7 Key Insights Business Leaders Can Use To Step-up EBITDA: Lessons From 1,000+ Successful Projects

A roadmap to impactful and sustainable EBITDA growth

Ever wondered why conventional operational excellence approaches often result in unsatisfactory improvements to EBITDA?

Over 40 years delivering successful high-impact EBITDA improvement projects to over 1,336 companies, we’ve noticed that all winners focus on 7 crucial factors. To achieve permanent and lasting step-change improvement to EBITDA, it’s essential to conduct a gap analysis of these 7 areas.

Example of typical results: One company turned a planned saving of £70MM into £130MM (85% increase), by harnessing the heart of EFESO's Seven Key Insights:

Focus on attacking losses in crucial areas of the E2E value chain

Doing this avoids the 2 tunnel vision traps that all winners must steer clear of:

1. Investing in Capex and cost reduction (which reduces quality of product)
2. Over-focus on one area of the value chain (typically Operational Excellence in manufacturing)

Seven Key Insights for Significant and Sustainable EBITDA Improvement In 24 Months (taken from the full webinar presentation)

1. Align Improvement Programmes with Boardroom Strategy - Your improvement programmes must be tied to the Boardroom ambitions. Misalignment could lead to resources being wasted on activities that are not impactful to the priority KPIs. Is your Boardroom vision directly driving your improvement programmes?
2. Prioritize Critical Domains within the E2E Value Chain -Diagnose the most impactful areas in your end-to-end Value Chain that will create the most impact to KPIs. Defaulting to traditional areas for operational improvement like Manufacturing Excellence is a lost opportunity for a meaningful transformation.
   Have you properly diagnosed the E2E Value Chain to find opportunities for impactful improvement?
3. Find and Attack Losses in the Identified Critical Domains - Focusing on losses truly reduces cost to serve. Traditional Capex and top-down, non-loss driven Cost Cutting reduce the value added of your processes.
   Do you systematically identify & attack losses at the start of all improvement programmes?
4. Identify Key Workstreams - Focus on workstreams whose KPIs will have a step-change impact on EBITDA. Focusing on less impactful workstreams will dilute efforts.
   Are your workstreams prioritised by impact to EBITDA?
5. Avoid "Projectitis“ -Ensure you have a single, clear agenda of high-impact projects linked to results within 3–4-month cycles. Falling into the trap of creating numerous, unfocused projects («projectitis») will suffocate EBITDA impact.
   Have you got a single agenda of clearly defined, focused and results-driven projects?
6. Only Leadership, Engagements and Daily Performance Behaviours Drive Sustainable Change - Senior Leaders must be passionate and create a “guiding coalition” to drive change and engage more and more people. Poor leadership will allow problems to be “hidden” throughout the company.
   Are your Leaders driving implementation and fostering adoption and performance behaviours?
7. Implement Digitalisation in a"4P"Way: People First, Progressive Digital Journey, Partnership with existing programs, link to Profitability. Risk: Ignoring the 4Ps can lead to the “shiny toys” syndrome, harming profitability.
   Are you implementing Digital with the "4Ps" in mind?

About the author

Luca Stoppino Managing Director EFESO UK