More than efficiency: why business certainty is the new ‘must’ for back-office optimisation

Be it in the face of changing market conditions, surging competition or a squeeze on profits, back-office optimisation has long been a way for businesses to improve efficiencies.

Today, though, the goalposts have shifted. Leaders are looking for more than just cost savings, and now expect transformation to actively drive value creation. Businesses want a deeper understanding of the relationship between optimisation and C-suite priorities: how will this project support M&A activity, enable scaling without extra complexity, and lead to better-quality decisions? The conversation, especially among CFOs and private equity (PE), has evolved.

But while the overwhelming majority of businesses agree that back-office optimisation can be used as a vehicle to create exponential value, many are failing to actually make that happen. According to analysis from Bain, a staggering 88% of business transformations fail to achieve their original ambitions.

Typically, organisations do know where their inefficiencies sit – but they often lack clarity and confidence when it comes to how processes can be improved, and particularly how much can be achieved in a given time frame. In the space between strategy and delivery, too many businesses lose grip on much-needed value creation.

Why business certainty is becoming king

The executional risk of failing to deliver and of causing disruption, especially when investment in a transformation project may be high, can hinder businesses from making progress. Almost a third of leaders say that a lack of expertise in knowing exactly what needs to be done is the biggest barrier to change management, according to our latest research produced with FT Longitude.

Against this backdrop, business certainty – a mandate to deliver measurable and successful outcomes relating to a specific need at speed – is fast becoming a critical factor among savvy leaders. But how easy is it to build commercial certainty into an optimisation project?

The reality is that business certainty can, and should, be designed in and embedded from the outset. What that looks like in practice is the articulation from all parties of clear SLAs, as well as full transparency on what great outcomes actually look like. Equally as important is having an in-depth understanding of how each aspect of the transformation process – from data and technology to people and change management – will impact the wider ecosystem.

The importance of the right optimisation partner

In environments such as private equity, delivering results at pace is already an operating model rather than a preference – but this is increasingly becoming a prerequisite for businesses across all sectors. Today’s leaders, particularly CFOs, expect certainty and speed to be baked in from day one, and apply this rigorous standard to any partner that they work with.

In a landscape where there is a growing demand for fast value creation, choosing the right transformation partner has become mission-critical for any organisation. A domain expert with a detailed understanding of operational challenges is far better positioned to deliver outcomes than a generic efficiency vendor.

At Liberty Blume, delivering back-office optimisation in a structured and measurable way is our “secret sauce”, and is how we create measurable enterprise value quickly and with certainty. Taking ownership of outcomes, proving value creation early on, and avoiding what I call the “hand-off trap” – a lot of optimisation projects unravel in the hand-off stage, when an advisor leaves and processes drift – are central to how we create certainty for our partners.

For us, establishing commercial certainty up-front is just the beginning. By providing consistent visibility, measurable outcomes and proactive partnership, we maintain certainty and trust throughout the delivery process.

At a time when the cost of failing to provide ROI is higher than ever, ambition is no longer enough for leaders – they are seeking confidence in execution and real outcomes. The right delivery partner provides that certainty by helping organisations optimise faster, reduce risk and, crucially, to create real value.