Most businesses in the £5M-£75M range are carrying unnecessary operational cost, not because they're poorly run, but because the systems, tools, and workflows were built for a different scale (and a different time) and never re-examined.
The margin sitting in your systems (that you've stopped seeing)
Here's what happens in almost every business I audit.
Within the first 30 days, we find recoverable margin that's been hiding in plain sight. Not in obvious places like headcount or rent, but in the operational layer most owners stopped questioning years ago: the systems, the tools, the manual processes that still exist because "that's how we've always done it."
It's not waste in the traditional sense. It's gradual drift. And drift is expensive.
You're not inefficient. You're just optimised for the wrong scale
The CRM you chose at £2 million revenue is now costing you three times what it should at £15 million. The fulfilment process that worked when you shipped 50 orders a week is now burning hours at 500. The reporting pack your finance team builds manually every month exists because someone set it up that way in 2019 and nobody ever asked if there was a better option.
None of this is neglect. It's just that you were solving for survival, then growth, then capacity. You were never solving for efficiency at scale, because efficiency wasn't the constraint. Until it was.
One thing I've noticed across dozens of businesses in this range: the biggest opportunities to recover margin aren't in cutting people or negotiating harder with suppliers. They're in eliminating the manual effort, the duplicated systems, the tech stack bloat, and the preventable problems that eat time, create delays, and cost money every single week.
What actually moves the needle
There are five “system“ areas where you can typically unlock up to 15 percent improvement in EBITDA without touching revenue or headcount:
1. Reduce manual effort and streamline systems
Your team is spending hours every week on tasks that could be automated, consolidated, or eliminated entirely. Manual data entry. Duplicated reporting. Processes that require three people to touch something that should take one click. This isn't about replacing people. It's about freeing them to focus on work that actually drives value instead of maintaining operational scaffolding.
2. Speed up decision-making and delivery
Every delay costs you. Slow lead response times. Quotes that take three days instead of three hours. Projects that stall waiting for approvals. Delivery timelines that stretch because handoffs aren't clean. When you compress decision-making and tighten the delivery cycle, you don't just improve customer experience. You unlock capacity and make the business more responsive.
3. Reduce waste across tech and infrastructure
Most businesses are paying for software that's too expensive, or they don't use, licenses they forgot about, and tools that overlap. It's hardly surprising that when nobody owns the tech stack, it grows by accretion rather than design. A proper audit typically finds significant unnecessary spend, but the bigger win is consolidation: fewer tools, cleaner data, less friction.
4. Predict and prevent issues before they cause disruption
Reactive businesses burn margin. Every fire you fight is time and money you can't recover. The businesses that run well aren't lucky. They have early warning systems. They track the metrics that predict problems before they escalate. They build buffers, run scenarios, and fix small issues before they become expensive ones. That discipline shows up directly in profitability.
5. Data monetisation and pricing optimisation
You're sitting on customer data, usage patterns, and pricing insights that most businesses never interrogate properly. What segments are most profitable? Where is pricing leaving money on the table? What upsell or cross-sell opportunities exist that aren't being actioned? The businesses that get serious about pricing strategy and customer segmentation often find 5 to 10 percent in margin just by charging appropriately for the value they deliver.
It's not cost-cutting. It's operational maturity
When you pressure-test your systems, tighten your workflows, and eliminate operational inefficiencies, you're not just improving profitability. You're demonstrating to yourself, your team, and any future buyer that the business is run with intention. That every pound is allocated deliberately. That the operating model is built for scale, not held together by effort and goodwill.
That's not a small thing. A business that runs cleanly, predictably, and without unnecessary cost is worth materially more than one that requires constant intervention to deliver the same result.
You don't need to wait for a buyer to find this margin. You can capture it yourself, this quarter.
All the best,
Gavin
P.S. We help owners remove the constraints that suppress profit, growth, valuation and exitability.
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