How to cut operating costs without cutting the muscle

Uncertainty is not a reason to wait. Across our 450+ client engagements this year, the mid-market companies that pulled ahead were not the ones with the boldest forecasts — they were the ones that placed a small number of deliberate, well-funded bets and stuck with them.

Below are the five bets we expect to separate leaders from laggards in 2027. None of them require a moonshot budget. All of them require focus, sequencing and the discipline to stop doing something else. If you want the full data behind our view, our 2026 Mid-Market Outlook covers the methodology in detail.

1. Double down on pricing power

Most mid-market companies leave money on the table because pricing decisions are made by habit, not by evidence. List prices are reviewed once a year, discounts are approved case by case, and nobody owns the end-to-end margin waterfall. That is exactly the kind of gap a focused team can close in a single quarter.

• Map the full price waterfall — list price to pocket price — for your top 50 customers.
• Segment customers by willingness to pay, not by size alone:
  • strategic accounts that value service and reliability;
  • price-led buyers who need a leaner offer;
  • long-tail customers best served through self-serve channels.
• Give one leader clear ownership of discount governance.

Where to start

Start with the deals you already have. Renewals are the lowest-risk moment to rebalance value and price, because the customer already trusts your delivery. At Brightway Logistics, a structured renewal playbook added 3.2 points of gross margin in nine months without a single lost account.

A quick diagnostic for your leadership team

1. Do we know our pocket margin by customer, product and channel?
2. Who can approve a discount above 10%, and how often does it happen?
3. When did we last raise prices on our highest-value services?
   1. If it was more than 18 months ago, start there.
   2. If you raised them across the board, check for churn in your best segment.

2. Turn operations into a data asset

Every order, shipment, ticket and invoice your company processes is a data point about how value really flows through the business. Yet in most of the companies we audit, that data lives in a dozen disconnected systems and is only stitched together when the board asks a hard question.

The leaders we work with treat operational data like inventory: they know where it is, who owns it, and what it costs to keep it accurate. They invest in a single, governed set of operating metrics before they invest in dashboards.

That sounds unglamorous. It is also the foundation for every other bet on this list — you cannot price, automate or forecast what you cannot measure consistently.

“We stopped arguing about whose numbers were right and started arguing about what to do next. That shift alone was worth the whole programme.”

— Marcus Okafor, COO, Halden & Co.

A practical first step is to agree on ten metric definitions and publish them. For example, we define revenue_per_fte as trailing-twelve-month net revenue divided by average full-time equivalents — and we write that definition down where everyone can see it:

# metrics/operating-core.yml — single source of truth
revenue_per_fte:
  owner: finance
  formula: "ttm_net_revenue / avg_fte"
  refresh: monthly
on_time_delivery:
  owner: operations
  formula: "orders_delivered_on_time / orders_delivered"
  target: 0.96

3. Build a resilient supply base

The disruptions of the last five years taught most leadership teams that the cheapest supplier is rarely the cheapest option. Resilience is now a board-level topic — but it is far cheaper to build before you need it than in the middle of a crisis.

Here is how the five bets compare on investment horizon, payback and risk, based on outcomes across 1,240+ Corwell projects:

Strategic bet	Horizon	Typical payback	Execution risk
Pricing power	3–6 months	< 6 months	Low
Operational data	6–12 months	9–14 months	Medium
Resilient supply base	6–18 months	12–18 months	Medium
Back-office AI	4–9 months	6–12 months	Medium
Leadership pipeline	12–36 months	24+ months	Low

Strategy is not a list of things you will do. It is a short list of things you will do instead of everything else.

Daniel Whitmore

4. Make AI a back-office discipline, not a lab project

The fastest returns from AI we see today are not in customer-facing chatbots. They are in accounts payable, contract review, demand planning and IT service management — places where work is repetitive, rules are clear and the baseline is easy to measure.

1. Pick three processes with high volume and stable rules.
2. Measure the baseline for cycle time, cost per transaction and error rate.
3. Pilot for eight weeks with a cross-functional squad:
   • one process owner with authority to change the workflow;
   • one data engineer;
   • one finance partner to sign off on the benefits.
4. Scale or stop — and publish the decision either way.

For a deeper look, read Priya Raman’s practical AI playbook for CFOs.

5. Invest in the next layer of leaders

Every one of the bets above depends on people who can lead change without waiting for permission. In our experience, the constraint is rarely the executive team — it is the 20 to 40 managers one level below, who carry the day-to-day decisions.

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Give them real P&L ownership, a peer group outside their function and a coach who has run a business before. It is the slowest bet on the list, and the one with the longest tail of returns.

The bottom line

You do not need to make all five bets at once. You do need to choose — deliberately — which two or three you will fund properly in 2027, and which projects you will stop to make room for them. If you would like a second opinion on your shortlist, talk to our strategy team.