (31:24.069)

And that's kind of some of the policies we've adopted when I introduced, when I was working at the John Lewis Partnership is that horizontal thinking and that end to end. And that then breaks down silos as well. know in a small to medium entity, there's a lot more, I think, connectivity between the teams. so I don't think the silos is an issue there. I'm not sure. It just depends on the business, but I think the communication, the alignment, that's the kind of thing that's quite important and the transparency around.

the conversation that's needed to take a business from where it is today and its future ambition in terms of growth and things like that. And having a lot of engaging and communication sessions around all of that and selling the concept to everybody. That's why I can't downplay the importance of that engagement and conversation. I I used to literally go out to branches and bring what we're doing to life in the sense of saying, look, this is...

what we look to strive and achieve in terms of lean, fast. What does that mean for you? Well, let's just say we're going to switch the lights off when we go home at night. That's going to help us save on this bill. Let's turn the temperature down. That's going to help on this bill. So there's a lot of things you start looking at because what you want to do is you want to look at all areas, all avenues, all options, because every little bit adds up at the end of the day.

There's no one big, know, there's no one silver bullet that's going to solve all the problems. It's about looking at all the areas. It's about challenging yourself. It's about saying, well, how realistic can we be in terms of ambitions and things like that? And then setting your stall out to achieve that. It's also a lot of hard work and art graft. I think the culture shift as well. John Lewis partnership was, you know, their partnership in the sense that

The employees are basically the partners of the business, that shareholders of the business. And to drive a cost Optimisation strategy there was a shift was needed in the culture and being a lot more cost conscious and things like that. So you've got all of that as well to contend with, but obviously in the SME environment, it's a lot less because you don't have so many people. I think that John Lewis when I was there, had about 80,000 partners or something like that. With the SMEs again,

Adam (33:16.76)

Hmm.

Alistair Roman (33:41.657)

you're much closer, more connected, which will, I think, be a much greater platform for success in that sense. So I think there's quite a few lessons there, which I've applied at much, much smaller organizations across the years. Ultimately, the template stays the same. There's no special template just for large companies. The template stays the same, the methodology, the approach.

Adam (34:02.136)

Mm-hmm.

Alistair Roman (34:10.213)

the issues around engagement, communication, the shift needed to in the culture, embedding those savings. They're all the same. The only thing that varies is the scope and the degree and things like that. But it's the same approach I use.

Adam (34:24.222)

That's fascinating. As you say, there's so many lessons that are comparable. Everyone has vendors, it's just how many of them. Everyone's got to look end to end or horizontally. It's just the length of that chain. So, really interesting. Really interesting. Well, thank you. then just shifting gears to what I call our business book bonus section. So this is where I ask our guests to make a recommendation of a business book or other piece of business content.

Alistair Roman (34:31.949)

Exactly.

Yep, exactly.

Adam (34:51.642)

that's really helped you during your business career and that you'd like to recommend to the audience. So Alistair, what would you like to recommend to our audience?

Alistair Roman (34:59.353)

I think specifically around the SMEs, there's an article, piece of research which ACC and I'll share the link with you for your readers. There's an article which they did on, it's called a scale up success. What does SMEs need to do to supercharge their growth? It's a great piece of research. And there you could see, you know, the kind of.

structures that's needed for SMIS to be successful, whether it be on the technology side, whether it be on the finance side, what does that need to look like, especially in a high growth environment. It's a really good piece of research, more than 1300 small to medium enterprises partook in that survey, some really good insights there. I would highly recommend, you know, your listeners try and get a hold of that. It's off the ACCA website. I'll in fact send you the link.

and I'll send you the actual PDF as well if you want to it in the video link that goes out by all means. I think it's a great piece of material for your customers and so on to read.

Adam (36:05.486)

That's great. I know there's some hidden gems on the ACCA website, which aren't always so accessible to everyone else. So that's great. Thank you for recommending that. And so we'll include that in the show notes along with your model slide, as you said. And I guess before we wrap up, really enjoyed the conversation. And I think there's some real insights that the audience will walk away with. But is there anything that we haven't covered that you'd like to add before we wrap up?

Alistair Roman (36:09.201)

Yes, no worries, no problem.

Alistair Roman (36:35.203)

I think we've covered everything. I think the one thing I will call out, and this is a challenge across the entirety of the business community out there, the Deloitte Q4 24 CFO survey for the UK flagged the fact that cost reduction is the number one priority for CFOs. It's been so for 11 consecutive quarters. If you look at the Gartner CFO priorities for 2025,

Cost reduction is right up there for several priorities as well. think the macroeconomic environment speaks for itself, cost of living crisis, high interest rates and things like that. My steer to the SME's out there is that cost will continue to be a challenge. The sooner you get on top of controlling your cost, the sooner you understand the drivers of your cost base, the sooner you a future view of where your future operating model needs to look like, what it needs to look like to scale your business, how to fund your growth.

the better it will be for you because every passing day means a missed opportunity. The sooner you can get onto this, the sooner you can get those benefits flowing into your P &L, the sooner you can have fun, scale your growth ambition as a business. Don't sit on it for too long. Otherwise, it's going to be really, hard as the year progresses because it's just going to be a lot more competitive out there.

Adam (37:54.74)

That's great closing thoughts. you, Alistair. How can people find you after this? Where are you most active?

Alistair Roman (38:02.897)

You know what, think I'll give you my contact details which you can include as well and just try and find me on my website. I've got contact details there as well. Reach out to me on LinkedIn by all means, please. You'll find me there. think this, you can't forget, you wouldn't forget my face now that you've seen me. So reach out on LinkedIn as well and include that in the detail I'll send you as well, Adam. And by all means, give me a call as well. I'll give you all my contact details. As you can see,

I'm really passionate about this subject. want to drive the agenda that sees us performing a lot better. Ultimately, I look at it and I say, if we can become better at managing our costs as businesses, we can then free up the resources for investing in growth, investing in whatever, new market, new product and things like that. Ultimately, it makes our businesses in the UK more profitable, more competitive. It will help UK PLC.

When that happens, it then helps produce more revenues for government. It then also helps uplift society. So it's also just not the kind of narrow lens of it's just my business. No, when you do well as your business, UK PLC does well and that's what we need. I'm really passionate about that.

Adam (39:18.328)

Yeah, no, excellent, excellent. Good thoughts to end with. So thank you very much, Alistair, for joining me today on the Fractional CFO Show. Really appreciate your insight, your experience, and your time. Thank you.

Alistair Roman (39:28.945)

Brilliant. Thank you very much. well. Bye bye.