How A LinkedIn Ad Turned Into 10 Million Dollars

Late summer last year an advertisement popped up in my news feed on LinkedIn “inviting” me to an executive breakfast sponsored byWilson, Perumal & Company, a small management consulting firm. The topic was around how complexity costs as defined in the book: “Waging War on Complexity Costs” by Stephen Wilson and Andrei Perumal erode the value generation in companies. In short the idea is that in most companies there are too many non-value adding activities due to business becoming more and more complex. This leads to increasing costs of complexity which the company must fight to keep down or out of the business in general.

The discussion was very interesting so I sought more information from the book and armed with this new inspiration started to analyze complexity costs in my own company. It quickly became clear that we too have plenty of complexity costs in our business and come November I decided to pitch some initaitves to our CFO. Large scale company-wide initiatives can be difficult to manage and buy-in is not easy to come by so instead we decided to start with some smaller local initiatives in the country organization I am Finance Manager for. A couple of months later following several discussions with the local management team we are now looking at a list of profit improvement initiatives of more than 10 million dollars. The initiatives include deciding on a different hiring mix of our offshore drilling crews in collaboration with HR, achieving general cost savings by re-negotiating with vendors as we grow our business in collaboration with Procurement and taking a more lean approach to offshore training for further collaboration with HR.

Below I have summarized my story in a few simple steps you can follow to help improve the bottom-line of your company:

• Seek knowledge from outside your own job/company – in my case it was a LinkedIn ad that helped spark ideas worth more than 10 million dollars
• Don’t be afraid to be pitch your ideas to the top management of your company – despite the CFO knowing me and my work I had no direct authority to propose these initiatives
• Spend proper time gathering buy-in for your initiatives from other functional areas before you go ahead and execute – I spent 2-3 months making sure there was buy-in even for the local initiatives I was proposing
• Try and get other functions involved in driving the initiatives as it cannot be seen as just another [insert your own department] initiative – We now have three work streams all headed up by different functional managers

Remember that anyone in your company can help make improvements and chart the future direction of the company. Why shouldn’t that be you?