Cutting the Chaos: How to Go from Disruption to Margins-Focused Business

Every year for the past decade, asset managers have been facing a combination of new technologies, shifting demographics and seismic international politics -- all of which are changing the needs for successful internal operations week by week.

One critical evolution helping them serve these rising demands is the move towards tech-enabled services and increasing work automation. This, in turn, translates to the need for firm operations to support more: more vendors, more tools, and more contracts.

Amid accelerating business disruption and even more comes a profound need for stability and predictability for your general ledger. To drive growth, firm leaders must approach the more with stability. And stability requires strategy.

Can Business Evolution Occur without Business Disruption?

Disruption is inevitable — you face the unexpected every day. And for the last several years, the solutions to your business problems have been couched in terms of “transformation” and“disruption.” 

In many ways, those terms serve solution providers. They profit by selling the opaque, the complex, the networked, and the integrated.

But still as we mentioned above, your firm must embrace new platforms to compete in the new digital arenas. You must connect various data sources. You (or your) team must take hours out of your week to work on the systems meant to work for you.

In all the complexity and newness that you face, you need something that isn’t shifting. You need to get consistent, reliable, steady value out of the vendors and tools you rely on, so that your portfolio companies can go disrupt their markets and get closer to what their customers need.

Responding to exactly that unrelenting executive anxiety is at the core of the new Procurement Outsourcing movement.

 5-Year Evaluation Is a Long Time to Not Hit the Mark

The field changes when all your expenses—travel, vendors, insurance, benefits and more—are negotiated to market-wide standards. Look for opportunities to aggregate your spending to drive more buying power, which can help you drive pricing terms similar to larger enterprise negotiations than high-growth mid-market. 

‍Keep Your Eyes on Opportunities, Not Expenses

You have a focus at work. You have key business requirements you have to meet. Performance indicators you must reach.

When it comes down to the vendors and expenses that help you reach those goals, any time you spend trying to decide which to install, or how to use them, is time not spent on what really matters to you. The same goes for the executives in the decision-making process. You’re too busy working as hard as you can to take the time to evaluate if your tools work as well as they should.

That’s where a partner fits in. To make business decisions that matter in five to six figure purchases, while filtering out the unimportant information so that you can do your job, you need a partner who can get buy-in from all parts of the business and who has an extra set of eyes on future programs and platforms. In short, they watch your back so you can watch your business grow.

Non-Disruptive Disruption

Change comes to every business. Rather than introducing more moving parts into your organization, you need away to ensure that no matter what the future holds, you are holding all the assets you need. That means more efficiency from vendors. That means contracts that serve you better. That means travel, business expenses, and insurance at group rates, with negotiated prices that drive lower costs.

‍

Interested in learning more about procurement-as-a-service for your firm?  

Learn how leading firms are partnering with Concertiv to reduce spend, minimize risk, and save time across key spend categories.