Strange Finance Problem: Too Much Accuracy

One of the biggest problems in effective profitability management is the instinctive desire on the part of many CFOs for too much accuracy. How can this be?

In my experience, there is good accuracy and bad accuracy. Let me explain.

Good Accuracy

Accuracy is essential for financial reporting, a prime CFO job.

I’m on the Audit Committee of a NYSE company, and we spend a lot of time making sure that the company’s financial results are reported extremely accurately. Like all public companies, we have controls and audits to ensure that even inadvertent errors are uncovered and rectified. The SEC and other regulatory bodies take strong measures to enforce this requirement.

This need for strict accuracy in financial reporting shapes the culture of all Finance Departments. Most CFOs and other top finance managers have strong accounting backgrounds, and many have managed internal auditing departments. 

This strong cultural bias causes two big problems in profitability management: (1) the overly rigid use of financial reporting information for granular profitability analysis, precisely because it is so accurate; and (2) an unfortunate insistence on a very high degree of accuracy in profitability management. Both get in the way of effectiveness.

Bad Accuracy

The first problem, using financial information for granular profitability management, seems counterintuitive. After all, great financial information is available and the company has worked hard to ensure its accuracy – why not use it?

The problem with simply using existing financial information is that it is compiled into categories that are much too broad for effectively managing profitability. Here’s the acid test: if you select five accounts at random, and select five products at random in each of those accounts, would you know (or could you find out quickly) the profitability of each product in each account? In virtually all companies, the answer would be no.

This leads to the problematic situation of virtually all companies: 30-40% of the business is unprofitable by any measure, and 20-30% provides all the reported profits and subsidizes the losses. This results in a huge amount of embedded unprofitability in virtually every company – unmeasured, unseen, and untapped.

Why does this occur? Because revenues and costs are compiled into categories that work well for reporting the company’s overall financial results, but are not granular enough to match revenues and costs on an invoice line basis. As a result, finance managers embark on a problematic exercise in allocating these accurately measured costs and revenues into broad categories of account segments and product families – usually by using imprecise allocation functions.

All too often this becomes an exercise in trying to measure accurately things that can’t be accurately measured. The objective implicitly becomes measurement itself, rather than clearly and relentlessly focusing the organization on discovering and acting on the most important profit opportunities.

Instead, you need a completely different process to develop effective granular profitability information. I call this process profit mapping. It involves essentially developing a 70% accurate “income statement” on every invoice line, then putting these into a database and sorting them by product, account, and other essential dimensions. I describe how to do profit mapping, and provide a number of concrete examples, in my book, Islands of Profit in a Sea of Red Ink.

The process takes an insightful manager and analyst about a month or two, using standard desktop tools.

It is critical to understand the important difference between information developed for financial reporting and information developed for management control. This is one of the basic distinctions drawn in introductory accounting and finance courses, yet it is deceptively easy to blend these together when the finance managers have already developed a huge amount of very accurate financial reporting information.

What is 70% accuracy?

Many top financial managers, particularly CFOs, have difficulty understanding the need to work with 70% accurate information for profitability management. They are so culturally accustomed to producing extremely accurate financial reporting information, that they tend to view 70% accurate information as merely the result of inadequately careful work.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In order to understand the needed degree of accuracy for granular profitability management information (as opposed to accurate financial reporting profit information), you have to start by thinking carefully about what managers throughout the company will do with the information. Then you work back to the nature of the information that will be most helpful to them.

The first set of actions that managers will take with a set of granular profitability information is to quickly see where the business is making money, where it is losing it, and why – its islands of profit and sea of red ink.

In practice, most companies have perhaps 10-20 clusters of product/account segments, each with its own internally similar characteristics and profitability – but each very different from the others. These will be very obvious in your profit map, even with 70% accurate information.

The action question for each product/account segment is: what one or two things can you do that will have the biggest impact on profitability: Is it pricing? Order pattern? Product portfolio? Visibility into big orders, etc?  I call these profit levers, and the big payoff comes from finding the smallest number of actions that produce the biggest results.

The most effective way to manage this process is to start with a rough profit map, using readily available information and estimates. The outlines, composition, and profit profiles of the product/account segments will literally jump off the page. By examining a few typical accounts in each segment, you will quickly see the most effective profit levers. But remember that these almost always are different for each segment.

At this point, it is helpful to sharpen your pencil where the additional accuracy will make a real difference:  measuring the exact problem that the profit lever will fix, and developing a precise program to remedy it. This requires a higher degree of accuracy in order to specify highly focused initiatives in your target areas.

This process will enable you to match your degree of accuracy with the likely use of the information. Where better information is clearly not needed for a high-priority action, why spend valuable time and bandwidth on developing it? Instead, find out early where enhanced accuracy will really make a difference, and focus your time and resources where they will produce the biggest payoff.

Maximum profit impact

The more subtle problem with bad accuracy is that profitability management is a moving target. Companies change all the time, especially in a complex economic situation.

Even more importantly, when your managers have worked with an initial set of profit levers to produce radically improved profits, a new set of opportunities for profit generation will naturally arise.

This means that your profit map, along with your segment and profit lever identification, must be very dynamic. If you make extremely accurate measurement the implicit objective, it is very hard to move as quickly as necessary in order to maximize your profitability.

Another critical problem arises. When you focus on measuring everything extremely accurately (implicitly believing that everything is important enough to warrant it), you are in danger of flooding your managers and sales reps with so much information that they will not be able to act effectively. They will lose the critical understanding of the smallest number of realistic actions that will produce the most powerful set of results.

Instead, by aligning your information accuracy with the nature of the information use, you will have the biggest impact on your company’s profitability. And for all CFOs and other top finance managers, maximum profit impact is the ultimate management objective.

The Missing Element in Large-scale Change

Large-scale change. Most managers view it as the ultimate management challenge.

I remember when I wrote my Harvard Business School Working Knowledge column, “The Challenges of Paradigmatic Change.” The column went out on the Web on a Monday morning, and by noon I received a flood of emails from my readers describing their experiences and asking questions.

Managing large-scale change certainly is a big challenge, and it requires a different set of building-block actions than improving the day-to-day business. Most of the change management literature focuses on this.

But, the most important thing I’ve learned from years of involvement in change management is that more often than not, the need for large-scale change is avoidable. And many large-scale change projects really are evidence of a prior failure to keep the organization on track in a changing world.

Certainly, from time to time a big abrupt change takes place in an industry – a change in technology, a new regulation, a major new competitor – and these require a strong, thoughtful response.

I remember talking to the head of a major telecom company, now one of the world’s most successful, during the early days of deregulation. Aggressive new competitors were taking market share in the most lucrative markets, and the company’s culture was rooted in the days of cost-plus regulation. I remember the questions clearly: How can I get our managers to understand that they need to manage differently? What do I do? Send them a memo?

I wrote “The Challenges of Paradigmatic Change” as a guide to managers facing this type of situation.

Most companies, however, have a very different situation. The world around them is changing, often at an accelerating rate, and yet they tend to do things in more or less the same way. They may get better and better at it, but nevertheless, it is more or less the same approach. Over time, they become more and more disconnected from their customers and markets, until eventually someone rings the fire bell for a big, disruptive change.

What can a manager do? The answer is obvious: Develop ongoing processes that keep the company on track all along.

But how can a manager do this? The answer to this question is not obvious at all.

In my experience, many managers make two big mistakes in change management:

• They fail to realize that managing change is not necessarily more difficult than day-to-day management, but it is very different;

• They fail to see that there are three very different types of change and that each requires a completely different change-management process – and they almost always prioritize them incorrectly.

Most managers focus on the first problem – how managing change is different from making day-to-day tactical improvements.

But the second is the real source of lasting management effectiveness and great financial performance.

There are three very different types of change: (a) constant weeding – tuning up the way you do things in fundamental ways; (b) new strategic initiatives – trying out new things and scaling them up if they work; and (c) large-scale change – fundamentally changing the way everyone does things.

Which is the most important? Judging from the literature and my own observations, most managers probably would rank large-scale change as most important, new strategic initiatives second, and constant weeding as the last priority – if it’s a priority at all.

For most companies, this ranking is backwards.

Constant weeding. In most companies, the failure to institute an effective process for constant weeding is the biggest cause of suboptimal performance.

For example, in my research and consulting in over a dozen industries, I’ve found that even in the best-known leading companies, 30-40% of the business is unprofitable by any measure, and 20-30% provides all the reported profits and subsidizes the losses. Moreover, a lot of the marginal business can be turned around in a surprisingly easy way, and can become sustainably profitable.

In years of writing about this, no one has disagreed. Successful profit generation and profitability management requires four elements: (1) the right information – rarely available from accounting systems; (2) the right priorities – a strong focus on securing your best business and turning around high-potential underpenetrated accounts; (3) the right processes – almost always involving ongoing coordination of Sales, Marketing, and Operations; and (4) the right compensation – not assuming that all revenue dollars are equally profitable. 

Yet how many companies have really focused on perfecting these four elements – successfully making profitability management (not budgeting and operating reviews) a core business process?

New strategic initiatives. This is the second change management priority. A vibrant, successful company should always be trying showcase projects – low risk experiments that enable it to try new things and “learn by doing.” Unfortunately, the business case process (capital budgeting) discourages this – because, by definition, a showcase project has uncertain returns. This is a huge mistake.

The companion issue in managing new strategic initiatives is developing an effective process to scale up those that are successful.

I recently spent time with the management team of a very successful international service company. The company had a number of great showcase projects. But, after discussion, the managers realized that they lacked a strong, explicit process to scale them up, transforming the company’s core business to incorporate these new ways of doing business. Without this, they remained isolated pockets of interesting innovation.

Large-scale change. This is the prime focus of most managers and writers. Yet in the absence of truly extraordinary circumstances, painful transformations should be only rarely be needed.

If a company has an effective process for constant weeding, it will stay highly profitable even in the presence of rapidly changing markets. And if it has an effective process for developing and scaling new strategic initiatives, it will carve out a lucrative competitive positioning as the market leader and as strategic partner to the most important customers.

If a company succeeds in these two critical change management areas, it will have accomplished the essential goal of large-scale change: repositioning the company for the future. But, without the need for abrupt, painful large-scale change.

When a company is in trouble, it is easy to get everyone’s focus and attention. But the real missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle of change is an understanding of how important and feasible it is to avoid the need for abrupt large-scale change in the first place.

Doing the right things all the time through constant weeding and new strategic initiatives – this  is the real missing element in large-scale change.