A CEO's guide to finding your next £50 million

That search matters more than ever right now. Employer National Insurance contributions rose to 15% in 2025 and remain there through 2026/27, the threshold at which they apply has been cut to £5,000, and the National Living Wage continues to climb. Add the Employment Rights Act's new day-one entitlements into the mix, and most UK businesses are absorbing a structurally higher cost of employment than they budgeted for just two years ago, with little sign of that pressure easing.

Most cost programmes don't fail because they lack ambition. They fail because they look in the wrong place. Faced with margin pressure, the instinct is almost always the same: cut headcount, freeze discretionary spend, trim the obvious lines. It feels decisive. It rarely finds the real money.

We recently helped a large UK hospitality business prove that. Leadership had set an ambitious target: £40 million of annual earnings before interest and tax (EBIT) improvement, sustained over five years. Previous efficiency programmes had chipped away at costs without shifting the dial. The prevailing wisdom in the business was that labour costs held the answer. There was some truth in that…but it was not the whole picture. With a lean, largely fixed staffing model already in place, the bulk of the opportunity lay elsewhere, and pushing further on labour risked cutting into the customer experience the brand was built on.

The £56.4 million of annualised benefit we supported the business finding in year one came from somewhere else entirely: the operating model itself.

Why the obvious answer is usually the wrong one

Every cost base has a story leadership tells itself about where the money is. Usually, that story is years old, built on assumptions nobody's revisited since the last downturn. The result is a cost programme that re-cuts the same lines every time margin pressure returns, with diminishing effect and rising organisational change fatigue.

The businesses that consistently find their next £50 million share one trait: they apply as much rigour to identifying the opportunity as they do to delivering it.

A tried and tested framework for finding it

We use a four-phase approach to structure that search, tested and refined across sectors stretching from hospitality to professional services. Deliberately built for pace as well as rigour, because boards asking for cost improvement rarely want to wait six months for the first answer. The framework holds, but it flexes: how each phase is run adapts to the client's own scale, culture and constraints.

Set up for success. Before any analysis starts, get leadership aligned on what success actually looks like. Skipping this step is one of the most common reasons cost programmes run into difficulty later. Not because the analysis was wrong, but because leadership was never fully aligned on the ambition, and disagreement surfaces further down the line instead.

Discover. Build a fast, evidence-based view of the full cost base using data and diagnostics, not assumptions. This is where labour-cost myths or previous misconceptions get tested, and where the "long list" of opportunity should be genuinely long hundreds of ideas, not dozens, triaged later rather than filtered too early. Just as importantly, this is where you agree the red lines: the things that matter as much as, or more than, cost savings. This means considering customer experience, colleague wellbeing, environmental, social and governance (ESG) commitments, and so on. The result is that everyone is clear on what "good" looks like before trade-offs are on the table. Discover should end with a clear, themed set of priority workstreams to take forward, not just a long list of disconnected ideas.

Determine. Pressure-test what's been found, evaluating each opportunity not only on financial impact but against the red lines and other lenses agreed earlier. Not every opportunity that looks good on paper survives contact with the business - some fail commercially, others fail against what the organisation has said matters most. Deciding what to pursue, and what to park, is where discipline earns its place alongside ambition.

Deliver and Drive. Turn the surviving opportunities into business cases, mobilise them, and critically, build the governance and drumbeat of accountability that keep savings compounding after the programme officially ends. A cost programme that stops delivering the day the consultants leave was never really a transformation.

The businesses that get this right don't treat these phases as a straight line. Opportunities get tested, refined, sometimes paused, sometimes reshaped into a different form entirely. That iteration is a feature, not a failure, of a good cost optimisation programme.

What this looks like across sectors

The pattern holds well beyond hospitality:

• In professional services, a group-wide review of back-office spend across Finance, IT, HR, and Risk & Compliance uncovered savings worth 12% of revenue, concentrated almost entirely in duplicated activity across functions, not headcount.
• In consumer goods, a root-and-branch review spanning stock keeping unit (SKU) profitability, manufacturing footprint and back-office operations found savings the client hadn't been looking for at all. The brief had been about SKU rationalisation; but the biggest number came from the operating model behind it.
• In transport, a back-office review delivered savings in year one, with a further, larger opportunity flagged across operations and engineering. This serves as a reminder that the first pass rarely finds everything.

In every case, the biggest number wasn't the one leadership expected when the programme started.

It's not just about the numbers

The financial case for looking properly is obvious. What's less obvious is what happens to a business once it starts.

In the hospitality example above, the shift wasn't only financial. A business that had historically been collaborative but slow to act became noticeably more accountable and willing to make bold calls. Colleagues who'd previously waited to be told what to do started bringing forward their own ideas. In the months after the programme's first year closed, over 200 employees proactively suggested new areas for the business to explore, entirely unprompted.

That's the part a spreadsheet can't capture, and it's often the difference between a cost programme that sticks and one that quietly reverses itself 18 months later, once the pressure that triggered it fades. Finding the £50 million matters. Building an organisation that keeps finding it matters more.

Proof, not promises

We don't say this lightly. The hospitality programme referenced above has been shortlisted for the MCA Awards 2026, in the Performance Improvement (Private Sector) category. In its first year, it delivered £56.4 million in annualised benefits, an 11.4% EBIT improvement, and a return of £53.30 for every £1 invested – a 5233% ROI of our fees, well above the 400–700% industry average for external consulting engagements. You can read more about our work here: Grant Thornton with Greene King – MCA

That's not a one-off. It's what happens when the search for cost is treated as seriously as the delivery.

Where to start

You almost certainly don't need another spreadsheet exercise on the obvious cost lines. You need an honest, fast, structured look at where your operating model is quietly working against you and the discipline to act on what you find, even when it's not where you expected to look.

If you're a CEO, COO or finance leader wondering where your next £50 million might be hiding, we'd welcome the conversation.

Get in touch with Lauren Moore, Transformation Consulting, to talk through what this could look like for your business.