Before passing on a cost increase directly to customers, consider the potential volume impacts. Carefully assess price elasticity and market pricing to inform customer pricing strategies.

Could your suppliers be giving your organization larger cost increases than your competitors? Leverage analytics and market information to evaluate if the cost increase makes sense before accepting it.

Cost increases may make it worthwhile for you to reconsider the products and services you offer, as well as the customers you serve. BDO leverages a data-driven 80/20 approach to define strategic focus and simplify operations to improve your bottom line.

Is your organization spending time on non-value add activities? Are there opportunities to leverage digital solutions to enable your employees to work more efficiently? What is the root cause of increasing turnover? These issues can be diagnosed through BDO’s Operational Performance Diagnostic, which aims to identify practical opportunities to drive sustainable, profitable growth.

More than a quarter of business leaders are struggling to retain their employees. Modernizing succession planning, training, compensation packages, ways of working, and culture can boost productivity while mitigating expensive turnover costs.

While digital channels allow businesses to reach more customers, they often result in decreased profitability. The cost to fulfill and deliver an online order is high and it’s not uncommon for these orders to generate negative profitability while cannibalizing brick and mortar sales. For strong, long-term financial health, organizations should ensure they have a cohesive strategy to manage margins across channels.

Are we missing out on digital drivers of growth? Are there ways we can leverage digital tools to drive automation and efficiency? Are we leveraging digital tools effectively compared to industry peers? These are important questions to consider as part of an operational performance diagnostic, which aims to uncover quick wins and long-term opportunities to drive sustainable top and bottom-line growth.

Major disruptions to business operations, such as COVID-19, requires businesses to be able to make smart and informed on-the-ground decisions and provide leaders with information on a timely basis. To do so, businesses must ensure they have the right tools and processes for monitoring and reporting, crisis management, and continuous improvement.

From demand planning to inventory management to shipping and logistics, more organizations are leveraging predictive analytics to ensure availability while minimizing excess inventory to drive sales growth and operational efficiency. With constantly shifting market dynamics, forecasting models can no longer be driven by historical sales; key external factors must also be integrated for increased accuracy and agility.

As your organization develops its 2022 business plans, consider how ESG fits into the objectives and overall strategy. Recent ESG trends are driving opportunities for revenue growth (new products and markets), cost reduction (e.g. energy efficient technologies, waste reduction), and risk mitigation. Organization-wide alignment behind how ESG supports corporate objectives can result in sustained value creation.

From an M&A lens, ESG is a factor that is increasingly considered in the due diligence and integration processes. If the target organization lacks ESG management practices, the buyer may face costly risks post-acquisition. In integration, as ESG is directly related to corporate and employee values, it is important to ensure alignment on how ESG fits into the combined entity’s strategy.

Leveraging analytics throughout the M&A lifecycle enables efficiency and increased value capture. Using a fact-based, data-driven approach to complete commercial and operational due diligence provides both buyers and sellers with the clarity required to promote deal success. Post-deal performance measurement through automated reporting supports efficient integration and realization of synergies and enables adaptation where needed on a timely basis.

With many organizations pursuing several deals at any given time, each moving at a rapid pace and requiring cross-functional support, M&A activities can become difficult to manage. To increase efficiency and effectiveness, particularly in a virtual setting, businesses may consider using digital platforms to support them throughout the M&A lifecycle.

With significant shifts in consumer behavior, market dynamics, the labor landscape, and digital advancements, organizations must evaluate whether their current strategy remains the right one to move forward with. These shifts have created opportunities for growth while mandating organizations to rebalance priorities and transform how they operate. Ensuring organization-wide alignment on the path forward is critical to future success.

As external disruptions have put strain on cash flows and pushed for rapid transformation, many businesses are experiencing value leakage from misalignment between historical processes and new priorities. Conducting a deep dive review of revenue streams, operational efficiency, overhead costs, and working capital can uncover low-hanging fruit opportunities to boost financial performance, as well as long-term strategic opportunities for sustainable value creation.

Higher interest rates generally result in decreased valuations. As the cost to borrow increases, a buyer’s willingness to pay decreases. For business leaders that are planning to sell their business, it’s important to understand the impact of changes to interest rates. To optimize its selling price, an organization can also undertake a performance review to identify and/or implement value creating opportunities that would be attractive to the buyer.

For organizations investing in growth initiatives, capital will likely become more costly and difficult to access. In response, it’s worthwhile for business leaders to evaluate what types and sources of capital are most appropriate. Identifying the right funding partners can promote achievement of growth targets with decreased cost of capital and higher levels of flexibility.

Helping employees understand how to securely connect to the work environment and exercise appropriate vigilance when operating a system remotely go a long way to help keep your organization secure.

Updating use policies and enabling additional security controls to prevent sensitive data from leaving corporate systems is a critical step to maintaining confidentiality of information.

Detecting threats early in the attack cycle could prevent threat actors from achieving their objectives. It’s important to have capability in place to monitor for behaviour which strays from the norm, and the ability to rapidly respond and remediate.

Include cyber security in the business planning process and throughout the lifecycle of a new solution. Test the resilience of systems to security issues prior to implementation. It’s easier to fix a security issue beforehand, than recover from a cyber incident.

While new services will drive business growth, it’s important to understand how enabling technology changes your security posture and creates new security challenges.

It’s important to understand the risks associated of sharing data with third-party vendors and organizations. Ensure that parties handling your data have the capabilities and security posture to protect your sensitive information.